Bookkeeping: 'Rising Tide' Performance Week 12

Week 12 performance of the mutual fund

Comments: With 1 week to go until (my) quarter 1 closes, it was an interesting week of earnings. After the indexes I follow fell roughly 4% last week, they made back more than half of that loss this week, helped on Friday by Microsoft (MSFT). To be blunt we stood at the abyss Tuesday, as the market was testing Friday's lows mid day - technically a break of that level would of lead to a much larger selloff. Then out of the wild blue yonder a massive futures buy order appeared, and the market reversed - pulling itself from the abyss. One really wonders, and I am not the only one on what the heck is going on out there. (required reading if you dare to be short for more than a few days) Anyhow, a very choppy rest of the week and then a Microsoft led rally on Friday - with the 9.5% move in Bill Gates puppy helping all the indexes as its found in every index!

For the third week in a row Rising Tide Growth Fund had a heck of a performance versus its peer group. The fund was +4.37% versus S&P500 +2.32% and Russell 1000 +2.24%. Despite some blowouts in fund positions, especially weighted by the large position in Blue Coat Systems (through no fault of its own), and some smaller positions being swatted down 20%, the strength in coal, agriculture, infrastructure, and India helped performance this week. I was extremely bullishly positioned as of last Friday with my short ETFs reigned in and very little cash, so that worked out, although at the nadir Wednesday that bullish exposure was about to turn out poorly - but those white horses in the distance came galloping to the rescue (yet again). As of Friday (today), I began doing some selected selling and starting to raise cash incrementally, along with some small buying in short ETFs to begin rebuilding 'insurance' against my long only fund. I expect this to continue as we move to Halloween's Fed meeting.

This is the 3rd week in a row the fund outperformed its measures by >2%; my informal goal is beating indexes by (on average) 0.3% each week which would lead to a 15% outperformance over the course of a year. (surely worthy of you investing in my fund!) :) So it's been a great stretch here, and I am especially happy during the recent downturn the fund lost less than the market, and then on the rebound gained more then the market; even with a few individual implosions in specific stocks (it's going to happen with such a large portfolio). It's also been fun to pull this off with very little exposure to the "sexy" sectors in this recent market post August lows - large cap tech or Chinese stocks.

Price of Rising Tide Growth: $11.718
Lifetime Performance to date (vs Aug 3, 2007): +17.18%

Comparable SP500: 1,535.3 (+4.78%)
Comparable Russell 1000: 836.1 (+5.02%)

Fund return vs SP500: +12.40%
Fund return vs Russell 1000: +12.16%

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