Investing is for the long term. Wealth is built not from short-term trades, but from following sound strategies and keeping costs low over a lifetime of investing.
With March 2018 now at a close, let's take a look at how our tracking portfolios performed for the month.
Tracking Portfolio Movement In March
Here are how all of the mechanical strategies did last month:
| Portfolio |
Monthly
Gain/Loss |
Monthly
vs. SPY |
 Magic Recipe
|
-1.69% |
+1.96% |
 Deep Value
|
-1.67% |
+1.98% |
 Quality Growth
|
+2.21% |
+5.86% |
 Green Team
|
+0.65% |
+3.44% |
And a breakdown of how the stocks underlying the different business model diligence categories did:
| Rating |
Monthly
Gain/Loss |
Monthly
vs. SPY |
 Red |
-1.40% |
+2.54% |
 Yellow |
-1.53% |
+1.59% |
 Green |
-1.76% |
+1.99%
|
Thoughts and Conclusions
Three brief thoughts about March's performance:
Broad losses in March. After over a year of straight monthly advances for the stock market, February and March have both been down months. We saw broad declines in the market last month, with all 3 business diligence categories declining, and 2 of the 4 real-money spells. As far as we can tell, the market declines were largely influenced by macro factors, including fears of higher interest rates, a trade war with China, and just a general pullback from what has been a hot market.
“Quality” continues to outperform “Value”. We've only been tracking monthly performance since November, but in that time both the Quality Growth and Green Team spells have far outperformed the Magic Recipe and Deep Value spells. Since inception, both of the latter spells are under-performing the market, while Quality Growth is outperforming by 27.6% and Green Team is outperforming by 13.2% (in a shorter time period).
Valuations are improving… but still not “cheap”.
