Brief note on this morning's action, and on our core mix...

While stocks do believe it or not fall on occasion, it seems so odd these days that I find myself compelled to comment. Keeping in mind that day-to-day fluctuations are never, ever, ever, a factor in what makes for good, smart, investment management -- it's all about underlying general conditions!

For today, there's absolutely nothing to add to our most recent messaging, but since I've been highlighting the fluctuations within our recently-revamped core asset mix fairly frequently of late (I promise this will not be a daily event!), and given that the Dow's off 525 (1.90%), the S&P is down 1.84% and the Nasdaq is trading 1.65% lower as I type, I'll do it this morning as well.

While, like yesterday, our non-correlated-to-stocks positions aren't completely offsetting the entire decline in stocks today (like they did last Friday) -- which, frankly, is not at all our expectation -- our 100%-allocated-to-core model is capturing a little less than half (-0.79%) of this morning's decline.

Positions in the green:

S&P 500 Put Option
FXY (Japanese Yen)
FXB (British Pound)
FXE (Euro)
SJB (inverse junk bonds)
VPL (Asia Pacific)

What's interesting is that GLD (gold) is actually trading down 0.59% as I type. For the moment we'll chalk that up to profit taking, given its impressive 8.6% year-to-date return.

Of course, and I can't emphasize this enough, one day never a trend makes! And the above positions (gld, fxb, fxe, fxy and sjb in particular) do not always go up -- or stay flat -- when the market goes down, or go down when the market goes up. We own each for different reasons, but one thing they each have in common is that they possess relatively low correlation to stocks. Which is what we want given the current environment!

Note, if you check your stuff on line and your portfolio's move this morning isn't quite consistent with the above reference to our core mix (give or take, depending on when you look and what happens between now and then), it's because due to tax constraints specific to your situation when we rotated, you're not quite there, or your (or, say, your kids' or grandkids') portfolio isn't large enough to capture every position. We manage modified allocations for those smaller accounts...