Brad Hessel

financial implications of changes such as the aging of populations in the developed world, the rise of China and India, global warming, the AIDS epidemic, the decline of the U.S. dollar, and others…and using investment strategies employed by macro hedge funds to profit from the effects of these changes. Between 1988 and 2008, the S&P 500 had a compounded annual growth rate of 6.37%, while macro-strategy hedge funds produced a CAGR of 14.25%. Let Intelledgement help you manage your investment portfolio in accordance with our best analyses of these macro trends. We are an independent registered Investment Advisor company whose only income comes from our clients. We don’t get commissions for making trades or recommending particular mutual funds…we are happy only if you are happy. (And as our fee is based on the size of your portfolio, we have every incentive to help make it larger!)

invested in exchange-traded funds in order to avoid the risk of owning individual stocks. Generally, positions are limited to 10% of the overall value of the fund. The main purpose of this weblog is to track the IMSIP. The top three categories of postings pertain to the IMSIP: “Investment Strategy” includes general information about how we determine what to invest in; “Investment Recs” contains specific BUY and SELL recommendations; “Investment Reports” are quarterly performance summaries. We also track the IMSIP on Marketocracy (scaled up from our virtual $100,000 fund to a virtual $1MM) and The Motley Fool’s CAPS (which does not attempt to simulate real money returns but instead tracks performance directly against the S&P 500). Partly for intelligence gathering and partly for fun, we also have a separate model speculative portfolio, our Intelledgement Speculative Opportunity Portfolio (ISOP, a virtual $10,000 fund). ISOP positions may include stocks, options, bonds, and other securities. The “B”-labeled categories of postings pertain to the ISOP. The date of inception for both funds is 29 Deccember 2006. Periodic updates and other information pertinent to the model portfolios in particular and macro strategy investing in general are posted here. This weblog is maintained by Brad Hessel, of Intelledgement, LLC. The word “tsimmis” is yiddish, and means roughly a fuss or altercation, and is often rendered in conjunction with the English word “big,” as in the following description of a Thanksgiving dinner at which the subject of politics had arisen, roiling the digestion of most everyone who doesn’t enjoy the spectacle of adults arguing as if they were six-year-olds: “Oy, it was such a big tsimmis, you wouldn’t believe!”