A1Mhigh

Mohnish Pabrai looks like a big winning manager in his US portfolio since 2025-12-31. All individual stock selection with $RIG being a big winner & $VAL a significant winner. Sector focus is 66%: Basic materials, 33%: Energy. Concentrated!

Stanley Druckenmiller Top Holdings of 2025-12-31. In top 10 has added $XLF financials, $RSP equal weight S&P500, $EWZ Brasil. Moving away from market cap weighted $SPY (Mag-7 underweight), and towards Latin America are interesting tactical moves imo.

Software cos. have been weak for some months, coming to a head after latest SaaS vs. AI sell off. Sold #MONY last year as it took out a Stop loss. Same with #KNOS this year. But investors are sell first, ask questions later atm. I am sure bargains will emerge when the smoke clears.

I think they are probably very good. I am talking about the level of over exaggeration used in the pitch. This seemed excessive given what is available in the public domain. Maybe he has a hotline to management and it is trading on a forward PE of 15?

Hindsight Harry talks a load of bowls. His pitch on a certain well known Stoke based engineering company was a laugh a minute. Problem is inexperienced investors might well be taken in. 🤔

Exactly my thoughts.

Interesting. In the U.S., Robinhood earns a lot from Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) a practice where market makers pay the broker for routing retail orders their way. But in the UK, PFOF is effectively banned under local best-execution rules. So how is it making money in UK?

The idea that US big tech can keep AI all to itself and monetise it just for its own benefit was always a fantasy, as DeepSeek showed many months ago. Open source AI & Chinese AI cos. will be disruptors for sure.

Posted this chart after a "parabolic" gold move 9 months ago. $GLD is up 48% since then. Not saying that $SLV doesn't looks way over done short term. But as the old Wall St. saying goes "keep calling tops and you will be pushing mops".

These are quite significant changes (as Dealing a/c was free before now) i.e. fees going from £45/pa to £300/pa unless you have small account sizes. Increase of about £21/pm.

Well spotted missed that.

Crypto driven by liquidity according to Richard Bernstein. If credit spreads blow out crypto gets creamed. Note the inverse relationship (RHS axis). i.e. crypto is "digital gold" is a v. bad take.

Standing ovation at Davos for a Mark Carney speech that argued the global order has fractured, not evolved. He warned that pretending the old rules still work is dangerous and called on middle powers to stop performing a comforting fiction and start acting in the world as it actually is

very odd time to make these changes imo. Because this will place UK investors in a greater proportion of US assets net-net.

$AJB AJ Bell statement below. There was £500m increase in pension withdrawals ahead of the budget compared with Q1 FY25. This is not a good look for Reeves, or stated govt. policy to boost UK retail investment.

Yes. It works in the same way. However, there are other constraints on qualification (such as it has to be profitable etc.). So for example $TSLA did not qualify until it was huge (and profitable). And yes it was almost certainly front run.

Not sure Iceland want to be drawn into this. 😂 Geography not one of his strong points? But then what is?

Thanks. Been thinking about this for a while, and wanted to post something. Fine line between crying wolf (I may be too early), and people sleep walking into a "passive" investing wealth trap. I think there are similarities between this "bubble" and the one in LT bonds $TLT that burst in 2021-22.

BTW the European market is not the odd one out, UK, Indian, etc. markets all show the same thing i.e. the the domestic market index (FTSE100 etc.) looks a lot like the "mid" performers. The odd one out is the US market.

My response to this is 2-fold. 1. At what point does the $SPY index composition diverge from QVM metrics to such an extent it becomes dangerously unstable? I don't know. 2. if I pick my own stocks from the top quintile in either UK, Europe etc. I can in a self directed way outperform the S&P500.

Even if investors mainly pick their own stocks you can bet their work place pension invests almost totally via passive indexing (UK, EU or US funds alike). What is less clear is: 1. How long this Size factor can last - is it perpetual? 2: Is it not just sensible to join this momentum jugernaught?

Because US market is dominant, as % of World index (~70%) performance is driven by a NEW mother of all factor returns, Size. Because we live in a "passive" indexing world (where investors from around the globe invest in a world index tracker & not their local market). Flows are #1 driver of returns

Exhibit B: Here we have European stocks ranked in the same way as US market. Again you can see outperformance of the top quintile, stacking nicely down to the under performing bottom quintile (red). This time the European index ranks approximately at the mid-quintile (ranks 40-60), not at the top.

However, even the top decile (10%) does'nt outperform the S&P500 index (blue). If you think about this then it becomes clear that size of index membership ALONE is the top quantitative metric for outperformance. i.e. the market returns are being driven by passive flows. Not QVM factor returns.

Stockopedia: ranks stocks in terms of Quality, Value and Momentum. The top quintile in green (top 20%) should outperform lower ranked ones in a quarterly rebalanced portfolio over time. The US market (exhibit A) shows this to be the case (green at the top (ranks 80-100), red (0-20) at the bottom).

I no longer own US index trackers of the S&P500 ($SPY) or Nasdaq100 ($QQQ). Or for that matter World tracker funds (~70% are US stocks). I sold out completely in January of 2025. I explained my reasons in my 2025 review. But I thought it useful to show my reasoning in terms of a Quantitative view.

A thread on why I won't be investing in either a US index tracker or World tracker fund/ETF any time soon (Warning: could be a long thread..) (1/n)

I think the biggest risk to US economy is if EU pension funds (who own a shed load) start dumping US equities (and switching to equities in the RoW). It is happening already imo.

I am with @brokenbanker.bsky.social on this. I don't see a credible way EU weaponize this debt. Most of it owned by pension funds anyway. There has already been 3-4yrs of slow bleed in USTs by EU pension funds, China and the rest.

The irony is that his mother is Scottish and he owns two golf resorts in Scotland. 😂