How I Nearly Doubled 2019’s Market Returns: A Story of Predictions
As January draws to a close, I thought I’d review some of the predictions I made 2019, and how they helped me nearly double market returns.
This is not a guide to what you should be investing in, nor is it some kind of proof of my savvy, it’s simply a very brief look back on ideas that worked and ideas that didn’t — in hopes that by expressing them publicly, I can do even better next year.
The first was the most fundamental, the theory that the end of 2018 was an anomaly rather than a sign of things to come. It might be difficult to remember considering how insanely attractive returns have been in recent history, but at the end of 2018, a lot of people thought that the bull market was grinding to a halt.
This was a reasonable belief, all three indices dropped by around 9% in December, and everyone was spooked that the Federal Reserve was going to keep bumping up interest rates, making money slightly more expensive than free for the first time in a decade.
I was focused on the fact that correlations between equity price movements were relatively high, everything was falling at once — both…