The Heretic Speculator January Month-end Newsletter
It was a wild month filled with red candles, NFTs, and a lot of posts. Here's a look back and how the investments did.
January was kind of a bitch. I’m a bit of a maniac old man. In addition to keeping all of our grocery store receipts for the purpose of finding examples of high inflation, every single month I log the value of our entire household wealth and I watch the long term trend. All of our accounts, all of our liabilities, rolled up into one spreadsheet. On the first of each month I know exactly how much my wife and I are worth if we liquidated our assets. I’ve been doing this for about three years now and it’s been immensely helpful at keeping us on track for retirement. I realize most people my age aren’t doing that, but it’s probably also true that most people aren’t doing that regardless of age.
I share this story because January was the biggest single month draw-down since I’ve been logging it. Yes, even worse than March 2020. What does that tell me? I got lazy and I got complacent. I was wise enough to close out all of my paid member Trade Ideas heading into the new year but I wasn’t wise enough to hedge my own personal retirement accounts. You live and learn. The market is a brutal teacher. Don’t worry about us. We’ll survive to see another day.
In this month end review for January, I’m going to highlight each stock, ETF, and Cryptocurrency that I mentioned on the site during the month. And I’ll provide a new market insight exclusively for paid members. Let’s begin.
My Top 3 Crypto Holdings – January Performance
Bitcoin -16.6%
Ethereum -26.9%
Zcash -35.6%
Seeking Alpha Pieces
In the month of January, I published three pieces on Seeking Alpha and while the focus was mostly on the cryptocurrency space, my latest article was about Spotify and the big push for content censorship that the company is currently dealing with. You can click the hyperlink to get to the full articles. Be aware: Seeking Alpha has a metered paywall. You may not be able to read all of them.
Zcash: A Tax-Advantaged Option For Privacy-Focused Crypto Enthusiasts
My main takeaway for potential investors: “Tax-advantaged exposure to a leading privacy coin with minimal other options.”
Bitcoin: it Will Because it Must
My main takeaway for potential investors: “Miner profitability is due for a turnaround. The logarithmic trend is still very bullish long term.
Spotify: Getting Interesting Despite Content Controversy
My main takeaway for potential investors: “With an oversold RSI, a content controversy making headlines, and freshly published platform rules, pressure on shares has been a buy opportunity.”
“Be Greedy When Others are Fearful”
“Buy when there is blood in the streets.” How many more Wall Street idioms can I squeeze into this newsletter? Let’s not spoil it… In all seriousness, on January 25th I gave 3 examples of long term investments that I bought more shares of during the massive draw-down at the end of the month in the broad market. Here are those stocks and how they’ve performed since that article:
Costco (COST) +5.7%
Sturm, Ruger, and Company (RGR) -0.6%
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (CSSE) -5.4%
A bit mixed, to be sure. But the market is trying to find a bottom. This is an art not a science. In addition to these three stocks, I also gave 2 swing trade ideas and 5 ETF investments for the paid members.
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