Darwin Portfolio Review: 17 October 2025

Chepstow Castle, Wales

For readers that may have been wondering why they haven’t seen a review from me in a couple of weeks I apologize. I purchased a new computer two weeks ago and tried to move all my files to the new computer – but  something went badly wrong and, even though the files were backed up/syncronized to a cloud account, I lost all my files and performance history in all locations. I managed to salvage one of my more recent files (the new rotation system that I have been migrating towards) so I am beginning to reconstruct the files/system for future use. However, the detailed past performance history of all the portfolios is lost – so I will be starting from scratch in that department.

In the markets this week US equities stayed mainly in a consolidation range although they did recover from last Friday’s significant pullback to close the week ~1.7% above last week’s close:

However, we are sitting near the bottom of the bullish uptrend channel and meeting resistance in the 6700 area with mixed signals from the MACD and RSI momentum indicators.

Compared to the performance of other major asset classes:

US equities performed about “average” with Gold continuing to lead the way (up 60% year-to-date) and crypto losing some ground.

My recovered analysis file shows the following rankings and recommendations:

with Buy recommendations for IAU (Gold) and TMF (Bonds) and Hold recommendations (with possible hedges) for SPLG (US Equities) and EEM (Emerging Market Equities). Crypto (IBIT) comes in with a Sell recommendation. As a result of this, adjustments over the past 2 weeks look like this:

where 50 shares of IBIT were bought and later sold (a whiplash trade) and EEM and SPLG were hedged through the sale of Call Options. A position in TMF (Bonds) was opened on 10 October.

Starting again from 3 October (when I lost the files) performance looks like this:

Although not really very meaningful at this point, annualized IRR over the period is ~14% with 10.5% volatility (due to the 10 October mini “shock”).

I am working on the risk parity volatility targeted allocation sheet for this system and hope to be able to use/show that in next week’s review. I have also dropped the “Rutherford” reference from the Portfolio name to keep things simpler – but it’s still the same quiver of assets as before.