Why We Went To Cash – How We Timed the Market

How We Got Up 13.06% in Just Over a Month

As I speak, the Marcus Today Strategy Portfolio is up 13.06% since April 14 – that’s in just over a month.

This is a real portfolio, with real money, taking everything into account – fees, spreads, dealing costs, all of it. And at this point, we’re sitting on a 13.06% gain. We’ve done that by timing the market.

We cashed out during the tariff turbulence – out between February 28 and March 3 – and got back in on April 14. So we were in cash for about six weeks, stepped aside during the chaos, then re-entered. And now we’re at a record high, while the market is still well below its peak.

So yes, timing the market does work.

Why don’t mainstream fund managers do this? It’s not that they’re doing anything wrong – it’s that they can’t. They’ve got mandates that stop them doing the short-term things you and I can do. Most of them have strict limits on how much cash they can hold – some only 10% or 20%. Their job is to stay invested, even when markets are falling.

That’s the advantage of being a self-directed investor. You can go to 100% cash if you want to. And we can do that in the Strategy Portfolio too – we wrote the mandate that way, deliberately.

We’re not trying to be clever for the sake of it. But in moments that matter, we act. That’s how we preserved capital during the sell-off and captured the rebound. That’s how we got to 13.06% in just over a month.