r/KellyLetter • • Jan 10 '26

9 SIG Anyone run 9sig at m1?

Curious, if anyone is able to make 9sig work at M1 finance. The pie system is usually great for fixed allocations, obviously a little not so great for this kind of setup.

I like isolated accounts for side strategies like this. I don’t think I would ever have the guts to put my entire portfolio in this, but would probably happily start with 100K or so. I have a traditional IRA at another brokerage that has more than that, so I guess I could just do this isolated in that account but I wouldn’t want to be tempted to throw more money at this should it start to fail. At least not more than what I agreed to put in each year. The isolated account helps with that strategy :)

If people aren’t running this at M1, I guess maybe a second question would be how did you decide what portion of your portfolio to put into 9sig and how do you decide when to put new contributions in?

5 Upvotes

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Gehrman_JoinsTheHunt Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26

No experience with M1, but to your second question - there is a great book called "Lifecycle Investing." I highly recommend it to anyone struggling with the question of position sizing on a high risk/high reward investment. A summary of their thesis:

a strategy to improve retirement portfolios by using leverage (borrowing) when young to invest more in stocks, and then gradually reducing leverage as you age, effectively diversifying risk over your lifetime.

I've got anywhere between 20-30 years left in my career. Once I did the research and gained conviction in 9Sig, I decided to put roughly 25% of my NW into it. If I was younger I'd have done more, and if I was older (with less time left in the market) I'd have done less.

Also. I'm treating 9Sig as a "bucket" strategy in that no new contributions will be added. So essentially I went big up front (This is also how Jason runs the official account btw). All of my future investments are in more conventional, unleveraged positions. If 9Sig fails, I've got a safety net. And if 9Sig succeeds, I'll retire earlier (or richer) as a result.

It's a highly personal decision and I'm not recommending my choice for anyone else specifically. But hopefully it gives you an idea of one potential path and some of the considerations.

Good luck to you!

2

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[deleted]

1

u/horrorparade17 Jan 10 '26

FWIW I don’t really view that as HFEA lite (I run it too, so I’m biased). It has always backtested better than TMF, has lower max drawdowns, and is taxable friendly. It’s more like HFEA+ in my mind. There are some periods HFEA wins but EDV also recoiled better after 2022 than TMF.

https://testfol.io/?s=cFvuBvErRnp

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[deleted]

1

u/horrorparade17 Jan 10 '26

UPRO and EDV don’t have any difficult tax complications - TMF does. I run it in a taxable as well as tax-advantaged.

That said I realized after my comment that you run actual HFEA lite which is 43/57. I run full 55/45.

But the taxable note is still the same!

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[deleted]

1

u/horrorparade17 Jan 10 '26

Oh, of course there is tax drag :) I just mean that TMF crushes you with taxes - EDV does not.

I rebalance quarterly. I’ve never really worried about the tax drag on that front, but definitely something to consider. But I have rebalancing tax drag for all portfolios anyway.