I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Last week, I shared that I was moving from all-white paintings to Kline-inspired white + black paintings. That unleashed a torrent of work, and I finished multiple pieces. I named the series Motion Memory because so many of them made me think of — you guessed it! — skiing and ski machinery. I have a bunch more in progress, and I’m thinking of trying some at larger scale, painting on unstretched canvas, which is cheaper than buying canvas on stretcher bars especially for very large paintings. It also would allow me to use non-standard aspect ratios, which could be interesting. And it’s easy to ship (though the recipient then has to have the canvase stretched onto bars and possibly framed.
I also started experimenting with some scribbly paintings. I love to scribble with my artist’s crayons. But I want to figure out how to scale that up to really big paintings. I still want it to look like crayon but the strokes will need to be wide so I’ll have to do it with paintbrushes.
Here’s a scribbly painting I really like.
Yesterday, I started another project, this one more nerdy and technological: building a dashboard using Google Sheets to implement my Freestyle Investing approach. Not sure that’s what I’ll call it though. Other options: Reckless Investng (but it’s not really reckless because it reckons a lot), Emergent Investing, Unfolding Investing, the Unfolding Portfolio… I dunno. I will keep thinking about it and asking the AIs if they have good ideas.
Building the spreadsheet is a lot of fun. Here’s how it works right now:
- I download my position data from Schwab for the accounts I want to include and then upload them to a specific Google Drive folder, the upload folder
- I use a menu item that I added to the spreadsheet to import the raw data into a sheet in the spreadsheet
- I use a second menu option to clean and summarize the data, loading it into a consolidated data sheet
- This updates a dashboard with various pivot tables, charts, and tables including positions I might want to buy (and why), positions I might look at trimming or selling entirely, and positions that should be held.
I use two trend following rules based on the 10-month moving average and the 12-month high to decide what bucket a particular ETF falls into (I only invest in ETFs, not individual stocks or mutual funds).
I’m thinking of sharing this spreadsheet as a template for others to use if they want to implement something similar. I’ll write up the approach on my Substack and get it out in the world that way.
It was interesting to see which sectors are doing well, which seem overextended, and which seem to be showing new green shoots. I’m excited to use this at my next monthly portfolio buy/sell day, coming up on February 2nd.
So this week I’ll be painting and working on my portfolio dashboard, along with daily blogging. My writing projects other than this one have fallen by the wayside. I’m beginning to accept that I’m happiest doing what I want to do when I want to do it and not forcing myself to finish something just because I started it. I usually come back around to what I was working on before.
Wishing everyone a wonderful week!