Buying The Seeking Alpha AP-Portfolio
Alpha Picks Portfolio
As some of you know I started my trading journey around 2 1/2 years ago. I should say that I have been trading for more than 20 years, but those 2 1/2 years ago I did an about face and reset my trading strategy. I was determined to be more data driven and astute to my strategies. I spent about 5 months researching tools, podcasts, YouTube Videos, etc. As you can imagine, there are a lot of people and trading tools out there that you can really get lost. I will say that during my journey Alpha Picks typically came up my searches. I did try trading view for some time, but I felt it really didn’t seem intuitive as I have now with Trendspider. But I get ahead of myself.
In that 5-month discovery I found Gary from DailystockPicks and started to follow him. What made him stand out for me was that he was not giving advice on what stocks to buy, but rather he was going through his journey on trading stocks. He went through strategies and tools he used prior and now. The fact that he is very upfront in ensuring that you have your own strategy and not follow his. His ability to be genuine is what really made me become a paid subscriber. To this day I will say it has been one of my best decisions, not because I have made millions, but rather he has inspired me to be disciplined in my stock trading. This included using the tools he does, which included Seeking Alpha and Trendspider. I spent the first 3 months after subscribing to the tools and listing to his podcast, learning the Trendspider.
All I did in those 3 months was paper trade using Trendspider and Gary’s 4 hour and 65 min algorithms. Also, during this time, I only had subscribed to Alpha Picks, but after about 2 months I realized that I was missing half the equation on doing my research, hence is why I bought Alpha Picks. There is more to this story, but I will get to the heart of this article.
For those who are subscribers to DailyStockPicks, you will remember the day he decided to take the plunge and bought the Alpha Picks portfolio. You hear Gary talk about the portfolio all the time, and how it basically has been beating the S&P since its inception. Gary had created a spreadsheet that he used to decide on the allocations of all the stocks from the portfolio and he did share with people who wanted it. I looked at it and created my own based on his idea but added some of my own things. Now I did not buy the portfolio at the time when I created it, I really sat on it for a while as I had a plan that I needed to enact to get to it. Well, that time came a week or so ago.
This is what it looks like:
Here you can see the spreadsheet I created. I decided that I didn’t want to use the Alpha Picks allocation % because it is weird time in the stock market. I opted instead to do a 60/40 split. Where 60% of the investment money went to Strong Buy and the final 40% went to the buy and hold category. In case you want to know how I did the %, I divided 60% by the number of stocks in the Strong Buy category. For the Strong Buy it was 60/16(symbols).
I split up the categories by the different valuations of Strong Buy, Buy and Hold. I did this really for tracking performance purposes, as well as seeing the difference if I would have bought using the SA allocation. Now the challenge I have, unlike Gary, is that my broker of Vanguard does not allow for fractional shares. When I initiated my buys, I had to round up or down to the nearest whole share. I have a separate sheet with the final actual numbers.
Now with this sheet I can change how much the investment is and the numbers will change accordingly. After I bought the portfolio and had the true cost bases, I created two SA portfolio’s, one with my real numbers and one with SA shares, this way I can see my performance at the end of the year. (i.e. if I used the Alpha Pick % instead of mine)
In conclusion:
I will leave this topic like this, I did put in a lot of work on this which I figure many people would not do, but as a theoretical mathematician and an engineer added with OCD, I guess I am very particular about numbers. It did help me organize my strategy and I can see the performance on a daily timeframe. I hope you all like this and if you are interested in the spreadsheet, reach out to me and I will send it to you.