Hey, stupid! Why not just buy longs and be done with it?

Yep, that’s the kind of cruel query I pose to myself after times like, oh, the past eight trading days (kicked off on the morning of 9/11, appropriately enough, when Jensen Huang talked up his own stock and kicked off a multi-trillion-dollar worldwide equity rally). The lifetime-highs-every-day rallies we get compel me, from time to time, to put together hypothetical “what if I just bought a bunch of good-looking stocks?” portfolios and track them over time. I’d like to share this updated data with you now.

The construction of these portfolios is easy to explain: I go through all my charts as I normally would, and I try to pick out the very best setups. Here, for instance, are a dozen stocks (a pretend $120,000 portfolio evenly divided into starting $10,000 positions) that I “bought” on July 31st. As you can see, in spite of us being at lifetime highs, it’s a mixed bag: 5 winners and 7 losers, yielding a small loss and an annualized -3.1% return.