Doubler Portfolio Overview February
Weekly 10 2025
For those not yet familiar with our Doubler Portfolio, read more about it here.
Look at the sharp market swings over just a few days. On February 24, we opened at +3.6% YTD for our portfolio, only to drop to -0.4% eight days later, and then bounce back to +2.4% by Wednesday—all thanks to Trump.
Even he was surprised by how the markets reacted to his statements. He doesn’t like falling stock prices, so he partially walked back his remarks, leading to yesterday’s relief rally.
This is a perfect example of how, in the short term, the stock market can feel more like a casino than we’d like. As Benjamin Graham put it:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
When an entire portfolio—with a 33% cash buffer—swings this much, you know the underlying stocks are even more volatile. Take Stellantis, for example: within three days, it fluctuated between €12.62 and €10.86—a 16% swing in the first half of the week, purely based on Trump’s statements. It had nothing to do with weak earnings; that hit had already been priced in the week before.
The market assumes that import tariffs will hurt carmakers, seeing Stellantis as a European company. But it’s not just that—it’s a European-American carmaker. Since the Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot merger, people often forget about the Chrysler side of the business.
The cars Stellantis sells in the U.S. are mostly built there. I say “America” rather than just the United States, because production also happens in Mexico and Canada.
Trump can’t maintain high tariffs on Mexico or Canada for long, but the market keeps buying into the idea that he might try. In reality, such measures are often rolled back or softened after a round of bluffing. Sustained high tariffs on both neighboring countries would be economically disastrous—not just for Mexico and Canada, but for the U.S. itself.
February Recap
Last month, I wrote that January started volatile and that this would likely be the theme of the year. February already confirmed that.
For most of the month, the portfolio was in positive territory (measured from our start in April), only to erase all gains in the last two trading days.
February ended at -0.7%, after trending towards +1% for most of the month.
Year-to-date, we stood at +1.17% by the end of February, which, interestingly, is exactly the same as the total loss since the portfolio launched in April last year (-1.17%).
On an individual stock level, February was less volatile than January:
In January, three stocks gained over 20%, while one dropped 27.5%.
In February, the swings ranged between +14.75% and -12.75%.
And if you thought Stellantis was the worst performer due to weak earnings—think again. It only fell 4.57% over the month.
I’ll repeat what I said last month: these strong movements create opportunities, as long as we stay focused on the businesses themselves, rather than being swept up by the constant flow of macroeconomic and geopolitical news.