By skyforbes TLDR
QQQ LEAPS: +$150k gain
QQQ shares: +$60k (unrealized)
XLP LEAPS: -$80k loss
NEW POSITIONS: $300k in VOO
Hi again. I'm sure like 5 people remember my last post from a year ago where I broke down my entire strategy. I won't be doing that again, but here's an update on how it performed. Overall up +32% which is slightly better than QQQ's +29%. I didn't even come close to TQQQ's +63% this time around and the cause is pretty clear…
XLP flopped big time. I know it's a hedge so in a way it's supposed to underperform when everything is at all time highs but to underperform THIS much? It felt like I was hedging my calls with puts. I could speculate that there's some global macroeconomic shift away from consumer staples or something but I didn't get here by doing that kind of DD. I just backtested historical returns.
On an unrelated note, I find it hilarious that some haters bookmarked my post and showed up to say "told you so" around liberation day. Yeah I was down -$167k at the time but I've seen worse and that ended up being a nothing burger. Turns out when your calls have 1-2 years until expiry those temporary setbacks don't matter much.
Moving forward, I think I'm done with options. I'm sure we've all seen those posts where people hit it big and make life changing money but don't know when to quit. There's this dismissive attitude like "if you can't quit your day job right this instant then it's not enough money" but that's just not true. All time (since 2018) I'm up +$415k which is a massive head start and is plenty to snowball into retirement from here even in shares. Maybe if my goal were to hit a high score of millions of dollars I'd keep YOLOing 50% of my portfolio into LEAPS every year but I just want a comfy normal life.
If you backtest retirement strategies (which I've done a lot of) the ones that fail happen when you hit your target number due to some bubble, quit your job, then immediately stuff crashes back down like in 2000 or 2008. Moving to safer investments early and planning to work a while longer should both protect against that in case we're in a bubble right now.
It's been fun. We'll see if I have anything worth posting next year but probably not. The actually boring stuff starts now.