We placed a few trades in both our model portfolios late on Friday, September 11th. The relatively minor changes were primarily to shift us out of some areas that had been hot and to add some lagging stock categories.

With interest rates near zero and property owners facing potentially massive problems with occupancy and rent collection, stocks are becoming the only game in town. But it is an increasingly expensive game to play.

If your only news was stock prices, you'd never suspect that America was slowly and not very carefully emerging from one crisis only to quickly slide into another. Another headscratcher is how our stock market is currently down less for the year than other countries that have fared better during the health pandemic and economic shutdown.

We executed trades in both portfolios on April 3 (just over one month after our previous trades on February 28th) to cut way back on corporate bonds and deal with the cash from a liquidated inverse 3x oil ETF that the fund company shut down on March 27. This ETF returned around 90% since our buy at the end of February and at least offset huge losses in our inverse gold miners ETF (which declined significantly even though gold mining stocks were down in March). So wild were the oil swings in March that at one point when the Dow was in freefall on March 19, we were up about 379% from our buy, which did briefly offer a performance offset to our declining stock funds.