Portfolio Update: February 2026
Good picks, wrong sizes
2026 has been an eventful year so far. Regime change in Venezuela, and now the strikes in Iran. At Friday’s close, the S&P was up 0.49%, lagging basically every international index apart from China and India.
The best performing sectors continue to be Energy (+25%) and Materials (+17.7%). As I’m writing this on Sunday morning, the full extent of the Iran strikes is still unclear. The initial reaction looked like markets down, oil up, but that’s already starting to reverse. The big caveat for oil will be the strait of Hormuz and by how much OPEC could increase production to offset Iran. We’ll find out more once futures open. My view is that the longer-term effects will be negligible and markets will have forgotten about this within a few weeks.
I came across this post showing the historical effect of similar strikes on the stock market:
Source: https://x.com/TheShortBear/status/2027476773785501838?s=20
Current positioning
My portfolio is up +2.7% YTD. Honestly, it feels like I left some stuff on the table. Two of my last three pitches here on the blog have worked very well and much faster than I expected (+46%, +79%), yet they only contributed 5% and 1% to my YTD performance. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it once again highlights the difference between being a good analyst and a good portfolio manager. Position sizing cuts both ways, but with small positions only, it's tough to generate meaningful outperformance.
Here’s an overview of the biggest contributors so far this year: