My Wild Week in the Stock Market
I’m even this week, and you probably are as well, or perhaps down a percent or two. But if you’re doing it right, I bet you feel a lot better about it than I do. Here’s why.
I built the perfect portfolio. A mix of individual stock recommendations from Dr. Michael Burry, ETFs that shorted the three main indexes (with the NASDAQ short-weighted the heaviest), and a massive stake in SOXS, which shorts semiconductors (think critical AI infrastructure) at 3:1.
Why was this my portfolio?
The AI bubble is real.
The political backlash of data centers will come with a reckoning.
I thought the election would be close enough that the President would try something, as he did on January 6th.
The Iran war has been waged, in part, with consideration of both sides of the stock market implications.
But early that afternoon, I saw the blue tsunami coming in the prediction markets, so I reallocated. It was too overwhelming to claim election fraud, and markets generally like split government. (Albeit I didn't think the results would be that overwhelming).
So why am I pouting? Because if Tuesday’s portfolio would’ve been Thursday’s, I would’ve been up 28% in one trading day. Think about that. Up 28% in one day. I can’t stop thinking about it.
So although I'm even, I’m crushed. I also know better, but I did it anyway.
I’m distraught from hindsight bias, where you think you knew it all along.
Here’s the reality: I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody does. But the biases pulling me into believing otherwise are strong. Consider this.
Political bias dramatically impacts individual investment returns, often costing investors up to half of their potential portfolio growth because of poorly timed market exits. My disdain for the current president is not a mystery.
I check my accounts multiple times throughout the day. People who do so, on average, perform worse than those who don’t — a truth stemming from myopia and loss aversion.
I outperformed the market in 2025 when the President started talking about actually implementing the tariffs. I shifted entirely to VXUS and outperformed American markets. So now I think I’m smarter than the markets—a self-attribution bias, the tendency to credit your own “skill and brilliant judgment” for past successes.
Nobody can time the market. It takes a special kind of stupid to think you can, so here I sit writing this post wearing a dunce cap.
I’m going to try to do better, but not try my best. If I were going to try my best, I’d give my wife all the login information, have her change the password, and not allow me to log in unless we have a wealth-planning meeting with our financial advisor.
But I’m not going to strip away my easy access to reallocating a percentage of my portfolio based on Dr. Burry’s advice or getting out of SOXS, an instrument that you should never hold over a long period of time.
To be fully transparent, my portfolio today and moving forward is as follows:
38% DIA (Dow Jones Index)
30% VWO (Vanguard International Emerging Market Fund)
20% VXUS (Vanguard International Index Fund)
13% SOXS (with stop losses)
8% Dr. Michael Burry recommendations
I’m convinced tech is toxic right now, especially where equities are strongly tied to AI. So I’m trying to insulate myself from that a bit.
Full disclaimer: my brokerage is outperforming the S&P 500 by 8% since I started trading this year, and between my two retirement portfolios, I’m underperforming the S&P 500 by 5%.
JL Collins is widely regarded as the Godfather of Financial Independence (FI) and author of the best-selling book The Simple Path to Wealth. J.L. and I were chatting about active trading a while back. At the time, I was solely in VXUS, which I thought he’d approve of. His response gave me a chuckle because it still rings true today; he said I still have yet to shake the disease, the belief that I can outsmart the market. VXUS is the total world stock market, minus the United States.
The smart thing to do would be to only invest in the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (VT) and check my account balance a few times a year. But as I said, I’m convinced tech is toxic right now, especially where equities are strongly tied to AI.
Wait, I don't know that to be true. Here I go again; I can’t shake this disease!
If you want to invest the smart way and do what I say and not what I do, listen to our past podcast episode with the great JL Collins.
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Note: I am not giving specific investment advice in this post.
