Starting the New Year Off Really Good, and Really Bad

My wife sometimes says my ‘dual personality’ is the result of my astrological sign. I like to believe I’m simply malleable, an easy going fella who enjoys banter and differing views of opinion. Invariably, my investment portfolios exemplify how very different my ‘dual personalities’ are.

On one hand, I have a portfolio being managed by algorithms set up in Exodus. It is a sterile approach and it doesn’t need my opinion to make money. Last year it made me more than 30% on my money and this year it’s up around ~2%.

My other portfolio is my discretionary account — my devilish nature, and it is getting HAMMED BURGERED — racked by one stock: BURG. It was supposed to make me 100% inside of a week’s effort, but now I’m down ~25% in the name. Don’t worry, however, I have other positions to provide me with ample succor. I made 20% in XNET, up a solid 6% in SN, and have some more gains in JNUG, UCTT, and GSUM. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this — me starting off the year with a hamburger stock racking me for 1/4th of my investment. Then again, what did I expect, when juggling clay jars filled with nitro-glycerine?

My overarching theme for 2018, thus far, is to be levered long oil into the maelstrom of Iran. This trade may very possibly reverse and scorn me, as oil seems to do at least once per annum. The crypto proxy trades feels heavy, after week’s of gains, totally hijacked by the very dumbest people on the planet. The marijuana trade feels younger and virile, but still lame and degenerate. My sense is to be careful, especially with VIX down at record low levels; but I probably won’t heed my own advice and will continue to swing at the windmills, as they approach me in their menacing manner.

Perhaps it is my particolored personality that will save me from total destruction, having the majority of my net worth invested quantitatively, whilst I dabble around in the pits of Wall Street chasing golden dreams in a gauche milieux. The highly publicized vaunted success of the stock market has created a new cast of perfidious bootblacks, seemingly immune to the restive pangs of set-backs, unstinted in their rise to a higher order. While I do appreciate the ceremonial death of the old guard and rise of a new one, an aspirational radiance that has created billionaires from their bedrooms through a never-ending rise in assets, I’m afraid a sockdolager is coming soon — a weaving comeuppance designed to remove the chaff from this grande party.

Buyers Beware!