Good evening! New trades:
- 2024-07-09 +33.2964 QLD @ $107.9395
- 2024-08-14 +32 QLD @ $90.88
This is a new ticker for the portfolio, but I wrote about it a while ago in my deep dive on index funds and their leveraged variants. QLD is a leveraged Nasdaq-100 ETF in the same family as TQQQ — except it's 2x leverage rather than 3x. So it tracks similarly, but TQQQ is more volatile: it rises and falls harder, and digs out of deep drawdowns more slowly.
I did my own comparison and was surprised: while 3x leverage looks more profitable in theory on a long horizon, in practice the historical record from 1985 to today shows similar returns for both — largely because TQQQ's drawdowns in 2000 and 2008–2009 were brutal. Both ETFs as actual products are relatively young, but I built fairly accurate synthetic clones in Excel using historical Nasdaq-100 data. There's a lot to say on this — I'll do a separate post.
The conclusion I came to: buy TQQQ during the deepest drawdowns (more volatile → higher upside on the recovery), and buy QLD when the broader market doesn't look cheap.
Side note: in July I made the last "normal" deposit into Interactive Brokers via a transfer from BBR Bank. Without residency in a friendly jurisdiction, broker top-ups are no longer easy, so I'm back to using FF for now.
Markets are near all-time highs, Elon is launching another giant rocket, OpenAI shipped a new model — the usual mix of AI-fuelled records. I keep adding within the strategy.