Like a lot of Snowbirds, we are back in Florida after a long Summer up North. We went to a fun “Dueling Pianos” show at our clubhouse over the weekend and met up with a lot of our Sunshine State friends.

It’s been a while since I looked at the active returns of our neighborhood investment club predictions, so I thought I would take a look. We started on Groundhog’s Day in February and the contest goes until New Year’s Eve. One of the guys set up a great spreadsheet that automatically updates our chosen investments with their latest trading price.

With about 2.5 months to go, the results are not good. As a group of savvy investors, our bets are DOWN -0.35% for since we picked our investments. That’s way behind the market overall.

Eight of us are doing better than the S&P 500 average (+9.78%), but nine are below the mark …

I was the one who bet on double-shorting the silver market with “ProShares UltraShort Silver”. I wanted to either win BIG, or go HOME. So far, I’m up a solid 20% since we started in February, but recall that I really got snake bit by bad timing. This fund shot up +64% in the 48 hours after I picked the fund, but before our bet actually started!

I could be sitting in second place right now – that would be the silver medal, appropriately!

Like gold, silver is used as an inflation hedge. My investment thesis was that inflation was going to cool this year. I didn’t have the foresight to think that Trump would unilaterally declare war on Iran and foul up the world energy markets with strife in the Strait of Hormuz.

As a result, silver has remained high. It’s still running about 2x the price it was before Trump started his second term. It didn’t move much during the Bidenflation years. I don’t see it moving much before the end of the year, but politics is a strange business.

Have you done really WELL or really POORLY with an individual investment so far this year?

Image: Pixabay