Game on between the "Monkey" and the "Cray On" portfolios!!!

From Monday, 10 June 2019. Experiments are the way to improve the world. Sadly because of an overkill of regulation experiments are getting rare in the financial industry. After all nobody wants to be accused of “experimenting with client money”. Also terrible regulation like MIFID II acts like a barrier of entry to the industry as the big boys and girls can afford to pay the army of legal and compliance people necessary to run an asset manager in the EU, but sadly if you are a small asset management start up you will be bankrupt within your first year trying to comply with all those regulations before you can start to make money. So here on this blog let’s run a paper investing experiment using a monkey style investment plan and a “Cray on” style portfolio investment plan taking from my book on Amazon “Beat the stock market casino”. The Monkey investment style can pick an investment first by putting a pin in the quotations page of the newspaper and the “Cray on” style portfolio then picks something in the same currency listing that it thinks might do better long term. So a couple of weeks ago I picked the first 2 investments. The pin in the newspaper “City A.M.” first was closest to some JP Morgan Indian mutual fund, but I had to bin that one because I could not track that investment on the web. Next pin hit the US stock Cisco, so the first paper investment for our experiment in the Monkey Portfolio was called Cisco. I invested the same $ amount in both portfolio’s and that means about 91 shares in Cisco Systems could have been bought and tracked on the website www.stockrover.com. The current holdings for the Monkey Portfolio is just 91 shares in Cisco Systems at a $55.93 last makes a portfolio $ value of $5090. The Monkey Portfolio is slightly under water by $16. So far the Monkey Portfolio is a touch better than the S&P 500 since inception. Using the “Stockrover” website will allow for some charts etc. to check up on performance long term a little easier. Sadly the charts from “Stockrover” do not copy paste into Blogger so I am afraid I cannot show you what I see on “Stockrover” as visually pleasing as I had hoped.

Next up was the “Cray on” portfolio. I picked a small but powerful company called MSCI. If you create new ETF’s you need someone to create the benchmarks for you and pay the benchmark provider. Passive investing and ETF’s are continuing to become more popular and I do not see that change any time soon. So I think MSCI could have a “moat” and pricing power, two quite rare things in the financial industry. I could buy about 22 shares of MSCI before running out of cash if I wanted to invest an equal amount of money in Cisco and MSCI. Because MSCI traded at the high $200 plus level , I was stuck with some un-invested cash in the “Cray on” portfolio as per below. $116 is in cash in the Cray On portfolio. MSCI’s stock made new 52 week highs last Friday and the position is showing a $298 paper profit. The total $ value for the Cray On portfolio is $5287 for value of 22 MSCI shares plus $116 makes a total of $5403. It is very early days and doesn’t say anything, but the “Cray On” portfolio so far is beating both the S&P 500 and the “Monkey Portfolio”. June is clearly so far much better than the performance in May.

So it is now game on between the Monkey and the Cray on portfolio. May the best one win!

Clearly no recommendation is made here on what you should do. The value of shares and the income from them can go down and you may get back less than the amount invested. If you want to make an investment decision, please seek contact with a financial advisor first. As always when you read something assume the writer already has a position and is selling when you are buying….. Posted by Rogier G. van de Grift at 03:26 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Thursday, 16 May 2019 Welcome to my blog. A special thanks to the visitors that bought the book "Beat the stock market casino". Here will appear blogs relating to the book and track to paper trading stock portfolio's inspired by the book. The 1st portfolio is called the "Monkey Portfolio" and stocks for that portfolio are literally picked by sticking pins in the financial page of the newspaper (I have ran out of darts and monkeys). The 2nd portfolio is called the "Crayon Portfolio and here I will pick stocks I like. I know the difference between just 2 portfolios will not be statistically relevant, but I hope it will be fun. So 1 position will be added to both portfolios every 6 months on the basis of the "No Capital Gain Taxes growth investment plan" as described in the book. Please come back to the website once in a while if you like the sound of that. The information on this website is background information about stock markets and does not constitute investment advice nor is it an invitation to make transactions. No recommendation is made, positive or negative, regarding what you should or shouldn’t do. It is up to you. Please remember, the value of shares and the income from them can sadly go down as well as up and you may get back less than the amount invested. I do not accept any liability for any wrong information or consequences about information here. If you want to make an investment decision, please seek contact with a financial adviser.