The East Asia Stocks portfolio
Disclosing my personal portfolio (Q3 2024)
I've been on the fence for a while about disclosing my personal portfolio. There are pros and cons to doing this, which I won’t dive into here. But recently, I came across this poll:
It’s clear that readers are interested, and perhaps I underestimated the importance of this as a component of the investment newsletter business. Starting with this post, I will provide the following portfolio disclosure:
Performance
Positions and weights
Activity
Updates will be provided quarterly.
Conviction and risk levels can be hard to fully convey through words alone, so I hope that these quantitative disclosures help readers better understand how I’m thinking about the individual names. Also, as I cover more companies over time, readers will likely want to know which ones I still own and which I’ve sold.
Please note, the main purpose of disclosures is as a “communication tool.” It’s not about proving that I can consistently outperform the market. There will be times when I outperform and times when I underperform, but I’m committed to maintaining transparency, regardless of whether my numbers look good or not.
Performance
I launched East Asia Stock Insights on January 17th, 2024, and will use this date as the portfolio’s inception. Before this, I held a personal portfolio that’s much more globally diversified, but since the launch I’ve reallocated my portfolio significantly towards East Asia in order to better align my personal investments with my research focus.
The portfolio was up about 18% (since inception) prior to the recent China stimulus rally. Given my overweight position in China going into the rally, this pushed up the returns to roughly 30%. China has done so well in such a short period of time, leaving me contemplating the next steps (a topic for another day). For those of you in the same boat, here’s a fun piece to reflect on the current state of the market.
Some of my individual positions outside of China have also done well, including a significant stake in a Japanese industrial conglomerate, which has become my top holding.
The performance since inception is shown below.
