I don’t want you to subscribe to the Jubak Asset Management (JAM) site unless you feel that you can trust me to do the very best job that I can for you.
Trust is what will preserve this relationship through the inevitable bad times in the markets. Trust is what will make it possible for you to stay on board for the long term.
And trust is what will get you to keep reading, to eventually renew your subscription, and to recommend this site to your friends.
Trust is the best policy for you and for me.
But I don’t assume that you’ll just grant me your trust because I ask for it.
I expect to have to earn it in the way that I run this site.
Here are some explicit promises to you from me.
When I publish any idea it goes here first.
As you probably know, I do a lot of writing and speaking. But my duties to JubakAM.com come first. When I write about any specific stock, I’ll write about it here first.
I eat my own cooking.
I don’t have a lot of money invested in the stock market–most of my assets are indeed wrapped up in JubakAM.com and its sister sites. (And I’m paying two tuitions at the moment. You know how that goes.) When I do have some cash to put in a stock, I’ll disclose that at the end of any post about that stock. If there are no disclosures, it’s because I don’t own any shares of the company in question.
I don’t buy or sell ahead of my investors.
I don’t buy shares in a stock before I write about it here. And I don’t sell shares personally before I sell a stock before I write about it here.
I don’t short stocks. I do short assets such as bonds.
There’s nothing wrong with shorting a stock, but being successful at shorting is an art all its own—and one that I don’t think I’ve mastered. In addition, shorting is a highly emotional issue for many investors and I get more than enough grief as it is, thank you very much, when a purchase goes bad. However, I do think that the ability to short bonds, in what is shaping up as a long bear market in bonds, is essential to managing risk and I will use ETFs to short that asset class. I also use ETFs that hedge currencies when appropriate.
I don’t use derivatives except in my Volatility Portfolio.
Most of the portfolios on JubakAM.com are, by design, very simple. I may invest in obscure companies in exotic markets but I only buy and sell stocks and stock-like assets (such as master limited partnerships, for example.) That’s it. Except in the Volatility Portfolio where I will use options to leverage what are sometimes significant but relatively small changes in volatility. Much of the time I’ll own the shares underlying the options in the Volatility Portfolio in other portfolios here.