sport football: Introducing the High Yield Harry Strategies on Autopilot

Welcome back!

Well it's been a whirlwind of a week or so in the markets. There is obviously significant uncertainty and material reason to worry. But I'd very much rather talk about these strategies when valuations are coming down, as opposed to when the market was priced to perfection 2-3 months ago.

This is a special announcement edition to talk about my recent partnership with Autopilot.

Autopilot is an investment app best known for automating your portfolio and letting you copy traders in real-time. This has primarily focused on politicians and hedge fund managers based on disclosure filings - and now Autopilot is moving towards a Creator based future - with me (High Yield Harry) as one of the investors leading the charge on this initiative.

Please also see the necessary disclosure at the end of the piece, but let's get into it:

Business Rationale:

The world continues to move digitally, with fortune favoring disruptors. That's why the way Autopilot is disrupting the way we invest is so compelling and democratizing.

Autopilot is consistently a top App Store app, with individual investors increasingly championing this type of investment style.

When I look at Autopilot, I see a platform with $638mm AUM, a really robust level for a individual investor oriented platform.

But when I look at the platform I also see that a large chunk is tied to Nancy Pelosi's portfolio with 110k+ users following. It clicked to me that in the event of Pelosi retiring that the bulk of that AUM will get spread across the platform. The value proposition of copytrading is there, and folks are very familiar with what copytrading is, so that's what made this a no brainer from a business standpoint.

Beyond that, I'm glued to the public markets and I'm glued to news flow, so getting involved a handful of strategies was a no brainer.

If you've followed me on Instagram or Twitter for a while, then you know I'm much more of a Buyside oriented page than a Banking oriented page. I love investing, have far too many single names in my personal account ("PA"), and have a mix of a private markets and public markets credit background.

I've looked at distressed companies, private-equity backed companies levered 5-8x, and loans and bonds with public tickers. Generally I've favored companies that experience GDP-level revenue growth, cost structure flexibility, a need to exist, and positive FCF dynamics. There are industries I've zoned in on, but broadly I've been a generalist.

To create alignment in how I manage these strategies, I've invested in all four of these strategies.

I'll lead with The Tariff Trade strategy, which I spent Wednesday night making and which quickly surpassed $150k of "AUM" within 24 hours of launching.

The Tariff Trade:

The reason why this newsletter got delayed was because I was putting together The Tariff Trade portfolio. This portfolio focuses on Companies with U.S. Industrials and Basic Materials exposure, as well as more recession-resilient consumer staples.

This includes a mix of varying ETFs, such as the iShares U.S. Manufacturing ETF, the Tema American Reshoring ETF, the iShares US Basic Materials ETF, the iShares US Industrials ETF, and the First Trust RBA American Industrial Renaissance ETF.

This then also includes Berkshire Hathaway, the iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF, Consolidated Edison, Verizon, Kroger, UnitedHealth Group, HCA Healthcare, McDonald's, and Nucor. Many of these positions traded up yesterday as investors flocked to safe haven equities.

Once we received the news on Wednesday April 2nd, 2025 regarding Trump's aggressive tariff plans - I sprinted to do the work and assemble this U.S. focused basket.

Access The Tariff Trade Portfolio

Corporate Dividends:

From looking at the typical Autopilot portfolio, it's very Tech and growth stock oriented, so I wanted to focus on dividend yields.

The Corporate Dividends Fund is focused on Blue Chip, Defensive Companies with High Dividend Yields. These Companies have a market leading position, operate in an oligopolistic market, have high barriers to entry, and have robust Free Cash Flow.

This includes AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, as well as Phillip Morris and Altria Group, plus Prudential, American Tower Corp. and Pfizer.

In terms of more resilient, well capitalized, FCF heavy companies, the portfolio includes American Express, JP Morgan, Waste Management, Home Depot, and Chevron.

Like some of the Companies I mentioned in The Tariff Trade basket, many of these positions traded up yesterday as investors flocked to safe haven equities.

So when I launched this portfolio last week, AT&T, Verizon, and Altria Group were key overweights in the strategy. But hey, I'm not the only Bond guy who has a view on these names:

Golden Age of Private Credit:

This is a basket portfolio. There may be some additions and removals over time, but this portfolio is meant to primarily capture sentiment in private credit focused asset managers, as well as the advisors directly exposed to credit market restructurings and LMEs.

While there has been a massive rally in these managers over the past few years, I'd be remiss to note though that Alternative Asset Managers trade off materially during corrections. They have done so yesterday and may continue to do so. Ultimately, I wanted to build a thermometer of the Private Credit markets at a minimum. I'm still overall long-term bullish large asset managers:

Our Asset Management exposure includes Apollo Global Management, Blue Owl Capital, Blackstone Group, Blackrock, KKR, and Ares. These companies focus on alternative assets such as private credit, which provide senior-secured financing at attractive interest rates, and have stable AUM bases. Ares Capital Corp is also included within the portfolio.

I'm a big believer in the trend of asset manager consolidation and the bigger, performing managers in the space eating everything up, and have positioned the portfolio as such. Most importantly, managers that are able to deploy capital opportunistically during dislocations generate outsized returns. On the flip side - there are valid credit concerns and questions over returning capital during weaker economic periods. Plus, declining market values correlate to firms having less money to manage/there being lower global wealth in general.

Growth in Liability Management: The high interest rate environment has also led to an increase in restructuring and opportunistic investments, driving increased restructuring and LME activity. The Golden Age portfolio is rounded by Banks with leading Restructuring businesses such as Moelis, Houlihan Lokey, and Lazard.

This Private Credit basket captures growth in alternative asset classes, while also including countercyclical bankruptcy and restructuring advisory businesses in the basket.

Access The Golden Age of Private Credit Portfolio

High Yield Flagship Fund:

This strategy focuses on equities in several industries that typically have high yield bonds or leveraged loans in the capital structure. There are a lot of large cap, mid cap, and small cap companies who leverage the high yield bond and leveraged loan markets to pursue growth strategies.

Uber, Yum! Brands, Snapchat, and DraftKings are among the Companies that have leveraged the High Yield Bond market. While Uber has graduated to the IG markets, its High Yield fueled growth was an important story throughout my career and shows that the High Yield market isn't all about hairier names or sponsor backed names.

Other key positions include Restaurant Brands, Transdigm Group, Primo Brands, Virtu Financial, and Vistra.

Autopilot has limitations of 15 names, but I'm looking at a roughly 50 name list to evaluate swap candidates. This is while still trying to make sure we're covering the bulk of industries.

In a perfect world, I'd fill this to the brim with HY and Loan issuer Equities.

Thanks for reading through these strategies.

You can sign up for Autopilot without signing up for a subscription, but if you don't sign up for a quarterly or annual subscription, then your portfolio isn't updating as position changes are made. When a premium subscription is completed (kind of the equivalent to a management fee/expense ratio), you gain access to automatic buying and selling for all of the pilot portfolios.

I'll be back with more news next week. I have some news for Students and prospective Investment Bankers about something special I've been working on. Until next time.

Best,

Harry

Disclosure

Investment advice provided by Autopilot Advisers, LLC ("Autopilot"), an SEC-registered investment adviser. The portfolios are in partnership with Autopilot. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investing carries risks, including loss of principal. As always be smart out there.

In Other News

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Some Funny Memes from the past few days: