What a virtual portfolio manager is

Jared follows a public, legally mandated paper trail: under the STOCK Act, US senators must disclose their share purchases. He ranks the individual stocks drawing the most disclosed buying — funds are left out — and holds a basket of them, acting strictly on the public filing date, which lags the actual trade by weeks and often by months, so there’s never any hindsight. It’s a transparency play on a curious empirical fact: that senators’ own disclosed buying has, historically, been worth paying attention to. Whether buying after the public filing works too is what his record tests.

Watch for: The disclosure lag means he’s always following late, and the signal is noisy — politicians buy for many reasons. His book moves largely with the wider market, so it is not a hedge. This is a genuinely experimental strategy, and its holdings can be concentrated in whatever’s been filed lately.

Nancy follows the House side of the same public, legally mandated paper trail Jared follows in the Senate: under the STOCK Act, members of the House must disclose their share purchases. With 435 filers she counts breadth, not volume — a stock bought by five different members outranks one a single member bought five times — and holds a basket of the most widely bought names — each sized by how much money the members disclosed putting into it, no name above a quarter of the book — acting strictly on the Clerk’s filing date, which lags the trade by weeks and often by months. It is a transparency play on the same curious empirical fact: members’ own disclosed buying has, historically, been worth paying attention to. Whether buying after the public filing works too is what her record tests.

Watch for: The disclosure lag means she is always following late, and only electronically filed reports can be read — roughly four in five each year. Politicians buy for many reasons, so the signal is noisy, and the basket can concentrate in whatever has been filed lately. Four House purchases in five are reported in the smallest band, so the sizes follow the few members who file large purchases.

Margaux trades the long tides in real assets — gold, silver, copper, oil and agriculture. Each month she ranks the five on how strongly they have been rising and holds the two strongest — but only if each is also in a clear uptrend. Usually the two share the book equally; when oil is one of them and its market is tight — oil for delivery next month costing more than oil for the month after, as in a supply squeeze — she gives oil the larger share. Every week she checks the two she holds, and one that breaks its trend is sold at that check and its place waits in cash until the next ranking. Commodities march to their own drum — often when shares and bonds are struggling — so a disciplined trend approach to them adds a genuinely different engine to a portfolio, and a real hedge against inflation.

Watch for: Two holdings is a concentrated portfolio, and when oil takes the larger share it is more concentrated still: a bad fortnight for both shows up in full, and she can lag a broad commodity fund when energy leads everything. Commodities are volatile and prone to false starts. She follows price trend, plus one read of the oil futures curve each month — she does not trade the carry beyond that.

Omar spreads across five different asset classes — shares, foreign shares, bonds, property and commodities — but owns each one only while it’s in a clear uptrend. He doesn’t buy the whole market: each slice is a handful of its strongest-trending companies — foreign companies for foreign shares, property companies for property, and for commodities an oil company, a gold miner and a copper miner. Bonds are the one exception, held as a Treasury fund. When a slice breaks its trend he sells it and moves part of that money to the slices still working, up to a limit, keeping the rest in cash. He doesn’t try to call tops or bottoms; he follows the trend that’s actually there.

Watch for: Trend-following pays a small, steady toll in choppy, directionless markets — buying back in just before a reversal, or selling just before a bounce. It earns its keep in the big, sustained moves.

Once a month Nadia ranks every company in the S&P 500 by how far its share price has risen in recent months. She owns about 25 of the strongest, equal-weight. She ranks every sector but caps none: in a tech-led year most of her book can be technology, and it can overlap Arjun Mehta’s. A company stays for as long as it remains near the top of that ranking; only when it clearly falls away does she swap it for the strongest name she doesn’t own. She is always invested and never guesses the market’s direction — no cash switch, no stop-losses. It is the momentum factor much as the research defines it, with a keep band so she isn’t trading noise.

Watch for: Momentum reverses sharply: when the market turns, last year’s winners can fall hardest, and she holds through it because she reviews monthly. She never goes to cash, so a bear market takes her with it. Nothing caps a sector, so her book can concentrate wherever the winners are — mostly technology in a tech-led year, sharing names with Arjun — and then the two fall together. Her backtest ranks today’s index, a list full of companies that got there by rising, so it flatters her — judge her by the live record. About 110 trades a year, so fees matter on accounts under $10,000.

Grace doesn’t try to pick the one right sector — she follows the money. Each month she identifies which corners of the market are showing the most strength, then holds a handful of the strongest companies inside each of them — rotating as leadership shifts from, say, energy to technology to healthcare. She stays fully invested: she changes what she owns, not whether she owns anything.

Watch for: Sector leadership can rotate faster than a monthly cadence catches, and the strongest recent sector is sometimes the most crowded. Whipsaws in choppy markets are the cost of riding leadership.

Ji-woo treats crypto’s violent cycles as a map rather than a threat. She uses Bitcoin’s long-term moving average — which has marked, or come close to, the floor of every past cycle, though in 2022 price fell well below it and stayed under for most of a year — as a compass: fully invested when price sits near that floor, hold through the trend, and trim back into the euphoria when price runs far above it. Above all, she never panic-sells the bottom. It’s a disciplined, rules-based way to be invested in the most volatile asset there is — the highest-risk manager, by design.

Watch for: This is the highest-risk manager, full stop. Crypto can halve, and halve again; the strategy aims to survive and compound across a full cycle, not to spare you the gut-wrenching drawdowns along the way.

Arjun owns the strongest-performing platform and software companies in the Nasdaq-100 — the leaders momentum is already rewarding — but with a crucial safety valve: if the index as a whole falls below its long-term trend, he sells everything and waits in cash. He ranks the index’s platform names — software, internet, consumer electronics, gaming, entertainment, Tesla, travel, advertising and payments — plus Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce by name, and not the chip and hardware companies that fill a momentum rank in a chip cycle; that is what he was always meant to hold, and since the change on 21 October 2026 it is what the rules say. His record restarted on that change. It’s concentrated, high-conviction exposure to what is leading while the wind is at its back, and a clean exit when the index turns. He rides leadership; he doesn’t bottom-fish broken charts.

Watch for: A concentrated Nasdaq-100 book is volatile, and the trend filter reads monthly closes — a violent intramonth drop can hurt before the exit triggers. High ceiling, higher swings. Leaving out the chips halved the names he shares with Nadia, not how closely the two move: his record still moves with the Nasdaq about as much as the index itself does.

Tunde owns established companies with a long, unbroken record of raising their dividend year after year — businesses that have already proven, across decades and recessions, that they can share growing profits with their owners. He screens out the ones whose payouts look stretched or are quietly shrinking, and favours the most generous of the survivors. This is an income book, not a growth one: over three rising years the dividends were about a fifth of the return and the share prices the rest; over a flat summer they were most of it. He is paid to wait rather than waiting for the market to agree with him, and his edge over simply holding the aristocrats index is thin — the record says so.

Watch for: Dividend-growth names are mature and defensive — in a speculative, growth-led rally he’ll lag the high-fliers. He’s buying reliability, and reliability is rarely the year’s most exciting trade.

Once a year Isabela reads every large company’s own filings, counts the shares, checks that the cash is real and the debt is modest, and keeps the twenty that have retired the most of themselves. Banks, insurers and property companies are left out, because their share counts and balance sheets mean different things. Once a month she reads what has arrived since: a company that starts issuing again, or whose cash flow turns, simply leaves, and its place stays in cash until the next yearly rebuild. She does not forecast, does not meet management, and does not trade on the news. A company that keeps buying back its own shares is telling you what it thinks they are worth; she listens to the ones that can afford to say it.

Watch for: Her book rises and falls with the market, and moves much like the roster’s value book — a different reason to own large companies, not a shelter from them. Her worst backtest fall was deeper than the index’s, and the backtest ranks today’s index members, which flatters it. Share counts are filed by people: a misprinted figure can reach her, and while her rule discards what no buyback programme could have done, it cannot catch every one. Dividends are a small part of her return — a capital-return book, not an income one.