Re: Pooling of human capital for the \'Two Plus Two Portfolio\'
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pumped approx $10K into each stock, not including fees
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John, here's a little suggestion that could help you normalise your risk. After all, I think that risk management is one of the most important aspects of investing/trading/business.
If you invest 10K into a hot biotech stock, and 10K into a lumbering blue chip, the risk will be very different. The biotech's stock can jump around 5% in a day, whereas the blue chip might stuggle to move 1% up or down.
You can normalise this risk so that more of your money is invested in less risky markets.
Calculate the average true range (ATR) for you stock. Since it appears you are investing after the close, this will be easy.
The daily True Range is the greatest of the following absolute values:
Today's high - today's low
today's high - yesterday's low
today's low - yesterday's close
Do this for the previous 3 weeks (15 trading days) and add up all the true ranges. Divide this number by 15 and you have the average true range over the last 3 weeks. If the stock has recently been volatile, you can reduce this period to 2 weeks.
This ATR takes into account overnight gaps and represents the volatility of a particular market.
If the biotech and the blue chip have a stock price of $25, but the biotech's ATR is $1, whereas the blue chip has an ATR of $0.33, then I would suggest you invest only a third as much of your money in the biotech as you would in the blue chip. (there's much more to the use of ATR than this - but you get the principal).
I'd like to suggest some more risk management strategies using position sizing and stops, and how to implement the obove suggestion more practically. They would prevent you from losing too much an an individual stock.
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