Everything comes to an end eventually, and even though I still have plenty of gas in the tank and feel motivated to come here and write more than one hundred articles per year, reality gets sometimes in the way (kid coming soon, parents getting older and sicker, home ownership in 2017). So, if my free time is limited today, I can only imagine it getting worse in the future.
After thinking long and hard about it, I came to the conclusion that I simply cannot stop posting my trades until a full market cycle is complete. What do I mean by that?
During the first years of posting my trades here, we had to fight an unstoppable and very challenging Bull Market. Then, since the end of 2014 until now, we've been dealing with what, in the big picture, can be considered a sideways market. Coming out of both scenarios profitable and with manageable draw-downs is a satisfaction, but if I stopped posting trades now, I will be aborting the mission before ever being tested during a true bearish environment. It's like those Cuban Baseball players of the 80's and 90's who were solid but never tried themselves in the Majors. There's always that stain if you will; that inevitable question: we'll never know how good they were because they were not properly tested at the highest level. It's similar. LT's mission here is incomplete if a Bear Market is not faced. However, we also don't know when the next Bear will come. It may be in 2, 3 years, or 10 or 15....or maybe never again...
During the past two years I have been studying bear markets intensively and devising action plans to protect positions, something that in times of Global Monetary Easing and coordinated Central Bankers efforts, only a lunatic does; and although I feel confident now that I can trade an extended bear market, a la 2008, profitably, the reality is that it hasn't happened. I was still a Castro's slave back in 2008 and hadn't left the island. I also know 2008 was unique: the second worst year after 1929. Perhaps we are not too likely to face something exactly like that, but at least a couple of years of market negative returns are necessary for me to deal with and feel the mission on this site has concluded.
At the same time, as I have mentioned earlier, nobody knows when the next bear market will come. It would be kind of pointless, to keep writing the same type of content indefinitely with so many things to do out there in this wonderful world. So, here is my goal: I am going to be sharing all my trades, publicly for a total of 10-years. Hopefully we will get a bear before I'm done.
This is the 5th year posting all my trades, so I'm less than half-way through it. And that's my plan: to share my trades and analysis until the year 2021. That would be sweet. A nice milestone. I don't know exactly what that says about me, but I consider it a nice achievement anyways. I haven't seen any website posting trades publicly for free for ten years. If anybody knows one, please share it in the comments section.
If we don't see a bear market, I will feel like the mission is not totally complete, but like I said, waiting for the next bear can take 2 more decades,.....who knows.
After that, I can see myself coming back to this little corner of the Internet to have fun, as there will be (hopefully) more free time that I simply don't have now. So, It's very likely that this site will stay alive for many years to come, just that, in that distant future, I may not be tied to the self-imposed compromise of posting all my trades and the writing up of Weekend Portfolio Analysis, but definitely coming with a less regular schedule, talking trading/investing, just for the fun of it, because in the end, life needs to make sense somehow and never better than when staying involved with the game you love.
LT
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