Ed Mamula.com

All the window dressing and tape painting in the world couldn’t change the rankings for September.

• Automatic 7 (aggressive, leveraged): 146% IEF / 37% GLD; total leverage factor= 1.83 (I will get this exposure via futures rather than margining the ETFs)
• Mom and Pop (conservative) : 80% IEF / 20% GLD

The big changes to the model portfolios since last month are that gold is now officially a part of the invest-able universe for A7 and that both portfolios use IEF instead of BND and BSV…this means that even Mom and Pop plays “aggressive defense” instead of allocating to cash like instruments or bond funds of shorter duration.

Full results for August and editorials coming soon…spoiler alert…I got back into gold futures last night at 1799 just in time for them to rip higher today…and yes, I still feel like both treasuries and gold will eventually be the death of me…after all, how much higher can either of them go?

Okay, I’m out of gold (at 1803…as it has continued to cascade lower)…nearly got my face ripped off in today’s down draft.  When the dust settles, I will find that my gold trades this month have added about 0.6% to this month’s bottom line, but I also have a discretionary bond trade that will net negative 0.4%.

Sometimes this happens.  I move to a new trading platform and I get all excited by the new bells and whistles.  One thing’s for sure…at the end of this month, I’ll need to show results for the model portfolios and to show my actual results.  With a week to go in the month of August, as usual, anything can happen.