The market certainly has a way of instilling humility. As the I/O Fund was logging on to the Performance Webinar to present industry-leading returns (and to declare that a Retail Fund was kicking Wall Street butt!), we were simultaneously experiencing our largest AH drop following an earnings report on Snap.

We already had slides prepared to discuss what losses mean for portfolio returns. The first point we had planned to discuss is that all portfolios with sizable returns have losses. Part of our service is to show you that we hold through losses OR we cut them if the story isn’t playing out as we had predicted. We are not only a site that celebrates the wins, but we also show you how we handle our losses.

When we compare our results to institutions who also specialize in tech, we see that the I/O Fund is able to hang with Ark Innovation in the good years and then handily beat Ark Innovation in the drawdowns (at least so far). We have healthy respect for Ark and we certainly admire the bold move ARKK made in highly-shorted Tesla. Morgan Stanley’s Inception Fund has better returns than Ark this year due to their bold move going into Gamestop. This leading fund is now neck-and-neck with I/O Fund.

The I/O Fund’s bold move was placing blockchain assets, such as Bitcoin, Chainlink and Ethereum, into a stock portfolio with a leading allocation (approx. 10%/5%/5%) and then weathering the extreme volatility by adding near bottoms and trimming near tops. We began the process of taking gains in crypto from February through early May. We then began to buy again in the $42,000 – $31,000 region. Blockchain has always had a place in our long-term buy and hold portfolio and we didn’t budge on this even with large drawdowns of 40-50% whether it was 2019, 2020 or 2021.

The semis have held up our portfolio well compared to other high-growth portfolios. Datadog and Asana were also impressive choices. We still have some high fliers that we are hoping end the year strong. These were mentioned in the LTBH Top 10, such as Xpeng, Fubo and Magnite. If two out of three rally, we will be doing well. Our momentum portfolio is finding its wings again with nice gains in Affirm and also AEHR. These last two came in Q3 and are not reflected in the performance below.

We think this proves our fluency with tech and our ability to broadly form a winning portfolio. The issue with most tech ETFs is they are sector-specific whereas blending many tech trends into one portfolio is more advanced and can offer higher returns.

View our Performance Review Webinar here.

Performance Review:

We launched our fund on May 9th, 2020 and our first performance was calculated between May 9th and December 31st of 2020 with returns of 115.5%.

We have two performance letters for you:

Our 1-year returns from May 9th through May 9th were 236%. Please note in the letter below, the accountant preferred to stop the 1-year performance at Friday May 7th, which designates the weekend when the market is closed. It doesn’t make sense to count gains in crypto which is open May 8 and May 9th 2021 but not count stocks. Therefore, performance for our portfolio ended on Friday May 7th since May 9th was a Sunday.

We also did a YTD from January 1st, 2021 through July 31st, 2021 to help provide some color as to how we are performing in a more challenging year for tech stocks. We are hanging with Morgan Stanley right now for top tech fund.

Please note, although we are sharing our performance with you as a courtesy, we own the report and we do not give consent for you to share this publicly. Although we will discuss our final number from time to time, the terms in which we do this are determined by our agreement with the accountant. It’s against trademark and other laws to advertise another firm’s name, such as an accounting firm.

We also don’t share the dollar value in our portfolio, so this has been omitted from the report. However, the performance numbers we show below are a direct screenshot of the report.

For comparison purposes, we do not calculate Total Returns on our account. Rather, this is a performance audit. Total Returns on Ark Innovation may slightly differ due to dividends or management fees being factored in. In the table below, we show you an apples-to-apples on our performance relative to other Funds with no additional income factored in.

The performance reviews take two to three months to complete. Therefore, we are showing you YTD through July 31st and our year-end performance for 2021 will likely come out in March, etcetera.

1-Year Performance:

 

YTD Performance:

 

How the I/O Fund Compares:

For comparison purposes, we do not calculate Total Returns on our account. As stated, Total Returns on Ark Innovation may slightly differ due to dividends or management fees being factored in. In the table below, we show you an apples-to-apples on our performance relative to other Funds with no additional income factored in other than stock performance.

“No great thing is accomplished alone.”

We want to stop and thank our Members for believing in a small team of Retailers. When we launched our retail fund, we were admittedly quite nervous as we are all trained to believe that “smart money” knows more than Retail. However, we wanted to set out and test this by forming a small team of experts who care very much about their chosen specialty. As my intro stated, the market knows how to keep you humble, and thus, we will continually strive to improve.

What’s Next for our Website:

• We are going to split off Knox’s service to help separate fundamentals from technicals. There will be a Fundamentals chat room and a Technicals chat room on the forum. New prices will go into effect around the first of the year with anyone who subscribed 2019-2021 being locked in at the current rate. In addition to not mixing styles, the new price will also help cover costs for our real-time trade notifications.
• We plan to launch a Beginners service to help make investing accessible to more people at a low price (5 stocks for a flat fee, something like that).
• We launched YO/LO Fund. Please make sure to read through our Blockchain is Going to Eat the Internet report and we encourage you to keep an open mind as we find a few winners in this space.
• We plan to release community moderation where 10 downvotes will cause a post to disappear so hang in there with moderation issues as this will roll out before the end of the year.
• We think Q4 will be strong and are positioned accordingly. This could change as the market changes frequently. We will let you know if that’s the case.