Random thoughts

Delphi method is popular tool in managment. I think it can be used in macro trading style nice. We can find all info on separate company but its hard to see full picture alone on macro trading. So in hedge fund we can have 4-5 analysts on macro. In general analyst - the man who just collect info and making calculations. In classical terms, analyst is the man who dont give buy/sell recommendations. Practice when analyst give recommendations began with increasing broker's competition. Appeared star analyst, appeared sell side and buy side analysts. It became like a PR for brokers - "Look to as! Our analyst gave so good recommendation! He is superstar!" So we have 4-5 macro analyst and portfolio manager. Every period of time they make conference, where analyst saying buy/sell/neutral thesis. Portfolio manager collect this thesis and then ALONE make investment decision.
ETF on commodities. Next time i think we will not use commodities's company but will use commodities ETFs. For example now we have gold stake. 3 gold mining companies which are represent 10% from our portfolio. ETF - GLD better represent our investment idea. Also we find interesting new tool - ETFs on hedge fund's index. For example - QAI, which represemt multi strategy index.
What can be a catalyst for market downmove?
As we saw dollar weakness last quarter we could see better earnings for export companies - but its already in earnings consensuns forecast i think. But anyway, some suprises we can see. Oracle already reported good earnings. Good signal for us, as we have big stake in technology - 22% from portfolio. And also our companies in technology are selling products abroad. So with support from other strong fundamentals, we would see nice earnings.
We have H&S on S&P which everybody see know. So it could be activated but can be work with some deformations. Maybe down breakout will not be so deep as on classics tech analysis. Consumer numbers in USA after 3 strong month announced bad. Manipulation last 3 times? What will be if other economic data will be bad again? I think economic data have to be trendive. Its strange when we have this random numbers. I am not sure about this, will speak about this when i will become better in macroeconomic.
Its not effective in investing to use classics, all which using other players. Nut this is a start point for creative. No many other ways. I am agree with Charl Poper - new in science - is finding mistakes/upgrading old theories. All progress usually were made by this way.

Portfolio standard deviation

Mistake here. Look to this
Today we calculated our portfolio standart deviation using historical data. Our result - 30%. Wide market deviation - 64%. So we can say that our portfolio is less risky than S&P Index fund investments. By the way yesterday we saw good earnings from Oracle. Thats a good sign for our technology stakes. Our technology stakes export a lot of products abroad, so weak dollar for last quarter have to support their earnings.

Economic reforms - new stakes in portfolio

Now we have so many stakes that i even cant post full screen shot of portfolio :-). In future we will concentrate only on best ideas and we will have less stakes. Just need to keep normal level of diversification. But on other we need to remember that diversification mean from ignorance as Warren Buffet saying :-) .
Before we had an idea to long canadian banks due to its strong fundamentals and financial health. Today we realesed this idea by hedging with short big american banks. We looked to our database and found that STI, JPM, KEY have to be the weakest in near future. Also with shorting this banks we hedged it with our old idea to long CSCO from technology. Large growth of broadbend in Asia will support solid CSCO fundamentals.
Also we now have a hedged stakes in healthcare. Due to Obama healthcare reform plan we shorted health insurance companies and longed pharmaceuticals companies which making generic drugs. So we shorted WCG, UNH and longed JNJ, PFE.
Thanks Victor from Belarus, he will program for us portfolio tool which we need so. It will calculate all numbers we need.