How to Use this Blog

You asked for it.

First, I want to honor all who died in service in the US military. Your debt is a type that can never be repaid. To American readers, I hoped you enjoyed your holiday weekend.

Now, on to my message. Interest in this blog has been increasing lately, which I appreciate. That is coming with an increasing number of messages from readers wanting outlooks or recommendations for sectors and individual stocks. I will address requests about each, in turn.

First, of course, nothing I write should be considered investment advice, as such advice should be tailored to individual circumstances, including goals and preferences.

Now, when it comes to sectors I generally don’t focus much on them, except for the tech sector. This is because almost all other sectors tend to underperform the broader stock market generally.

On individual stocks, while I do invest in some individual stocks on a limited basis, and sometimes share those picks, I don’t put much emphasis on them. Here’s why:

That’s a breakdown of my individual stocks, which are obviously all tech stocks. Notice that my rate of return does beat the S&P 500, but not Vanguard’s Information Technology ETF, in which I also invest. Also notice that there are no obscure names there. These are all companies with household names. Hence, I can’t say I should earn money on the basis of my individual stock picks.

Worse still are my more highly speculative growth tech stock picks in exciting new industries. 75% of these companies have already gone out of business or will very soon. The rest are down since investment. Some notable names include Fisker and Virgin Galactic. CRSPR Therapeutics is also notable, and is still very much in business, but down more than 2/3 since I bought it. It has yet to realize positive earnings, but I’m still optimistic it could be a winner one day, given some potential groundbreaking treatments in the pipeline. I’ll spare you the explicit portfolio view, which is so full of red, it might be mistaken for a picture from a murder scene. I don’t want to give readers nightmares on a night after a holiday. Don’t feel too sorry for me though, as these losers make up only a tiny portion of my total portfolio.

So, this blog is intended to offer an outlook for the broad stock market and the US economy. I use such information to dynamically hedge my buy and hold portfolio. This means currently for example, given that the economy is running hot with inflation breakevens at the Fed’s target, that I expect stock prices to be flat-to-slow growing, sans a real shock. Hence, I sell covered calls, for example, to help boost my rate of return.

I am still working on some software to allow for scenario stress-testing of invididual stocks and ETFs. I recently started over on that project, and am finding ways to better integrate new LLM AI technology to give it a more progressive interface, with real-time interpretation of results.

Note: This post, as is the case with all my posts, should not be construed as offering investment advice. Such advice should be tailored to the individual investor by qualified professionals who, ideally, are fiduciaries.