Mingdom Capital: 2024 Q2 Update

In my last monthly update, I ended my market outlook with the following prediction:

“my current assumption is that the bull market continues and I should keep buying the dips on high quality companies when they present themselves”

At a glance, that looks mostly correct:

As you can see from the chart above, SPY (which tracks the S&P500) steadily rose last month. Tech stocks (QQQ) and semiconductors (SMH) rose even more, with SMH up 6.1% in 1 month.

But is it all smooth sailing from here? Let’s use the Fear & Greed Index to add some color to this otherwise rosy picture.

My interpretation: even though SPY and especially tech stocks are rallying, this performance is not shared broadly. The breadth chart is showing “Extreme Fear” and we have nearly just as many 52 week highs as we have 52 week lows!

It’s also worth noting that the SPY ETF is highly concentrated, with the top 10 names representing 34%. Much of the outperformance comes from a few of the big names. In fact, if we held the equal weighted index of all 500 stocks in the S&P, it would have been down 0.65% in the last month!

All this to say - it’s a tough market out there, reinforcing the idea that it’s really hard to beat the good ol’ SPY.

Portfolio Performance

But beat the SPY I did! For my public portfolio on SavvyTrader, I’m currently beating the SPY over 1M, 3M and since inception. Charts below:

Portfolio Allocation

The portfolio continues to be top heavy with the top 10 names accounting for over 60%. Compared to last month, there are some notable changes in the top 10:

• BIDU and BABA: China stocks gave me a head fake. I thought it was making a come back, the market said otherwise. I trimmed them and took a loss in the portfolio, still holding some shares but significantly less.

• CRM: I overbought into it after it dropped sharply after earnings, and trimmed as it recovered up.

Most of the action happens in the bottom parts of the portfolio where I have less conviction and tend to trade more. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the performance in the top 10 - the worst performer this year is V at -4% and top performer is NVDA with 72%. My top position for years have been GOOGL, and I’m glad it’s making all-time-highs again after a slow start earlier this year when the all the doomers were saying they already lost the AI war.

If you would like follow my portfolio and support my mission in beating the S&P over the next few decades, subscribe or share this link: https://trader.mingdom.co/.

*See disclaimers below.

What’s next?

I’ve definitely spent a lot of time trying to become a better portfolio manager since “retiring” last year from my first career in software. However, that is not my sole interest nor sole intention in starting this blog.

Now that I’ve done a few of the “Mingdom Capital” monthly updates, I’m planning to reduce the portfolio update cadence to quarterly.

Moving forward, I’d like to write more often and on a broader range of topics to consolidate my thinking and learnings over time. Stay tuned!

1  Not financial advice. The public portfolio shared on this blog is a best effort to mirror my real portfolio but it’s not exact, details here.