The Chairman's Flight

Review of the 🐿️'s BUSHY™ Multi Asset ETF Portfolio and live Acorn trade ideas. 2025, Week 41.

The Chairman’s Flight

A younger and more competitive 🐿️ used to query to the commitment of colleagues that took ‘day flights’ on business trips instead of a more self-flagellatory ‘red eye’ - “Ah, I see that ‘so and so’ is on ‘The Chairman’s’ - noted!”. A more grey-haired rodent no longer has snarky colleagues and actively seeks out those day flights.

Everybody’s jet lag hack is personal. I have found that arriving in my new destination in the evening is my secret to time zone conquest. This belief nudges me towards ‘The Chairman’s’. Also, the advent of in flight WiFi means that time at 30,000 feet can now be quite productive. When it works!

Apologies for the delayed note. The inflight WiFi did not cooperate at all for either sectors of my flight home this weekend. I write to you early on Monday morning, Melbourne time.

Many thanks to the readers who joined me and Erik Renander at our London drinks last Thursday.

Erik

put together a fun summary of some of the conversations from the night (link below). After reading it I was quite glad to have collared my gold last Wednesday - I have not touched the silver, PGMs or the miners (for now).

I was delighted that Thursday’s event at The Alfred Tennyson saw some cameo appearances from FinStack / FinTwit / Indy Research luminaries

Russell Clark

,

Rupak Ghose

,

NutStuff

,

Bill Blain

and

Paul Krake

. I was also pleased to have caught up with

Marc Rubinstein

earlier in the week.

While we were sharing all of those ideas, my latest conversation with

Maggie Lake

(recorded a couple of weeks ago) was published. Maggie and I spent time discussing how I am super excited by the “Travelling Wilburys” network of experienced, independent market thinkers that has assembled on Substack and elsewhere over the past couple of years.👇

As Lord Tennyson himself said, “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers”. You can catch the full show on The Market House via the link below¹.

So on to markets! Friday was fun wasn’t it??! How typical that the ‘Big Red’ day should come on the last day of my trip! Fixed income finally got some love and the semiconductor sector looked vulnerable for the first time in a while. The volatility complex finally got off the mat.

Friday did check the US dollar bull run that we had been getting Twitchy Whiskers about over the summer - but the dollar ‘wrecking ball’ still looks dangerous.

Weekly performance for sector and factor ETFs (FinViz)

BUSHY™ Review

Unsurprisingly, BUSHY™ had its first weekly drawdown since the beginning of August. The Vanguard benchmark’s length in fixed income was not enough to protect it from is heavy exposure to US large cap tech stocks over the week.

We made a couple of adjustments to BUSHY™ last week: