Folio Investing RTG Changes

The performance of the Biotechnology Ready to Go (RTG) folio results prompted me to spend some time looking at the Folio Investing web site. It seems a little strange at first, but really has a lot of information when you learn to use it. I sorted the past performance for all of their RTGs. The Biotechnology tops the list over most periods. Its annual return is 46% over the last 3 years (annualized). It holds 30 stocks of large companies that range from drug therapy providers to genetic testing services.

Since this is a test account, I decided to switch some RTGs looking for higher short term returns. I selected two RTGs to replace the lower performing Analyst Upgrades and Dogs of the Dow. First, I selected the Military Procurement RTG. It holds the 30 companies with the highest contract totals from the Defense Department in the prior year. The other is the Zack’s Momentum Anomaly RTG. This looks at the top 50 gainers over the last 52 weeks, then picks the 10 with the poorest performance in the past week. This RTG's holdings are updated weekly.

I started by “exchanging” the Analyst Upgrades folio for the Military Procurement RTG. Since they did have some stocks in common, there were Buy, Sell, and Sell All trades generated. There were 55 trades initiated. The exchange of Dogs of the Dow for Zack’s Momentum Anomaly RTGs generated 20 trades. I accepted making the trades in the next trading window. Because I had elected and paid for the annual commission option, these trades did not have a commission

These trades were executed on Monday at 11 AM. The only uncertainty that I had was that the original folio names were still listed on the main accounts page. I waited until Tuesday morning to see if these were updated automatically. They were not. After a bit of searching I found that I could change these names, and did.

It will be interesting to see how these changes affect the weekly performance. Follow me on Twitter @billlanke and I’ll let you know when this update is posted.