@Old_Skeet, thank you for sharing your insights and your approach, not just on a regular basis but also in specific responses to questions I've asked you previously. I very much appreciate your insights and wisdom as well as several others who post and discuss here, even when our investment styles differ. FWIW and based on your comment earlier in this thread, here's my approach for everyone's information and critique.
In your terms I have 4 sleeves: stocks, mutual funds, futures and private equity.
For stocks, I follow the Sound Advice newsletter and I invest based on M* screens I created focused mostly on wide or narrow moats and low price/fair value. I won't buy a stock unless its
5* and I don't hold most stocks above 90% of fair value. Both are value oriented approaches and following the newsletter is highly mechanical, although I exercise some discretion in an attempt to improve on his returns.
For mutual funds, which is the largest portion of my portfolio, I take a top down view and together with stocks I want my M* X-ray to achieve certain objectives based on the global market capitalization. Right now those objectives are significantly overweight frontier markets and small/mid-caps, overweight healthcare and emerging markets, equal weight US and significantly underweight developed international markets and large-cap stocks. At this point I have no fixed income investments as I'm far more concerned about eventually rising interest rates than I am about geo-political risks or a global slowdown. In picking funds, I'm looking for managers with outstanding records (sometimes with different funds or companies) and/or investment approaches that make very good sense to me. I have a preference for low AUM, focused portfolios, turnover that's not too high and reasonable expenses, but there are very few rules, just guidelines and preferences.
My targeted year-end collection of funds, from largest investment to smallest, includes POAGX, GPIOX, GPEOX, WAFMX, WAAEX, FSCRX, PRNHX, KGGAX, IWIRX, MEASX, OAKWX, PTSGX, OBIOX, MAPIX, DGS, GEGCX and PRHSX. I say targeted because I have a couple funds I'm rotating out of to build investments in some of these I've listed, specifically MEASX and IWIRX which I became aware of here on MFO and KGGAX which I read an article about on M*. I tend to start with smaller positions in new investments and build bigger positions as I get more comfortable with the manager, although Grandeur Peak was a big exception because of the hard closes. I tend to be a long-term investor but I will rotate when I find opportunities that better achieve my objectives. As an example, I'm funding part of my investment in MEASX by reducing GEGCX because I like the smaller-cap nature of the fund as well as greater frontier market exposure.
Futures are a very small portion of my portfolio and its my play money. Most of the time I make bets based on a combination of fundamental and technical aspects of whatever I trade. Right now I'm long Canadian $ and short Euro and keeping my eyes open for opportunities to short Yen and 30 Year Treasury Bonds.
Finally, I have a few investments in private equity that have become a much larger percentage of my portfolio than they should be but it shouldn't be too much longer before I find out whether my thought process was right or not.
