241101 Losing passion for my 20 year passion project

And stock picks for AUD EUR JPY and USD

Hi all, and welcome to the Two Crows Week#1 portfolio picks for November 2024.

Another month rolls in, our 11th thus far, with Week#1 portfolio picks presented below. Year to date, things have been going very well for the Two Crows Systematic live, play-forward portfolios. With the exclusion of the EUR portfolio, (which is actually up approx 6% XIRR but down approx -3% TWRR YTD), all other portfolios are

• strongly positive (ranging between +15 to +30% TWRR YTD)

• exceeding their benchmarks TWRRs, often by a considerable degree

• rank highly against professionally managed funds and strategies presented on HedgeNordic.com and in the fund performance letters that I read here and here

That said, over the past weeks and months, I have become increasingly disillusioned with this Two Crows project, and more generally, with pursuing a career as a professional investment manager.

Rather, I think I might prefer to build something, some software product or service with a tangible input and output, rather than merely move money back and forth betting on the economic efforts of others.

Even worse, I loathe the idea of spending my limited time comparing myself against an industry of often disingenous, and often outright dishonest, participants. In a field where the only outcome that matters is the safe, consistent, long term compounding of your wealth, I find it increasingly toxic to surround oneself with people grifting and lying and revising the history of their decisions and their performance, to the detriment of anyone swept up in their bullshit.¹

Just this week I received yet another “great investment offer” email from a service with the horrifically awful name “StockGptChat”, promising, ironically, “no bullshit” whilst ALSO promising the most insanely high, incredibly implausible investment returns imaginable. Just reading their marketing material filled me with violent, righteous rage — I’ll post more this coming week about this particular offender.

But the scammers aren’t the only issue.

The collecting of data. The cleansing of data. The analysis. The posting. The double checking. The debugging. The error handling. Dealing with data vendors. Correcting their data. Rerunning my analysis. This side-project eats up several days worth of effort per month, several weeks per year, for what statistically will at best amount to a couple of percent of annual outperformance over a low-cost index fund. IF it turns out that I know what I am doing and IF I can maintain a level head at all times and IF I don’t fall victim to bad data or bad luck or ego or a myriad of other pitfalls. All when I could spend my evenings walking my dog or learning guitar or building a software product to learn languages or… just about anything else, really.

And I cannot decide whether quitting the Two Crows newsletters now is the clever, long-overdue freeing up of my time, or is it a case of giving up prematurely. Whether to cut my losses, or continue the grind. Especially when, as I’ve said to pretty much anyone who will listen, the almost-certainly best thing to do for almost-everyone is to simply buy low-cost index funds, regularly, without fail, and go on living your life happily and ignorant of the daily stockmarket ups and downs.

With that in mind, my plan is to weigh things up after 12 months of operation, at the close of 2024, and make a decision. For now I plan to keep effort and time spent to a minimum. I will post monthly stock picks and portfolio performance reports but the supporting commentary and other research will be very limited, and I’ll revisit this decision in the near future.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Monthly portfolio commentary

On to this month’s stock selections for the Two Crows Systematic AUD, EUR, JPY and USD “Week#1” portfolios.

Monthly Trades for AUD, EUR, JPY and USD

AUD denominated stocks (50 000 AUD + divs/sales)

• BUY ATP.AX - Atlas Pearls Ltd: 32468 shares @ $0.14

• BUY CUV.AX - Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals Ltd: 312 shares @ $14.56

• BUY JIN.AX - Jumbo Interactive Ltd: 350 shares @ $12.98

• BUY LOV.AX - Lovisa Holdings Ltd: 157 shares @ $28.93

• BUY LYL.AX - Lycopodium Ltd: 403 shares @ $11.29

• BUY MAD.AX - Mader Group Ltd: 792 shares @ $5.74

• BUY NWL.AX - Netwealth Group Ltd: 166 shares @ $27.46

• BUY PRU.AX - Perseus Mining Ltd: 1567 shares @ $2.9

• BUY PWH.AX - PWR Holdings Ltd: 511 shares @ $8.89

• BUY SIQ.AX - Smartgroup Corporation Ltd: 585 shares @ $7.77

• BUY VLS.AX - Vita Life Sciences Ltd: 2066 shares @ $2.2

EUR denominated stocks (50 000 EUR + divs + sales)

• BUY ADYEN.AS - Adyen N.V.: 3 shares @ $1458

• BUY ASML.AS - ASML Holding N.V.: 7 shares @ $655.2

• BUY AOF.DE - ATOSS Software AG: 35 shares @ $129.4

• BUY BEC.MI - B&C Speakers S.p.A.: 267 shares @ $17

• BUY CAT1.DE - Caterpillar Inc.: 13 shares @ $358.5

• BUY HMU.DE - HMS Bergbau AG: 158 shares @ $28.8

• BUY KRI.AT - Kri-Kri Milk Industry S.A.: 321 shares @ $14.15

• BUY ROVI.MC - Laboratorios Farmaceuticos Rovi: 58 shares @ $78.3

• BUY PLNW.PA - PLANISWARE PROMESSES: 194 shares @ $23.4

• BUY QTCOM.HE - Qt Group Oyj: 52 shares @ $87.1

• BUY UNITED.HE - United Bankers Oyj: 255 shares @ $17.8

JPY denominated stocks (5 000 000 JPY + divs/sales)

• BUY 6532.T - BayCurrent Consulting, Inc.: 92 shares @ $4925

• BUY 4980.T - Dexerials Corporation: 193 shares @ $2355.5

• BUY 2326.T - Digital Arts Inc.: 88 shares @ $5140

• BUY 4722.T - Future Corporation: 239 shares @ $1904

• BUY 3150.T - gremz,Inc.: 173 shares @ $2623

• BUY 2124.T - JAC Recruitment Co., Ltd.: 627 shares @ $725

• BUY 6036.T - KeePer Technical Laboratory Co., Ltd.: 108 shares @ $4190

• BUY 9552.T - M&A Research Institute Holdings Inc.: 166 shares @ $2741

• BUY 3901.T - MarkLines Co., Ltd.: 164 shares @ $2780

• BUY 7839.T - Shoei Co., Ltd.: 197 shares @ $2309

• BUY 6196.T - Strike Company,Ltd: 104 shares @ $4390

USD denominated stocks (50 000 USD + divs/sales)

• BUY GOOG - Alphabet Inc.: 27 shares @ $171.14

• BUY ANET - Arista Networks, Inc.: 12 shares @ $401.57

• BUY AZO - AutoZone, Inc.: 2 shares @ $3060.89

• BUY IRMD - IRadimed Corporation: 88 shares @ $52.55

• BUY KNSL - Kinsale Capital Group, Inc.: 11 shares @ $433.86

• BUY ODFL - Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc.: 23 shares @ $201.31

• BUY PAYC - Paycom Software, Inc.: 28 shares @ $167.54

• BUY QLYS - Qualys, Inc.: 37 shares @ $124.39

• BUY RMD - ResMed Inc.: 19 shares @ $244.4

• BUY ULTA - Ulta Beauty, Inc.: 12 shares @ $379.84

• BUY V - Visa Inc.: 10 shares @ $281.88

As always, thanks for reading, and please feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in systematic investment and modelling.

1. as I’ve written about previously here https://twocrowssystematic.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-hedge-fund-performance