December Return: 8.59%
2020 Return: 25.05%
Stint Return (Nov-Apr): 16.76%
What a year 2020 turned out to be! You don't need me to rattle on about it, as you lived it and know it well, so lets get on with it.
Firstly, lets take a look at December, and then we'll look at the year as a whole. December was a solid month for Ubique putting up a gain of 8.59% for the month. This was down to all three strategies delivering positive returns. Gold was most prominent, etching out just over 14% for the month. This being said, our oscillator for the second month in a row has remained on the market side of the divide and as such, for January we will be long the S&P500 instead of Gold on this strategy. Combine this with the fact that we are also long the markets in our Sell in May Strategy and long Technology stocks which weighs heavily as a component of US index's at the moment, and it is fair to say we are somewhat correlated going into January. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but as always, we remove our emotion from the equation, have our stop losses in place, and we will let the markets decide if our edge next month will deliver alpha for us.
Looking more broadly to all of 2020, we put up a decent year, netting 25.05%. This is above our Compounded Annual Growth Rate percentage of 24.37% and considering the fund experienced its largest ever drawdown (-16.61%) at its trough, this year, to end the year in the black and above our CAGR number is a fantastic result. This also beat the SPY by over 60% for 2020, whilst showing 14% less drawdown in the process! What more can you ask for...
Looking ahead into 2021, by this time next year, everything right now will look almost unrecognisable. This is due to some major developments which happened last month and are in the pipeline. Firstly, Willow Oak has now taken on a new Chief Investment Officer, Timothy F. Jones, a mathematician our of North Carolina. Tim teaches advanced statistics to college students and over the years he has worked on modelling the markets. As such, together we have been working on the varying strategies and looking at ways of increasing the RoI, whilst minimising the units of risk to achieve this. We were hoping to have this all ready for Jan 1st, however this hasn't been possible, and we are now looking more towards the end of the month before this is ready to talk about.
What can be said though, is that there will be a slight 'pivot' in approach as to what was seen in 2020, with a volatility play in the mix as well, using the VIX, hopefully. More details to follow both in the monthly mailers and on the PodCast. Speaking of which, if you wish to hear from Tim and his thoughts, he will now feature on all PodCast episodes, going forward.
As part of this pivot, we will be introducing new and replacement instruments for the fund to trade; as such, we will be able to produce a much more thorough and deeper back history, going back to 1990 rather than 2008. This is due to the fact that these new instruments being traded existed before 2008 and therefore we know what their prices were before that time. This will mean we will be able to demonstrate how Ubique handled both the '01 and '08 market crashes, as well as the recent Corona Correction we saw earlier this year.
We will also be looking at a system whereby anyone can view our trades in real-time, so they can see what we are doing as we do, as opposed to waiting till the end of the month to find out! As mentioned above, once we have everything in place, we will release all the details fully explaining everything.
As always, if you have any questions, queries or comments, feel free to get in touch.
For more in depth analysis, everything is on the website for inspection (www.willowoakadvisory.com/ubique).
Until next time, stay safe and swing easy.