Bookkeeping: 'Rising Tide' Performance Week 11

Week 11 performance of the mutual fund

Comments: Well needless to say this was a tough week in the market. The indexes I follow fell 1.5% through Tuesday, started off terribly Wednesday before staging a late day rally to close flat (on hopes of more rate cuts). Thursday was incredibly boring (the calm before the storm) and today we got the tsunami with the indexes I track down about 2.5% today alone (Russell 2000, which are smaller stocks was down a whopping 3.2% today alone).

With that said, I am very pleased with how the fund fared. While today was a tough day, for the week Rising Tide Growth Fund was down -1.83%. This compares to a weekly drop of 3.9% in both the S&P 500 and Russell 1000. While I hate losing money any week, this is still a massive outperformance of over 2% for the week. So the fund continues to pull away from the averages, with a combined >5% outperformance in the past 2 weeks. Again to put that in perspective in weeks 1 through 9, the fund was beating the indexes by a healthy 4%. In the last two weeks, its tacked on an additional 5%+. Considering the carnage left strewn out there, I cannot complain. Only 2 more weeks until the first quarter of fund history is complete, and thus far being a fund manager is pretty cool.

What helped this week was a move to caution late last week, going to a heavier than normal cash position along with higher short ETF positions - I also locked in a lot of gains in my top performing long positions. Most of my remaining long positions still performed very well Mon - Thursday. Friday almost everything was thrown out. Top holding LDK Solar (LDK) put in another awful week, and continues to be a drag on the fund.

Price of Rising Tide Growth: $11.227
Lifetime Performance to date (vs Aug 3, 2007): +12.27%

Comparable SP500: 1,500.5 (+2.41%)
Comparable Russell 1000: 817.8 (+2.71%)

Fund return vs SP500: +9.86%
Fund return vs Russell 1000: +9.56%

Last week's results here.

Since the market cap of the median stock in the Rising Tide Growth fund (median $9.9 Billion as of October 07) is significantly below the SP500 index (median $13.1 Billion as of September 07) but higher than the median market cap in the Russell 1000 (median market cap $5.8 Billion as of September 07), I am measuring the fund against both indexes. Click here to see fund's holding by market cap as of October 2007.

Basis for indexes is 5 day weighted average of closing prices Aug 3-9
SP500 : 1,465.2
Russell 1000 : 796.2

To see why I use the 5 day weighted average of the first 5 trading days to smooth out the volatility of the indexes as the fund launched, see here.

Please click here: fund performance for previous updates