1st Year Annual Report: Portfolio Update and 2 New Portfolios
New Long Term Investor Portfolio and a Challenge Portfolio
Before I begin the annual report, a quick note: I originally intended to include the market outlook for the rest of the year, covering the Q3 correction and the scheduled Q4 melt-up in this report. However, due to time constraints, I will have to release it as a second article. I will get it out by Sunday evening. It will be a good one, so stay tuned.
And now we begin the annual report…
First and foremost, a huge thank you to everyone who has supported me on Substack and continues to do so.
One year ago, after months of encouragement from some of my followers on X throughout late 2024 and early 2025, I finally gave in and launched Trademetry. Two weeks later, I launched two live portfolios, each with a starting bankroll of $100,000.
Although both portfolios reached their one-year anniversary on July 10th, I decided to complete the first annual cycle at July OPEX instead. Going forward, every July OPEX will mark the end of one annual cycle and the beginning of the next.
First-Year Results
After twelve months, the results are as follows as Of July 17th Market close:
Regular Tier Stocks & Options Portfolio: +50.01%
Founding Tier Options-Only Portfolio: +303.58%
Every transaction remains fully trackable and auditable. Entries and exits have been posted live in the subscriber portfolio chat threads, and the transaction log has been maintained in the chat since inception, making it easy for subscribers to audit the performance independently.
When I launched these portfolios, I set a goal that many people considered ridiculous. The objective was to produce a return that is at least 10x more than SPY. The goal was exceeded with the options-only portfolio; however, when the two portfolios were combined, we fell little short. However two portfolio combined out performed everyone on substack and every ETF, including the SMH. Our goals for these portfolio will continue into 2nd year.
The philosophy behind these portfolios will also remained unchanged: Make money when the market goes down, and make even more money when the market goes up.
Many critics misunderstood what these portfolios were designed to accomplish. They compared them to traditional investment portfolios without recognizing that these are active swing trading portfolios built around options and trading stocks on shorter time frames. They are designed primarily for retail traders with smaller accounts, not institutions managing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
That said, one of the biggest requests from the first year is that many subscribers wanted a stocks heavy portfolio they could follow with larger amounts of capital. Others wanted a simpler, longer-term approach without the complexity of active options trading. I also had plenty of subscribers asking which trades I would choose if I could only pick one or two positions at a time to make quick money.
Those conversations played a big role in shaping what comes next.
Entering Year Two
As we begin our second annual cycle, Trademetry is expanding beyond the two original swing trading portfolios.
During the first year, the Founding Tier Options-Only Portfolio generated enough profits that it now holds a little over $400,000 in cash. One point that often confuses new subscribers is that this portfolio does not compound position sizing. Every position continues to be sized using the original $100,000 bankroll, regardless of how much cash accumulates via gains. That approach keeps risk consistent and makes performance easier to compare over time.
Rather than letting those gains sit idle, we’re putting them to work by launching two new portfolios that serve different purposes.
Both new portfolios launching this week will be funded entirely from profits generated during the first annual cycle in the founding tier options only portfolio. No additional capital is being added, and no changes are being made to the way the existing portfolios are managed. Instead, we’re expanding the product lineup to better serve different types of investors while continuing to build on the foundation established during our first year. Both new products will be available behind the founding tier subscription since its fully funded from the founding tier options only portfolio gains.
The first new portfolio is designed for long-term investors and institutions that prefer a concentrated, actively managed buy-and-hold strategy. The second is a challenge portfolio built for subscribers who prefer a simpler, high-conviction approach using only a handful of positions at a time.
Let’s take a closer look at both.
Two New Portfolios for Year Two
Founding Tier Long-Term Investor Portfolio
The first new portfolio is designed for long-term investors. Unlike our existing swing trading portfolios, this strategy is intended for investors with larger amounts of capital, including institutions, who prefer building wealth through disciplined portfolio management rather than frequent trading.
Launching with $250,000 entirely funded by profits from our Founding Tier Options-Only Portfolio's first annual cycle, this portfolio utilizes specific allocation percentages to easily scale and manage billions in capital. It will follow a buy-and-hold philosophy, but don’t mistake that for buying everything in the name of diversification. I have never believed that owning hundreds of stocks simply to mirror an index is the best way to outperform the market. Instead, our portfolio will typically hold 20 to 25 carefully selected companies, and at times even fewer, with every position earning its place based on conviction rather than diversification quotas.
The investment strategy will maintain a balanced approach across three distinct asset profiles. The portfolio will actively accumulate Cyclical Bottoms by identifying resilient businesses before they launch into multi-year bull runs, while simultaneously capturing Short-Term Opportunities through tactical positions held for six months to two years. Complementing these plays, the strategy will secure Perennial Cash Cows by investing in dominant, highly profitable compounders that deliver reliable, long-term secular growth. There will be no options trading within this portfolio, although I will occasionally use conservative strategies such as cash-secured puts to establish positions at better prices or covered calls to generate additional income or exit positions. There will be no margin/leverage trading or naked option selling.
Although this portfolio will be far less active than our swing trading portfolios, it won’t simply sit on positions through every market cycle. Market corrections and periods of elevated risk will be managed through hedging and tactical adjustments when appropriate. The objective is to build a portfolio that can compound wealth over many years while still actively managing downside risk when conditions warrant it.
Performance Goal & Guarantee
The primary objective of this long term investor portfolio is to outperform SPY, QQQ, and the best-performing non-leveraged sector ETF each year. Since this is Substack, I’ll also add an additional goal with a guarantee: The guarantee that this portfolio’s return will outperform the largest finance substack, Citrini’s “Citrindex” return by at least 10 percentage points over the next annual cycle. If it doesn’t, every subscriber will receive another year of access to this portfolio free of charge. As always, every transaction will be posted live in the dedicated portfolio thread, with a complete transaction log maintained from inception so performance remains fully transparent and independently auditable. Hopefully Citrini also makes his portfolio easy for subscribers to track so the comparison can be made fairly by his subscribers.
The $25K to $100K Challenge Portfolio
The second new product is something completely different. Over the past year I’ve received countless messages from subscribers who don’t want to replicate every position in the existing portfolios. Instead, they cherry-pick trades and regularly ask which one or two positions I would choose if I could only make a handful of investments. I’ve always avoided answering those questions because the portfolios are designed to work as complete strategies. Cherry-picking individual positions changes the risk profile and often leads to very different results.
This new portfolio solves that problem. It will start with $25,000, also funded from cash gains from founding tier options only portfolio and have one objective: grow the account to $100,000. Rather than spreading capital across many positions, it will swing trade one to three high-conviction stock positions, with as much as 90% of the portfolio allocated in those names. Around 10% may occasionally be allocated to options when they offer an attractive risk-reward opportunity. Because options remain part of the strategy, this portfolio is still best suited for smaller accounts, although investors with larger portfolios can simply follow the stock positions and ignore the options.
Every position in the Challenge Portfolio will come directly from one of the other three Trademetry portfolios. Nothing speculative will be added simply to make the challenge more exciting. The difference is not in the quality of the ideas but in the concentration of capital. This gives subscribers who prefer a simpler approach a dedicated portfolio they can follow without having to decide which trades to cherry-pick themselves.
Once the account reaches $100,000, the challenge will be considered complete and immediately restart with a fresh $25,000 account as Challenge #2. The same process will continue for Challenge #3 and beyond. I won’t promise how long each challenge will take, but my goal is to complete three successful challenges during every annual cycle. Some people will no doubt say those goals are unrealistic, just as they did when I launched Trademetry with SPY outperformance goal. That’s perfectly fine. I’ve always preferred setting ambitious goals because even if I fall short, the results can still be exceptional. Public criticism has never bothered me. If anything, it motivates me to work even harder to prove the skeptics wrong.
What the First Year Taught Me
The past twelve months have been a learning experience, not because the market surprised me, but because trading publicly is very different from trading for yourself. Before launching Trademetry, I only had to think about my own execution. Once others began following my trades, I had to consider how my entries, exits, and overall strategy would affect many people trying to execute the same ideas. That forced me to adapt much more quickly than I expected.
The issues was mainly in the options trading. As the subscriber base grew, some trades became increasingly crowded. A small number of subscribers would sweep option contracts far larger than intended, triggering alerts on options flow services and creating a snowball effect. Those trades often got very overcrowded, making execution less efficient and reducing the probability of success. It’s one of the realities of running a public portfolio that simply didn’t exist when I was trading on my own.
The good news is that I now have a full year’s worth of data to work with. That allows me to identify which types of trades perform best in a public portfolio and which are better avoided. During our second annual cycle, there will be fewer transactions, more selective entries, and a more refined approach to managing both entries and exits. The goal isn’t to trade less for the sake of trading less, but to focus only on opportunities that give everyone the best chance of achieving similar execution.
Rethinking Profit Taking
The biggest lesson from our first year had nothing to do with finding winning trades. It was about knowing when to take profits.
Roughly 70% of the options positions we entered were profitable at some point before expiration. Many eventually expired worthless because the majority of our options trades are inexpensive, out-of-the-money positions designed to capture explosive breakout or breakdown moves. During the first few months, when the subscriber base was much smaller, that approach worked exceptionally well. We were regularly producing options that gained more than 1,000%, sometimes every week. Capturing just one of those winners more than offset several smaller positions that expired worthless.
As Trademetry grew, however, those opportunities became less frequent. Crowded trades meant many positions would still double or triple before losing momentum, but fewer developed into the massive winners we had become accustomed to. Looking back, it became clear that continuing to manage every trade the same way no longer made sense.
Ironically, many subscribers outperformed me by doing something very simple. Rather than waiting for me to close a position, they scaled out gradually. Some routinely took profits once a position doubled. Others sold portions at 100%, 200%, and 300%, leaving a smaller position open to follow my exit. The one-year data suggests that this staged approach often produced better overall results than attempting to mirror my exits exactly.
That doesn’t necessarily mean my approach was wrong. In many cases I deliberately leave profitable positions open because they serve another purpose within the portfolio. I manage the portfolios as complete strategies rather than as collections of individual trades. A position that remains open may continue to provide protection if my market outlook changes, even if that means giving back some unrealized gains.
A good example came during the transition from the first to the second quarter. We accumulated several oil and gas positions ahead of the Iran conflict, and those trades quickly became highly profitable. We realized roughly half of the gains while keeping the remaining positions as a hedge in case the conflict escalated. At the same time, we aggressively rotated into semiconductors and technology as the market entered a powerful melt-up. In hindsight, the absolute maximum return would have come from closing every energy position and allocating everything to tech. However, given the uncertainty surrounding the geopolitical environment and the Trump administration’s unpredictable handling of the conflict, I was comfortable sacrificing some upside in exchange for maintaining portfolio protection.
Even with what I now consider a less efficient profit-taking strategy, our overall performance was strong enough to outperform every other Substack portfolio I’m aware of and beat SMH by a wide margin. More importantly, I now have twelve months of real-world data showing exactly where improvements can be made. Those refinements are already being incorporated into our second annual cycle, and I believe they’ll make the portfolios even stronger going forward.
Subscription Structure
For those wondering what each subscription includes, here’s how the portfolios will be organized going forward.
Founding Tier
The Founding Tier subscription includes access to everything:
The Long-Term Investor Portfolio
The Options-Only Swing Trading Portfolio
The Challenge Portfolios
Regular Tier
Regular Tier
The Regular Tier subscription includes access to:
The Stocks & Options Swing Trading Portfolio
Final Thoughts
Looking back, I’m proud of what we accomplished during our first year, but I wouldn’t say I’m completely satisfied. At the start of the journey, I set two additional fun goals for myself: growing the Regular Tier portfolio from $100,000 to $300,000 and the Founding Tier Options-Only Portfolio to $1 million within the first annual cycle. We fell short of both targets.
That doesn’t change how I view the year. We built two fully transparent, fully auditable portfolios from the ground up, established a track record that subscribers can verify independently, and assembled an incredible community of subscribers along the way. More importantly, we now have a full year of real-world data showing what worked well, where we left money on the table and where we wasted money unnecessarily, and how we can improve going forward.
Year Two isn’t simply a continuation of what we’ve already built, it’s an expansion. We’re growing from two portfolios to four, broadening our strategies to serve different types of investors, and applying everything we learned during the first twelve months to improve execution and portfolio management. I believe those refinements will make Trademetry significantly stronger over the coming year.
As always, every transaction will be posted in the chat the moment it happens, every transaction will remain fully trackable, and every result will be available for anyone to audit. Thank you to everyone who has supported Trademetry during its first year. Whether you’ve been here since day one or joined somewhere along the way, I truly appreciate your support.
Now let’s get to work on Year Two.
Be sure to stay tuned for the market out look article this Sunday. Many of you are looking forward to the update on my correction call and I will have clear road map of it. As of Friday's I have not entered any positions for the corrections. However, in preparation, I exited all longs this week in preparation for the correction. More details will be in Sunday’s article. Its free for all as usual without any paywall.
Only the subscriber chat is behind paywall and you can access it by upgrading.