Author: Yuval Taylor

06/07/2021 Predicting Growth If you were given a crystal ball that would accurately predict a company’s growth over the next year, you would logically invest in those companies with the highest growth and short those with the lowest. Portfolio123 recently allowed this kind of crystal-ball prediction in its backtesting by…

When backtesting a portfolio strategy, you have to decide how far back to look. Should you use all available data, stretching back decades? Or should you just look at the last few years? There are arguments to be made for both options. There are those who believe that factors are…

Choosing Performance Measures Performance measures have to be suited to the use you’re making of your portfolio and to its important features. In this article I’ll first outline in broad terms the appropriate measures for different portfolios, and will follow that by a more detailed look at each of the…

Leverage can be a powerful tool in increasing your returns, but it must be used very carefully. This brief guide will attempt to cover margin, hedging, and related issues. Financing Your Investments In theory, if your expected returns on an investment are higher than whatever interest you might pay, it…

Of all the companies I’m betting against, my biggest bet is against Applied Digital (APLD). I’m the portfolio manager of a small hedge fund, Fieldsong Investments, and we hedge our long equity positions with put options. These are essentially bets against stocks; they make money if the stock goes down…

The Nature of Financial Data Late last year, Marcos M. López de Prado, a hedge fund manager and professor who has pioneered machine learning in finance and who is currently global head of quantitative research and development at one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, published a monograph called…

At the beginning of 2022 I hit on a better way than going short to hedge my long positions: buying cheap put options on stocks I expected to tank. Following this strategy was very profitable at first, since 2022 and 2023 presented an ideal market for it. The strategy isn’t…

The Importance of Portfolio Management I’ve had a successful run as a retail investor, with an eight-year CAGR of 44%. I attribute my success to two things: my ability to find stocks that will outperform and my portfolio management techniques, which may be of equal importance to my returns. Without…

Note: The M Score is used to identify companies that are engaged in manipulating their financials. I am using pseudonyms in this article and changing certain details to mask the identity of the companies in question. I. Getting Defrauded Not too long ago, an investment research firm exposed a company…

2022 was an excellent year for me. OK, I didn’t make as much from my investments as I did in 2020 or 2021—who did?—but a 22% return isn't bad. But more important than how much I earned is how much I learned. Was this a better year than most? I…