🍔Our 2025 Performance: +23%
Beating the S&P500 with lower risk. Better than buy-and-hold!
Year in review
2025 was an great year for us. Our core portfolio returned +23% compared to the S&P500 at 16%. We managed to avoid much of the April Liberation Day selloff, which means we achieved those returns with lower risk than the S&P500. Market timing works!
As a reminder, we only own equity ETFs. We buy low, sell high to get a better return than a buy-and-hold strategy. We generally don’t trade a lot, unless it’s a crazy year like 2025. For newer readers, you can hold individual stocks if you prefer — our views are a signal to the directionality of the broad market.
We had some great calls this year. These were all made to paid subscribers in real-time, and can be verified in the archive. Here’s a recap:
Feb 27 Sell: We started the year incredibly bullish; we even thought there would be a short squeeze. But when SPX failed to break to new highs, we quickly changed our views and sold a portion of the portfolio near the peak. This capped off a tremendous 70% run from the Oct 2022 lows.
Mar 19 Buy and Apr 3 Sell: We had expected a run-of-the-mill pullback, and after a 10% decline our signals started perking up so we re-entered the market. But on Liberation Day, the market shock and potential recession was too severe to ignore. We went to all cash.
Apr 21-30 Buys: Recognizing that this was a “man-made” crash, and recession was not materializing, we fully re-entered the market. This was one of the best calls we made all year. We bought some QQQ because tech had corrected significantly in Feb, and was holding up relatively well in Apr. This helped our returns significantly for the year.
Aug 22 Switch to IWM: IWM was breaking out of a long consolidation, consistent with our economic reacceleration thesis. Unfortunately we held it for a bit too long — good idea, bad execution. We’ve battled IWM several times in the past and it hasn’t been kind to us. Luckily no damage was done to the portfolio and we switched back to SPX.
Oct 20 Switch to QQQ: Recognizing the strength in tech, and the potential for a dot-com-style bubble, we added some QQQ. So far, this has just matched SPX. Tech has been in a 3-month consolidation since then, and we are still waiting for the breakout. Patience on this one.
Dec 17 Exit and Re-add: We got faked out on the NVDA earnings day selloff, but quickly bought back in when we realized we were wrong. This again highlights the importance of having a “stop-buy”, which forced us to re-engage rather than sit in cash praying for the next dip to occur.
Overall, this has been a bit of an unusual year. It was the continuation of a long bull market that started in Oct 2022, but the deep selloff on Liberation Day gave us the opportunity to improve our returns significantly.
The above returns exclude tactical trades like the SOXX breakout, Bitcoin, Intel, Nvidia, Affirm, Dollar General, retail stocks, software, Gold long, Gold short, and many more. These short-term trades added a nice chunk to our non-core portfolio.
What we could have done better: Less trading during the Oct-Nov chop. We didn’t appreciate the significance of the Fed pause at the Oct FOMC meeting, which marked the tippy-top of a -5% selloff. Growth signals at the time were deteriorating as well. Some of this could have definitely been avoided.
Substack growth
Our readership count grew to over 11,000 with almost 100 paid subs this year (chart below). It has been our dream to share our trading and investment knowledge with the world.
We have many engaged readers and thinkers who regularly ask us questions via email, chat, or comments. And thank you all for the kind words over the year. We appreciate the support!
Outlook for 2026
It should come as no surprise that we’re bullish for 2026. Fiscal spending is coming, interest rates are getting cut, and the AI bubble continues. S&P500 earnings are growing double-digits and we’re on the cusp of a breadth expansion for the broader economy. The bull market continues!
But who knows? Remember we started 2025 bullish and the market surprised us with a -20% drawdown. That’s what makes us traders — we change our minds when we’re wrong. Never be wedded to your view.
So thank you all for your continued support and for an amazing 2025. Onwards and upwards for 2026!
And for those of you still on the sidelines: Join us on our journey of market timing! We aim to beat buy-and-hold investing, with smaller drawdowns and lower volatility. We’ll show you how to do it in our weekly deep dives.
Disclaimer: This publication is for educational purposes only. The authors are not investment advisors and nothing here is investment advice. Always do your own due diligence.