pendas wrote:"There were multiple one-off demo HYPs set up by Pyad on the Motley Fool, which Gengulphus I think continues to monitor on here if you want some evidence for how they perform."
I'm aware of HYP1 and the continuity HYP1 that Gengulphus kindly maintained after Pyad left the Motley Fool, but of course these started life as one portfolio. As far as I know, future portfolios constructed, or partly constructed and featured in the MF articles were never monitored once Pyad left.
Yes, I've only monitored HYP1 and its offshoot CHYP1 - mainly the latter because it's the one I have the best data about, and indeed have been running since the end of 2009 (though I have to confess to currently having a bit of a backlog on it - something I intend to catch up on in the next two weeks or so, leading up to their joint 17th anniversary on November 13th).
Pyad later constructed 3 more public HYPs at TMF, called HYP2, HYP3 and HYP4, plus IIRC another and a start on a second that were less public, being published in a subscribers-only TMF newsletter about Value and HYP investing, that TMF pulled the plug on after something in the region of 18 months. They all fell victims to non-maintenance: if corporate actions return cash, you really want that cash to be reinvested reasonably quickly, otherwise you've either got to backdate the reinvestment decisions, which carries the danger of hindsight bias, or you've got to make the reinvestment decisions based on the current situation, which means that the 'HYP' has held a significant amount of cash rather than being fully-invested - especially if the corporate actions concerned are takeovers for cash, because of the large amounts of cash they return.
At some point, it becomes untenable that an unmaintained HYP is still a reasonably fair demonstration of a HYP, or can be resurrected into one, because of those twin dangers of its investment performance being too badly affected by hindsight bias or too badly diluted by not being fully invested. When that point has been reached is of course a judgement call...
Anyway, a look was taken in 2012 at the instigation of ReturnOfFred at the possibility of resurrecting HYP2, HYP3 and HYP4. My judgement at the time was that HYP2 and HYP3 had gone beyond the point of no return due to takeovers, but HYP4 had escaped having any of its holdings taken over for cash. Of course, it probably did have some much smaller capital sums returned by other corporate actions, but they probably totalled a sufficiently small amount that leaving them uninvested until 2012 wouldn't affect the outcome all that much... And as I recall, either ReturnOfFred or someone else did make an attempt at resurrecting HYP4 - an attempt that struck me at the time as serious and good enough to produce a very reasonable approximation to what the outcome would have been - but unfortunately nothing more was heard of it afterwards, i.e. AFAIAA it went straight back to being unmaintained... :-(
I do have some records of all that, but most of them are nothing like as nice as links to Wayback Machine archives to the TMF articles and posts concerned. Which doesn't necessarily mean that they're not archived - just that I don't have links to any such archives that people may have made, and don't have any guarantees that they were made at all... But there are ways that such links might be tracked down - I've just used one of them to track down the December 2007 article that completed HYP4's selection - it's in https://web.archive.org/web/20071207135 ... yield.aspx. Intriguingly, none of the 16 companies it contains has been taken over for cash since, so a reasonably fair resurrection of HYP4 might still be possible, and we are coming up to the 10th anniversary of it being completed... Before anyone takes on the project of producing a HYP4 10-year report, though, let me warn them that working through 10 years of 16 companies' histories, making certain you've accounted correctly for every dividend, rights issue, share consolidation, merger, etc, correctly, is not a trivial job!
I probably also have records of the TMF newsletter HYPs somewhere - but I'm not going to put any effort into finding them: too much effort, which would probably be wasted because the outcome would probably be that they've gone beyond the point of no return on non-maintenance.
Finally, I'm fairly certain pyad has produced HYPs for his post-TMF newsletters, but I neither have any records of them nor have ever had such records.
Gengulphus