Juan Regular  Posts: 74 Joined: 10/11/2012 Location: Round Rock, Tx  User Profile | Once dynamic list came out, I spent a lot of time redoing my non-retirement portfolio and it has exceeded my expectations. Dynamic lists were something I thought OmniTrader had needed for a very long time. I’ve used OmniTrader since 1997 and was so excited when I heard this was being added to OV. So I jumped on it as soon as it came out in mid-March. Since 4/1/2014, my non-retirement portfolio has shot up 18.5%!!! At same time SPY is up 4.8%. It is margined up to 195% and allows shorts up to 50% of the portfolio. For my retirement account which I've been trading since 5/1/2013, this is now up 22.07%. It had been bouncing around btw 14% - 18% return for many months, but recently turned up. Since 1/1/2014, this is up 6.65% and SPY is up 6.09%. So it is exceeding SPY but not by much. Even though it’s not greatly exceeding SPY, I’m very happy that it has very low drawdowns. It’s not been volatile and allows me to sleep at night. On my non-retirement account, one of the key changes I made was to not allow MAX % Equity per symbol to exceed 20%. Before, I had it at 35%. The reason I did that was going back to 2000 and 2007, I was able to achieve billion $ returns. The returns looked astronomical and I couldn’t help myself. But what I found was when you over allocate on one symbol you can get easily burned. I had situations where two or three symbols took up over 100% of my equity and were big losers and would take away from all the hard earned profits over previous months. The portfolio was simply too volatile. So back in March my main objective was to redevelop a new portfolio based on Dynamic Lists on my non-retirement portfolio with a strict cap of 20% MAX % equity per symbol. The average trade size is 9.6%. So I was actually able to achieve higher CAR ratio with lower drawdowns capped at 20%. At 20% I can rest easier. I only used the default dynamic lists that were made available in late March. The way I built the lists took a lot of time probably 30 hours in all of add a strategy, does it improve the results, yes keep it, no remove it…and so forth..etc… Then I went back and removed strategies to see if it improved results. It was a tedious and iterative process. But I’ve not touched it since then. Now, after almost three months, I want to share the great results. SPY has had a max drawdown of -3.9% since 4/1/2014 (from 4/2/2014 thru 4/11/2014). My non-retirement account has experienced a real max drawdown of -4.8%. This is slightly higher than SPY but it came with 18.5% return which is well worth it. So V2 with Dynamic Portfolios has been very successful and I'm very happy with it. But the best has yet to come. Once Portfolio wizard is out, I plan to go back and revisit both my retirement and non-retirement accounts. I really believe the combination of Portfolio/Strategy Wizard, Dynamic Entries/Exits, and Dynamic lists will allow for even greater success at exceeding the major market indexes with less risk. Thanks. | |
