I remember you mentioning that you owned NVDA. Was NVDA in that account?

Nope, that's just a small piece of my quant portfolio. It's (ahem) not really my type of stock, but the quant screen it came up on is my kind of screen*, so I bought a little. It is currently the best performing stock in the quant portfolio, which typically has about 72 stocks.

My non-quant main portfolio's good performance is much more boring, almost entirely attributable to a large position in Berkshire, which has done very well. It hasn't done any better than the S&P in 2024, but I owned it with some leverage from calls early in the year, especially before I started opening the more bearish short call positions which made my Berkshire position closer to market neutral.

Jim

* This particular screen, only a part of the quant portfolio, was created around end 2018, and in the backtest it claimed it would have beat the S&P by 14%/year 2000-2018 after trading costs each two months (never believe backtests!). I waited about five more years before putting real money into it--really badly overtuned quant models often show their weakness within that time frame. In the roughly 5.5 years since it was created it has beat the S&P by 15%/year. It certainly isn't market beating every year, but the average return seems good. So far.