Tactical Short 4th Quarter 2024 Recap

McAlvany Weekly Commentary

Historic ‘24 Excess Portends Precarious 2025 MWM Q4 2024 Tactical Short Conference Call January 30, 2025 David: Good afternoon. This is David McAlvany. We'll go ahead and get started. This is our January 30th, 2025 Tactical Short conference call titled Historic 2024 Excess Portends Precarious 2025. Good afternoon. Thank you for participating in our fourth-quarter recap. As always, thank you to our valued account holders. We so greatly value our client relationships. With first-time listeners on today's call, we'll begin with some general information. And for those of you unfamiliar with Tactical Short, more detailed information is available at mcalvany.com/wealth/tactical-short/. If you'd like to explore next steps for opening a Tactical Short account or investigate how the service might complement your existing equity exposures, it's a good time to do so. The order of our call today will be my comments on performance followed by Doug's market commentary and then Q&A at the tail end. I have a number of questions already submitted. You may submit further questions to Ted via his email [e-mail]. And also, for inquiries on Tactical Short and its inclusion in your current strategies, you can also submit those inquiries to [e-mail]. The objective of Tactical Short is to provide a professionally managed product that reduces the overall risk in a client's total investment portfolio, while at the same time providing downside protection in a global market backdrop with extraordinary uncertainty and extreme risk. The strategy is designed for separately managed accounts. It's investor friendly with full transparency, flexibility, reasonable fees, and no lockups. We have the flexibility to short stocks and ETFs and our plan has been to on occasion buy liquid listed put options. Shorting entails a unique set of risks we're set apart both by our analytical framework as well as our uncompromising focus on identifying and managing risk. Our Tactical Short strategy began the quarter with short exposure targeted at 80%. The target was held steady throughout the quarter, focused on the challenging backdrop for managing short exposure. The short in the S&P 500 ETF, SPY remains the default position for this high-risk environment. I'll give you an update on performance. Tactical Short accounts after fees returned negative 1.73 during Q4. The S&P 500 returned a positive 2.39. So for the quarter, Tactical Short accounts returned negative 72% of the S&P 500's positive return. As for one-year performance, Tactical Short after fees returned negative 15.32% versus the 25% return of the S&P, with Tactical Short losing 61.3% of the S&P 500's positive return. We regularly track Tactical Short performance versus three actively managed short-fund competitors. First, the Grizzly Short Fund, which returned a negative 1.64 during Q4, and over the past year Grizzly returned a negative 6.74. Ranger Equity Bear returned a negative 5.71 for the quarter, with a negative 7.97 for a one-year return. And Federated Prudent Bear returned a negative 0.68% during Q4 and a negative 12.32 for the one year. Tactical Short outperformed the actively managed bear funds for the quarter on average by 95 basis points. Tactical Short underperformed over the past year by an average 631 basis points. It has significantly outperformed, Tactical Short has, each of the bear funds since inception. From April 7th, 2017 inception through the end of the year, Tactical Short outperformed each of the three competitors by an average of 1,743 basis points or 17.43 percentage points. There are also the passive short index products. ProShares' short S&P 500 ETFs, which returned a negative 70 basis points for the quarter and a negative 13.51% for the past year. And the Rydex Inverse S&P 500 fund, which returned negative 0.53 in Q4, negative 13.08 for the one-year numbers. And then the PIMCO StocksPLUS Short Fund with a Q4 return of negative 15 b...