2025 - A Year in Meme Review
Every year on the last Friday of December, legendary trader Jesse Livermore would have all his cash transferred to a vault at Chase Bank. He would then get the bank Manager to lock him in the vault (with food and drinks) and not let him out until Monday morning. Jesse would then analyse every trade he made for the year from his handwritten journal, surrounded by his winnings.
That sounds pretty miserable, but I do like to review what worked and what didn’t over the course of the year. At the time of writing, this is the last Friday of December so here it goes:
For 2025, the portfolio is up +60% YTD in USD terms. However, my home currency is the Euro, which had a strong rally this year, so performance is more like +50% YTD in Euro terms. Can’t complain either way. We give thanks.
What I’m most happy about is that throughout 2025:
This shrub has remained 100% organic. Once again, I didn’t use Excel once for modelling a company. I stuck with using scribbles in the “corner of the FT” or a “back of the envelope” for valuation purposes.
I didn’t suffer any major drawdowns. Even post Liberation Day, the portfolio was green like a shrub for the year.
I didn’t use leverage and kept a decent allocation in GAG™️ & Cash.
I used hedges at key spots and actually made money on shorts overall.
I did a few mistakes but they didn’t hurt me, and a few Puts and Calls went to Option Heaven as Nature intended
I took the kids to school every morning
As with 2024, some months were very quiet, some were good and some were great. “Super-Performance” is “lumpy”!!!
By now, you all know our secret for “Super-performance”: MEMES!
Yep, while Wall Street tries to sound smart, we just use Memes.
Here are the most profitable Memes of the Year…
2025 - The Year of Alpha
We’ll start where we left off in 2024:
The previous regime, characterized by Tamagotchi Yellen, was about BETA.
The new regime, characterized by Tamagotchi Bessent, is about ALPHA.
The Meme below is already hanging in the Louvre:
Incidentally, back in December 2024, the most frustrated comments I got from readers were for Platinum & Brazil because they were going nowhere at the time. They both ended up being the best performers of 2025, with Brazil up +40% and Platinum +150%.
A bit of patience sometimes goes a long way!
The BBBB-Barbell Portfolio™️
As we’ve recently written, a simple allocation of long Brazil (EWZ) and long Biotech (XBI) would have been enough to finish the year +40%.
However, under the hood, the BBBB-Barbell Portfolio™️produced some great single name winners:
QURE: 15x-bagger option trade
CLPT: 3x-bagger and now “free trade”
BABA: 10-bagger on calls (though we kept rolling our calls at higher strikes)
Commodity plays like Platinum & Valterra (+50%) and Metals-X (+160%)
EWZ outright long was a great winner (+50%), but we also made money by adding EWZ calls along the way as well as an Argentina trade in YPF (+40%)
The Meme below is so simple yet so powerful. Now filed under “Memes that Make Money"™️🥹🌳🙏:
