Story
I have been personally investing for over 15 years and working in the investment industry professionally for 10 years. I worked for years as an investment analyst helping manage individual client accounts and even worked on a mutual fund team. Over the years I’ve had people ask for my investment ideas, but have usually been cautious to dole out any personal investment picks. Part of this is if I give the individual one stock to buy and if they act on the tip, there’s a good chance that it could go south. Any one idea can be risky and volatile. I’d feel awful if I caused someone to lose lots of money because they followed my advice. Also I’ve never been very confident in any one idea and I can have perfectionistic tendencies, not wanting to be wrong. But now I have the means to share my entire personal portfolio and with that means more diversification and more confidence. I was inspired by the ARK Invest family of ETFs, run by Cathie Wood, which is completely transparent with all of its allocation and trade information unlike professionally managed mutual funds which only have to disclose their positions after the end of every quarter. In the same vein, I am being completely transparent with my personal portfolio so that others can benefit from my experience.
Soon after first starting to invest, I read On Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch. In the book, Lynch surmised that if an investor follows his guidelines and the market returned an average of 9 - 10%, then you could expect to return 12 - 15% annualized. As a naive highschooler at the time, I believed him. I picked 14% as my personal benchmark or at least 4% outperformance compared to the market. Fast forward to when I hit my 15th anniversary of investing, I had achieved outperforming the S&P 500 by 8.0% annualized. Only 3 actively managed mutual funds had a better track record at the time and the best performing fund didn’t even outpace my portfolio by 0.5% annualized. That means my portfolio performance was just about at the top, at least within the top percentile of portfolios. Whether I’m skilled or just lucky, you can be the judge of that. But the numbers speak for themselves.
The excess returns have been a boon on my own finances and now I hope to share my knowledge with others so that you too can be a successful investor. But please, please do your own research before investing. Please note that my portfolio is built to have a very high risk tolerance, with the goal of outperforming the S&P 500 over the long-term. Although I have achieved my goal over the long-term, over the short- or intermediate-term my portfolio has underperformed the market by a large margin at certain points as highly concentrated portfolios tend to do. Do not try to match my portfolio if you do not have a very high risk tolerance as well. Whether you hand pick a couple ideas from my portfolio, match my portfolio allocation exactly or pick from my top 10 highest conviction positions, I hope the information on this website provides value to my fellow investors and can help take your money to the NEXT LEVEL.