Dear Reader,
Happy Monday!
Just a few days till Christmas and I’ll tell you what – my kids are excited.
When I was growing up the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, used to walk around and say, “how am I doing?”
Those of you from New York may remember that, or even if you’re not from New York because it turned into a cultural meme.
Well, in this last week of 2024 I want to recap how we’ve done at Behind the Markets.
We’ve had our track record compiled by an economist named Conrad Mattern from Conquest Investment Advisory.
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He keeps track of all the trades we send out.
He marks them on the Bloomberg machine – recommended buy price, sell price, etc.
He does this for us and for asset managers.
He’s well-respected in our industry and a pretty serious dude.
So I was looking at his latest update which should be the last one for this year (I don’t anticipate sending any sell recommendations this week; if that’s the right choice of course we will – but no plans)…
And so far we have a 51.99% average gain on all closed trades for our Behind the Markets newsletter.
Not bad!
Wish we would have gotten to 52%. 51.99%? Come on.
But that is far above our 36.39% average gain from 2018 to 2023.
Again, that’s just playing the market we’ve been given.
We entered the year with quite a lot of stocks in our portfolio, which I don’t prefer to do.
But the market was just going up and going bonkers.
Now we’re finishing the year with a much smaller portfolio, which is how I like to end a year.
And here’s something interesting I discovered doing this year-end track record review…
We recommended selling 25 stocks in 2024.
We sold 43 in the prior 6 years – or about 7 stocks per year.
We’ve cleaned out a lot.
I’m really happy about that.
We enter 2025 lighter, our sails in.
We’ve taken some great profits this year and we are in a good position.
We’re nimble.
We cleared a lot of the older positions and I think one of the things that makes me feel so grateful today is…
I think of when I started this company – January 2018.
I know some of you reading this right now have been around since the beginning.
And what I never told you back then was, I was starting Behind the Markets after retiring.
I was coming back and it was very intense. It was a little bit scary, frankly.
I was doing this thing and I didn’t know if I had lost my fastball.
I was doing well in my personal accounts, but communicating ideas to people is a different game.
I was so nervous that I’d disappoint people.
I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
I’m not in the “hurting people” business.
It’s the last thing on Earth I want to do.
Those of you who’ve been with me since the very, very beginning, I appreciate you sticking around.
Because I remember coming out of 2018, our average profit was 86%. It was just crazy. A great first year.
But our second year was pretty bad. It was the only year we showed a net loss in our closed positions – down 12.96%.
It was like everything went against us.
That was really difficult.
I thought to myself, “my goodness – did I lose my fastball? Was 2018 beginner’s luck?”
But when we look at the long-term and we’ve averaged around 40% gains on all closed trades across all years, I feel good about that.
And near 52% average gains on all closed trades this year is pretty darn good.
I’d put that up against most anybody.
Now, I’m going to talk about the best and dumbest moves I’ve made this year.
Best move, META. I think that was the easiest money my readers have made in a long time.
We recommended META a couple years back when it had collapsed from around $500 to $300.
When it broke below $100 I started licking my chops and recommended it again.
We sold this year for a combined 152% profit. The last print was up 400% and the first one was up marginally.
But that felt like a great move because it felt easy…
META started crashing after investing too much in this virtual world stuff, but the underlying mechanics of the business – the cash-generating ability of the business – just didn’t miss a beat.
It was outrageous – we were very lucky Zuckerberg woke up and started investing more in AI, which has more positive ROI than the $20 billion a year he was investing in the Metaverse (again, big investment, very little return).
So that was the smartest move we made this year.
The dumbest, by far…
Paramount Global. The movie studio Sumner Redstone and so many other people own – down 49.3%.
[By the way, you can go to Behind the Markets and look at our closed positions to see our track record].
Former Giants head coach Bill Parcells used to say, “You are what your record says you are.”
So you can go see for yourself our track record.
So yeah, Paramount Global – dumbest move I made this year. Down 49%.
What I failed to perceive is, I did not understand how fast content manufacturers like Paramount would lose power to the rise of streaming titans like Amazon and Netflix.
I thought Amazon would be blocked from buying MGM and would have to go and buy movie content from Paramount.
I thought it would be a good thing for the company.
That was a dumb move on my part.
I misperceived the whole thing.
Just look what it’s doing to the cable business – it’s a disaster.
Anyway, I just wanted to do a quick little review of our year, 2024.
Feel free to go to www.behindthemarkets.com, login, go to model portfolio > closed positions. You will see it in black and white.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
You don’t graduate above being human.
Nobody’s perfect, but I’m pretty happy with a 51.99% average gain on all closed trades this year.
I can sleep easy tonight.
Have a wonderful Monday.
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