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I was going to do a complicated post-mortem with an annotated chart, with green/red circles for bond buys/sells and green/red squares for equity buys/sells with the two sizes of the circles and square for <$50,000 and >$50,000 transactions. But I gave up and will just post the unannotated chart.
From review of my posts in this thread since January 11th, I rebalanced out of equities on 1/11 and 1/18 which was a week or so "early" as the top was at the end of January.
My biggest mistakes were buying MTUM on 1/29 (Ouch!) at nearly its high for the year and also doing a Roth conversion from bonds to Total US Market on 1/30.
But then the market tanked on Feb 2 and 5. On Feb 5 I sold more bonds and bought big chunks of VSS and MTUM. I more than doubled my position in MTUM.
Then I hung on through a further dump on 2/8. I was not at my computer that day, but the next morning on 2/9, I sold more bonds and bought more equities. Then waited out the weekend.
Selling bond fund shares was good because they dropped after I sold them at least 1%.
Then after things had gone up on 2/13 I started selling equities that I had bought and also continued that selling on 2/14. MTUM that was my biggest loss on 2/9 fully recovered so I have nice gain overall, but only because I doubled up on 2/5 before the 2/8 bottom and sold about half the shares on 2/14.
So I ended up going to about 68% in equities and now sit at 63% in equities. I could sell another 3% of portfolio to get down to 60%.
I usually have no cash, but I have got quite a lot of cash that I need to redeploy into bond funds. My overall portfolio now only has about 10% in Total US Bond Index which is OK with me. I will try to buy short-term corporate bond index ETFs (VCSH and SPSB) in the coming days.
I will sell some equities to pay for February and March bills, too.
I compared my YTD return against my benchmarks of other 60/40 funds and the portfolio is ahead of all of them. This is only because I cheated and went up to 68% equities at more or less a good time.
Thanks for reading. This post-mortem helps me clarify my thoughts and gives me areas to improve upon, but also shows my limitations.
Bottom line: My timing is not great because I sold equities too soon and bought equities too soon, but it was good enough.