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Ten Years of Failures, One Lesson: Why Automate Your Portfolio Ten years of failed trading experiments distilled into one lesson: stop chasing magic signals and let an automated, diversified, risk‑parity portfolio do the boring work for you. 2025-07-30 Ten Years of Failures, One Lesson: Why Automate Your Portfolio Ten years in the markets. All products, all brokers, all strategies. Virtually no gains. Here’s what finally worked—and why. The Complexity Trap For years I hunted the miracle strategy and the perfect signal. I chased alpha in complexity and forgot the foundations: portfolio construction over stock‑picking. Hundreds of hours on tools and backtests that never delivered in live trading A belief that “if it’s simple, it can’t work” The Revelation Through an Unexpected Detour Multi‑strategy funds don’t seek one magic signal—they diversify alpha sources, then optimize allocation. Identify managers who consistently perform on specific segments Aggregate their public ideas and build a weighted allocation Focus on diversification and risk management Result: Better outcomes than my stock‑picking attempts. The System That Works (Technically) I now run a small automatic portfolio that allocates capital in risk parity across seven asset classes: US equities, Europe, Asia, commodities, real estate, crypto, and one additional sleeve Key principles: One well‑understood strategy applied across uncorrelated assets Temporal diversification across market cycles Remove emotion and inconsistency Prioritize process over performance Why the Industry Misses It “Obvious” strategies still work while the industry sells complexity. Barriers that keep investors out: Inaccessible minimums (€250k+) Prohibitive fees (2% + 20% performance) Opacity and lock‑ups Retail investors prefer control and understanding to performant black boxes. The Transmission Challenge Explaining the idea often loses the audience: Simplify too much → becomes generic like any robo‑advisor Explain the complexity → most people drop off Promise results → you’re lying Tell the truth (“boring but technically works”) → nobody listens What I Learned Consistency beats performance Process > intuition Cross‑asset diversification beats stock‑picking Automation eliminates our worst enemy: ourselves The best strategies are often “boring” and unmarketable What Now? I don’t know if the system will continue to work or if anyone cares. But for the first time in ten years, something runs without me thinking about it. Today: tinkering, testing, learning It’s a personal prototype that automates what I’d do manually Maybe the real innovation is building tools for normal people, not only hedge‑fund managers. Maybe the best product is the one you build for yourself first—and share when it helps others avoid your mistakes. --- This is a personal account, not financial advice.
