Sometimes Boring is Good
Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter! Within these pages, I'll share my perspective on investment strategies and the valuable insights I've gained throughout my career. Since dedicating myself full-time to investing in 2018, I've accumulated roughly eight years of hands-on experience. I'll regularly discuss the thinking behind aspects of my personal portfolio construction. The newsletter will take an educational approach, exploring how to integrate key concepts including relative strength, momentum analysis, asset correlation, and various weighting methodologies to help you develop a more sophisticated investment framework.
March's Portfolio Performance
Last month's performance was pretty uneventful, with most of the portfolio sitting in T-bills (Treasury bills). This reflected the model's strong risk-off stance at the time. The portfolio model works by selecting the top 4 performing assets out of 9 different asset classes, using a specific lookback period. Whenever T-bills make it into the top 4, they end up dominating the portfolio because of the unique asset-weighting model I use.
The portfolio uses a risk parity approach to determine asset allocation, which means it balances risk contribution across assets rather than just dividing money equally. Since T-bills are considered among the safest assets in the world, their risk contribution is tiny—so they end up taking up a much larger portion of the portfolio. The T-bill ETF I use contains T-bills with maturities ranging from between one to three months, making them very short-term. This short duration means they're less affected when interest rates change (unlike longer-term bonds that lose value when rates rise). BIL is currently yielding a respectable 4.13% (as of late March 2025), which isn't bad for such a low-risk investment.
March Performance Overview
- Asymmetric Edge +0.03%
- Gold +7.9%
- 60/40 -2.3%
- S&P 500 -6.17%
- NASDAQ - 7.72%