Q2 Portfolio Updates and Allocation Changes + 1 New Stock Position and 1 Stock Exit
Includes Premium Portfolio and Founder's Club Portfolios
Dear Members,
2025 has been a great year for our portfolios. While the market has shown high volatility and at times indecisiveness, our portfolios have continued to compound with greater sense of purpose and lesser volatility. We design our portfolios to perform in all market conditions, and it is satisfying to see when things play out as expected.
As you are aware, I manage 4 different portfolios at Astute Investor’s Calculus.
The Monthly and Annual Paid subscribers have access to my flagship Small Cap Value Portfolio. I also refer to this as the Premium portfolio.
The annual Founder’s Club members have access to my flagship Small Cap Value Portfolio, and 3 other portfolios as follows:
Dividend Fortress Portfolio - A dividend growth portfolio designed to generate compounding dividends over time. This contains stocks selected for long term holding.
Dynamic Core Hedge Portfolio - An all weather portfolio designed to address the value and momentum factors. This portfolio is hedged with assets that retain value during inflation.
Rapid Wealth Compounder Portfolio - This portfolio is based on the income factory concept with a goal of generating sufficient income over time to cover your lifestyle as well as fund investments in other portfolios.
All 4 portfolios have been doing well and have beaten the S&P 500 this year so far.
All the returns shown in the charts and the table above are Time Weighted Returns.
Portfolio Changes
We have added 1 new position to the Small Cap Value Portfolio. I am exiting one of the old positions, MKL 0.00%↑ with an average of 13.45% gain since initial purchase about a year ago.
Rest assured, the position that is taking Markel’s place is a worthy successor, and a stock I consider to be the Next Berkshire Hathaway.
The portfolio has also been updated with new optimized allocations that account for the price changes since last rebalance as well as the change in the portfolio composition.
Please consult the Premium Portfolio page for the updated positions and allocations.
There are no compositional changes to any of the Founder’s Club portfolios. At this time please spend some time reviewing the allocations and rebalance the portfolios so the target allocations are restored.
Founder’s Club portfolios can be found here.
The individual portfolio performance charts are below.
Small Cap Value Portfolio
Dividend Fortress Portfolio (Founder’s Club Exclusive)
Rapid Wealth Compounder Portfolio (Founder’s Club Exclusive)
Dynamic Core Hedge Portfolio (Founder’s Club Exclusive)
Volatility Management
We get high performance at lower volatility compared to the market, in each of our portfolios. This is not happenstance, it is by design.
We manage volatility in different ways in our portfolios. In our Premium portfolio, our positions are sized and selected to optimize performance and minimize volatility by taking correlations into account. The Dynamic Core Hedge portfolio is constructed to play off against 2 more or less counter-correlated factors: value and momentum. The other 3 portfolios are frequently rebalanced and by design contain stocks and funds that are less volatile.
As the following Risk/Reward data shows, each one of our portfolios have out-performed the S&P 500 while exhibiting lower volatility compared to the index. Click to expand the image to see full details.
Important thing to note:
I do not promise every stock we own will be low volatility. On the contrary, high volatility stocks are desirable as we can harvest the volatility for additional alpha. What I do promise is to structure the portfolio in such a way, that while the individual positions may keep your excitement up, the portfolio as a whole will sail smoother. Small cap value stocks in particular tend to be notoriously volatile, but you wouldn’t know by looking at our portfolio.
Thank you for this opportunity to invest with you!
Warm Regards,
Shailesh Kumar
PS. I have a few notes on the individual positions after this paywall.