My personal investing journal

How I invest my own money, shared every month

Tyler Marshall

I invest systematically instead of reacting to headlines or fear, shifting between stocks, gold, commodities, Bitcoin, and defensive funds at the end of each month. The aim is to match or exceed a traditional 80/20 stock-and-bond portfolio's returns over time while sidestepping the worst of major bear markets. I share my results and explain my thinking.

A wide range of assets

Built for different market environments

Stocks

Nasdaq-100Russell 2000JapanEmerging markets

Real assets and crypto

Broad commoditiesGoldBitcoin

Defensive

T-billsLong-term TreasuriesDefensive equity

Live since Jan 2, 2024
10 ETFs ranked monthly
4 held at a time
0.61 correlation to the S&P 500

How it works

An all-weather portfolio that plays offense and defense

Traditional portfolios count on bonds for defense, and in 2022 stocks and bonds fell together. Mine adds gold, commodities, Bitcoin, and defensive funds, then holds the four with the strongest momentum. In the spring 2025 tariff selloff, T-bills took over more than 90% of my portfolio. The 80/20 fell about 13%, and my strategy never fell more than about 6%.

Read the full method on the About page →

Offense

Follows momentum, not forecasts

Each month I rank ten ETFs by momentum and hold what's rising, not what I predict will rise.

Only the top four

Four of the ten make the portfolio. The other six wait until their momentum improves.

Defense

Balanced by risk

Less volatile funds get bigger slices, so each of the four adds about the same risk.

Built-in off-ramp

T-bills, which work like cash, compete in the same ranking. When stocks stop rising, they can take over most of the portfolio.

Track record

My live results

These are my own account's returns, not a backtest. I report every period, good and bad.

Growth of $10,000 since going live

Asymmetric Edge uses my account's time-weighted returns. Benchmarks are 80/20 (AOA) and S&P 500 (SPY), from Yahoo Finance adjusted closes with dividends reinvested. Before taxes and fees. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Returns by period

Period	Mine	80/20	S&P 500

Annualized is the yearly rate that compounds to the full return since 1/2/2024. Largest decline is the biggest fall from a high since 1/2/2024. 80/20 is 80% stocks and 20% bonds (AOA).

Correlation with the S&P 500

An 80/20 portfolio mostly moves with the stock market. Mine is much less tied to it. A correlation of 1 means moving in lockstep, and 0 means no connection at all.

80/20 portfolio

Asymmetric Edge

Monthly returns, since 1/2/2024, the full period my strategy has been live. Asymmetric Edge uses my account's returns. Updated after each market close. The current month is an estimate until I reconcile it to Fidelity's reported return.

Backtest since 1995

This is why I call my newsletter Asymmetric Edge

Asymmetric means unequal. I want the reward and the risk to be unequal: more return for the risk I take, and smaller declines than the market's.

Backtest results are simulated and hypothetical, not my actual returns.

More return for the risk I take

Return earned for each unit of downside risk (the Sortino ratio). Downside risk measures how rough the losing months were.

Since June 1995

RiskReturn Mine Simulated2.54 80/20 Actual0.67 S&P 500 Actual0.83

This history includes the 2000–02 and 2007–09 bear markets.

Smaller declines

Largest declines from a high, June 1995 to October 2026

My strategy's largest Simulated−15.3%

80/20's largest Actual−51.2%

S&P 500's largest Actual−55.2%

Lighter purple: when I rerun the backtest with small changes to my rules, such as measuring momentum over slightly shorter or longer periods, the largest decline reaches about 18%.

My goal is to keep declines within 20%.

Live figures use my account's time-weighted returns since January 2, 2024, before taxes and fees, and update after each market close. The backtest simulates my current rules from June 1995 to October 2026, net of estimated trading costs. Where a fund didn't exist yet, I reconstructed its historical performance using indexes, proxy funds, and research data that track the same investments. Bitcoin joins in 2015. Benchmarks are the S&P 500 (SPY) and the 80/20 (AOA, and VASGX before June 2009), using actual returns. Downside risk is downside deviation, how much the months that trailed T-bills varied. The backtest is hypothetical: no one was running this strategy for most of that period, and I chose its rules knowing how those years turned out. My strategy could fall more than my 20% goal. Past performance, simulated or actual, does not guarantee future results.

Tyler Marshall smiling, with red rocks behind him

Who I am

I'm Tyler Marshall

I have two master's degrees that rarely go together, one in accounting from the University of Washington and one in mental health counseling from Regis University. They sum up how I think about investing: the numbers matter, and so does the state of mind of the person acting on them.

I've never worked in the investment industry. Investing my own money became my full-time focus at the end of 2017, when I left my job directing sales and marketing.

Trying nearly every style, from day trading to buy and hold, taught me that markets don't care what I think should happen. So I question everything, including my own work. Before going live in January 2024, I tried hard to break this strategy, stress-testing it against crashes like 2008 and 2020.

Today I'm also a counselor, a Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate (LPCC) in Colorado. Counseling and investing have taught me the same thing: anxiety is the worst headspace for making decisions.

So I follow the strategy's rules every month, and I keep refining those rules as markets change.

Here I share my results, mistakes included, and write about the psychology of investing.

How I built and still test my strategy →

What you get