Don't worry BooLoo, at least you didn't volunteer to BFI it was a good year long short when it was trading at $180-$200. That would be kind of silly if those posts existed.

This is how you millennials flirt, right?

April Update


With the market having been in a bull run the last 9 years and with January starting off so great, had visions at the start of the year of this contest being a fun thing where we'd all have tons of profits showing by the end of the year. Guess the market has had other ideas

With the market being volatile but also flat in the net, the last couple of months of watching the market have had me feeling kind of similar to how things were sometimes with poker, after the heaters were over. Sometimes would go through fairly long periods of running break-even - and during those times, it would be nice to at least have rakeback.

Guess dividends are a way with investing to keep the gains coming no matter how the stock or the market is doing? Had a chance to add all the dividends from Q1 to everybody's portfolios, so quite a few of us got some nice little bonuses added this month. Have added a little note with the date and % of the dividend that looks like this, as showing with TheMVP's nice portfolio

Thanks so much to ToothSayer for the idea of leaving them until the end of the year - it felt really good to have an out in case things got to be too much. Was considering leaving things, but thanks to OlafTheSnowman's awesome code, it turned out to be not so bad (Thanks again Olaf!! ) - and remembering that there were dividends felt almost like finding money in a pile of papers ... times have gotten so rough with the market, it felt nice to be able to add that 0.40% to mine And then, it looks like maybe a couple of people may have gone out of your way to find stocks with dividends? So some of the additions turned out to be quite substantial - Zeno got almost 10%!


Something else that's kind of cool to see is that although it's been kind of a flat month, it looks like virtually all of us ended off April with at least one pick of ours with double digit gains? Go us! And there's 4 people who have portfolios with 10 picks and double digit gains, so congrats to the following people - ASAP's portfolio's still growing too

As well, a couple of stocks some people are holding had some double-digit gains this month:

ASAP17 - ACIA (short)
Backstabr, BooLoo, JoshSp - HOS
gangip - ALNA
mrbaseball - GLNG
Wilverine - MU
Zeno - TOT

Another reason the market's lately had me remembering those periods of running breakeven in poker is because have been finding myself wondering things lately like, "when will this end," or "what if the market's changed? " Apparently these are very normal and common reactions - because money represents security and lots of other things to us. So it's human nature to want to make lots of money fast - and it's human nature to be a little anxious if the road becomes a little more rocky.

Was just looking back at how things were in the middle of the last big market downturn in 2008 - i remember my parents being so like, "omg ... yikes " ...

And then not 10 years later, here we are ...

You think the market and the world's in decent enough shape that it'll be possible for the market to recover back to all-time highs in another 4 to 5 years, the way things have recovered after the last two downturns? If so, maybe we could be back here by 2022 or 2023?

Even if so, guess the big question may be what's in store for the market in between then and now??




Was looking around to see if there was any mental game stuff just for investing, and wasn't able to find anything like a Mental Game of Poker. Although was able to find quite a few tips tucked into articles on a bunch of other things, like how to keep a trade journal for reviewing hands, and stuff like that?

One tip that seemed like it might be helpful when the market starts to get rough was to maybe take a moment to remind yourself of what it is you do well. So going by stake, guess the list might look something like this?

1. buy and hold ETFs - willing to hold through ~50% short-term swings because they've had superior gains in the long-run of +20 years
2. buy and hold individual stocks/commodities - above, plus fundamental analysis to find enduring outperformers that are able to beat the market
3. trend follow - above, plus technical analysis of 4 horsemen, etc
4. short-selling and value investing - above, plus able to pick good entry (and possibly exit) points?
5. options - Sam's not sure ... you'll have to fill this in yourselves
6. other stuff (real estate (and renting), starting or investing in businesses) - ditto

Guess the idea is that there'll be something to feel good about when the market gets rocky - and also saw some tips on how to do it so there's more of a focus on info? Here's an example with some recommendations from the article

Guess it can also help us to avoid that tendency we all probably have at times to be self-critical, if the focus stays on the process and any lessons there are to be learned for how to possibly improve in the future?

There were a couple more interesting tips, but have run out of steam Guess if the stock market continues to stay flat for the rest of the year, there may not be too much more to report, so will probably take the summer off from doing these monthly summaries. Maybe this is would be a neat opportunity for someone else with more experience to give one a try? That would be great to read!


PS Guess the market hasn't been great lately, but it's sure been beautiful out - so that's been nice

Thanks for your effort TrustySam. Enjoyable synopsis. It appears we are all making some money in fantasy life and in real life, I hope.

Glad you enjoyed it Zeno! The summaries haven't taken too long - will likely continue to do a month end review on my own anyways, because guess watching people with experience can be the best way to learn things a lot of the time? So looking over everybody's portfolios has been an amazing opportunity to see a whole bunch of new things - and every month it seems there's been something new to discover and explore


Was really astounded to see how much some peoples' dividends wound up adding up to! Nice going Zeno - guess your portfolio must have made the biggest gain from what was showing in March to what's now showing for April

Had heard of people liking stocks that pay dividends because of the steady income stream, especially when bonds have been paying out so little for so long. And guess maybe the dividends can help offset losses for buy and holds when the market corrects? It looks like dividends can maybe also be used to help offset some of the potential risk of giving investing in value picks a try? Is that what you've been doing ASAP? And it looks like the dividends can sometimes get enormous for some of the stocks that have been taking a big beating?


In watching the contest entries from month to month, it's been interesting to see how well value picks have been able to do, even while the market's been going sideways/down. And then there are the shorts ... after giving a short a try this year, can much better understand some of the points people have been making about all the unique things about them. Like guess ToothSayer was mentioning how the borrowing costs can run so high, guess the returns for many of the shorts in real-life might be very different from what's showing? If they're even available for borrowing at all? And then holy cow is the volatility on shorts ever high. Saw someone post this graph of Enron's collapse to bankruptcy in a Seeking Alpha article of how high bounces can be when a stock's price starts to go really low and the amount of shorting is high ...

Guess when giving shorting a try, was expecting it to be just like a buy and hold long, except the sale comes first and the buy comes second? So guess was assuming it'd be okay to just hop on the train at any point, since the prices of longs in recent times have just kept going higher and higher? But taking a closer look at the SHLD graph for the past couple of years, guess there were already some pretty huge rebounds that maybe weren't visible on first glance?

It sounds like lots of people who short don't hold for very long? Or if they do, guess is it super important to pick a good entry point, to avoid the risk of possibly winding up underwater or hitting a stop?

So maybe entry points may be important in real life - and stop-losses too? And guess Juan was wondering about if we should have a margin call? And then there's LFIN that got delisted - in real life if people were shorting, did they wind up getting nothing? And then there's puts as an alternative ...


So guess there's much more to shorting than it being an anti-long Buying and holding long-term was so nice and simple - but with that only profitable during bull runs have been trying to figure out how best to adapt to the changing market conditions that have been anything but nice or simple.


How's everybody else finding things out there these days? Hopefully the increased volatility and uncertainty isn't causing too many headaches?

TTD 🚀

And awesome work TrustySam

Ahh, looks like it didn't take long for something new to happen after all - WOW, huge move there ... nice one TheMVP!!

Found something else kind of neat - went scrolling back through the list of articles on TTD's yahoo page to see what the articles looked like 6 months ago ...

With growth stocks, guess in the last 9 years it's been possible to buy high and see the stock's price just go higher and higher With value stocks, guess one has to be willing to buy low when everybody else is rushing out the door - but that must feel good to have things get rewarded when the price starts going back up again It seemed like quite a few of you had some value picks in your contest portfolios - so with still over half of the year left to go surely there will be more breakouts to come

Sadly I sold all my TTD after their Q1 earnings release, but it's nice to know I'm looking good for purposes of this contest, lol.

In real life, would be more likely to make my longs short and my shorts long lol - guess the market's changed a lot in just 5 month's time!

Hope everybody's having a lovely weekend!

No worries. Bragging rights spend exactly like real money.

Since I had to search for it, here is the spreadsheet again:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...ViY/edit#gid=0

I still am pretty sure that none of the active posters have much of a chance to beat me to the downside. I'm a bit worried about TVIX, I guess. In retrospect, I should have had long positions in VMIN and EXIV.

My EGO is down a whopping 30%; I don't see how that is possible. Of all my random picks, I was sure of this one the most.

Not even in six months yet - no worries from me.

after that rough start I'm fortunate to be in the black again!

Wonder if we can somehow replace JO with BJO since JO got delisted and that's the new coffee one. I could probably figure the equivalent value.

Also how about the shorts in here. Wowza. Nice year.

Looks like a lot of us had moves in the right direction in May ... yay, go us! With the big mover being TTD - congrats to the TheMVP, Malachii () ... and also JoshSP and twelve yr old!!

Nice going rafiki with the breakout and into the black month with THCX Was able to change your JO to BJO - and also, Pokabandito it looks like your yummy Brazilian steakhouse stock FOGO may have been bought over?


Will the big story this month maybe be the Fed Reserve meeting to decide whether to raise interest rates? Wonder how that will go??

Brian, TVIX is still off to it's best start to a year since inception (MINUS 17%). Too bad you have SVXY because the path to green would look pretty bright.

AMD been killing me the last few weeks, hopefully it doesn't break through this LT resistance at $15 or BooLoo could have an epic winner (and my loser) on his hands.

Looks like my FOGO pick is one of the ones breaking this spreadsheet. If you want to manually fix, the closing price on 12/29/17 was $11.60 and the takeout price was $15.75.

My closing price for TWX is 1.437 AT&T shares at close June 14 ($32.52*1.437)= $46.73+$53.75 in cash= $100.48.

Back to flirting with the flat line, feel pretty good about where I'm at given the way VIRT has backed off highs as you'd expect with volatility largely calming down. AMD, CHK have hurt the past month+ & Ryder is languishing again as the transports were rejected off of highs. Some good catch up potential in second half regardless of where the market goes.

If you take out the blockchain related shorts which are up 60+% and which we couldn't really do long term anyway since it's 180% yearly fees, 2p2 is getting violated

Your monthly commentary from the guy who couldn't even have been bothered to put ten names down. Well played cucks.

There's a lot of good calls especially on the long side, if you take out crypto and the short vol trades I'm sure we'd still be doing alright. I'll leave Sam to do a writeup but I'd like to give props to TheMvp, & twelve yr old for having 5 double digit gainers on the long side in what's been a wild half of a year so far (Wilverine has 5 as well but also has GE so not as much props ) Hopefully you guys have been benefiting IRL!

Fun contest, thanks for doing this Sam. It's been an amazing year to trade so far on the long side and I've been fortunate to catch some incredible moves in certain names not on my picks for this contest (IQ, CMG, WSM) that have already made this my best year ever. I think the latter half of the year will be choppier, so will have to tighten up a bit.

Yeah it's been a fun year so far. I don't trade, my 10 picks were simply those I had in my long-term portfolio.

Unfortunately I also started the year with roughly equal allocations between stocks & crypto.

When nearly every stripe of professional trader here was wanting to pile in short GBTC in December, that didn't give you pause? The long guys shorted it, the traders shorted it, the penny stock longs shorted it, the penny stock shorts shorted, the value guys shorted it, the momo guys shorted it, the options guys shorted it, the futures guys shorted it. Unanimous across all types of thinking and trading that this was a no brainer short. That kind of unanimity would scare me away from anything greater than a 10% position the opposite way.

Anyway, year isn't over yet
It's been a great year for the shorts too, mountains of free easy money. Just goes to show - longs make money, shorts make money, pigs get slaughtered.

This contest has been pretty interesting, helping a short term trader like me think about the longer term more deliberately. So great idea and great updates.

something break in the spreadsheet for a few people?