Yet another loser month, but this one with a silver lining, or rather a golden one, as gold softened the blow for a few portfolios. The Golden Butterfly won the month & the Capital Efficient Butterfly came in second, though both has performances in negative territory.
Another bad month, overall, but I suppose we can find consolation in the little things: gold, in the form of GLDM, was up 7.4% for the month and helped a few portfolios soften the blow of negative months for both equities and bonds. It’s been a pretty good time for gold overall, with performance over the past twelve months at +20.3%. We thus get a number of very timely rebalancing events this month, selling off gold as it climbs and buying more of the assets that are still tanking, namely longer duration bonds.
Outside of gold, it was a(nother) month to forget. VTI, the US equity fund, was down 2.7%, and VGLT, the long-term Treasury fund, slid 4.9%. What a consistent downward path for bonds it has been. I wrote a bit about the long-term bond apocalypse recently, but that was still several clicks over what they are at now.
A month to forget... except for crypto! Perhaps the rumors of a Bitcoin ETF are true, or perhaps it’s just the animal spirits that drive crypto investors, but Bitcoin was up 23% in October, and our digital currency fund GDLC was up 49.9%!
As for portfolios, the Golden Butterfly, with 20% in gold, won the month, down just 1.7%. But I was actually more pleased with the performance of the Capital Efficient Butterfly (or CEB for short), with effectively 22.5% in gold through the large position in GDE, WisdomTree’s capital efficient gold plus S&P 500 fund. That finished second, down 2%.
It was a treat to finish running the numbers: the way I have the table set up, I have the more conservative funds on the left and the more aggressive ones on the right. I then see the better ones for the month in green, and the worse ones in red. I got a quick visual cue right away that the CEB had had a great month when I saw a cell of green over on the right. The CEB has really separated itself from the portfolio that, in a sense, birthed it – the Levered Butterfly. Those had the same amount back at the start of the year, but the CEB is now $78,000 above the levered version. Nice.ry
Monthly Results:
Cumulative Results:
Asset Performance:
