Rather than shutting down HEDGEfolios at the start of 2010 (tomorrow) as I had planned, I have decided to keep it open for a bit with a few major changes that will reduce the quality of the site.

I am no longer committed to publishing the signal changes for each week by any particular time or day.   They might come out on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, etc etc….so they will be of varying quality with regards to timeliness.  When I was trying to make money by selling subscriptions and trying to analyze my performance, I endeavored to get the data out to you as soon as I could.   That meant I devoted usually 20-30 hours of every weekend for the past 7 years doing my fundamental and technical analysis techniques that include such things as looking at about 30,000 to 50,000 technical indicators depending on how difficult the previous trading week was.  After the first trading day of the week, I have to go through many additional hours just to get the site updated.   Now that 2009 is complete and I have finished the year for performance measurement purposes, I feel like it’s time to ease up on myself.  I had planned to stop altogether but am willing to give this a try for a while.   It’s a hobby for me now to support my own investing career…not an attempt to treat this as a business with customers.  If you want to follow along and get some insight into what I am doing, then that’s fine.

Some other changes:

Starting with signals on or after January 4, 2010, I will NOT be posting monthly or year-to-date performance calculations.   If someone truly cares, they can take the time to do it themselves.  I will always believe in ultra transparency and all the signal data (the good and bad) will remain on this site for anyone to review.

I will not be publishing the updated HEDGEfolios Timing Indicator each week.  I’ll still be using it for myself, but I won’t be making it available here.   Consequently, the HEDGEfolios Timing Indicator chart shown on this site is not relevant after December 31, 2009.

I plan to keep coverage of about 3,000 stocks as seeing that many each week is a significant reason why I have outperformed over the years.  However, I will stop coverage on many stocks that are less than $500 million in market cap and I will add a few that have come public in the past few years that I just never added (such as Visa).   On all but a few ETFs such as (DIA, SPY, QQQQ) I will be stopping coverage once I decide to give them a signal change.   My opinions of the ETF universe has declined so much that I cannot stand covering them here.   In my opinion, except for a few quality ETFs, they are highly illiquid and not the lower risk well-diversified offerings that their sponsors have promised.  Right now, most of the current ETF signals are wrong so I don’t feel good about removing them until I complete their current signal.

I am not sure how much I will be writing.  If I have something meaningful to mention, I’ll probably put it out there.

As I move forward with this more relaxed version of HEDGEfolios (aka HobbyFolios), I am sure there will be some other changes and I’ll let you know when they happen.

Thanks for following me over the past 5 years since HEDGEfolios showed up on the Internet.

Good luck with your investing.