Started the rebalance. CRM made the case for moving faster.
The Blue Portfolio sold GILD on Tuesday, then watched CRM fall 10.4% in the same week while still holding it. The rebalance has started — the sell list is longer than one name.
I sold GILD on Tuesday at $125.50. Wednesday, the S&P 500 fell 1.6% and GILD dropped another 3%. For once, the timing worked.
That felt good for about five minutes. Then I noticed CRM — Salesforce, the enterprise software company — had fallen 10.4% this week while I still held it. CRM has been tagged for exit in my dashboard for weeks. GILD wasn't. I sold the wrong name first.
That's this week.
The sale
GILD — Gilead Sciences, the biotech that makes antiviral drugs — had been sitting in the book at a small loss for months, generating no conviction and no particular reason to keep it. The new weekly assessment I built last week scored it against three checks: moat durability, fundamental health, and whether it still belongs in the book. It failed the last two. Not dramatically — the Altman Z-Score is fine and the Piotroski F-Score is middle-of-the-road — but the moat read came back weak (a pharmaceutical patent cliff with no obvious replacement pipeline), and the buy/sell verdict was clear: exit.
So Tuesday I sold.
By Thursday GILD had recovered most of Wednesday's dip and closed the week at $125.59. The sell was fine. Not great, not terrible. Fine.
What I held and shouldn't have
Every stock I own carries one of three labels in my dashboard — Hold, Watch, or Sell. A Sell tag means the position is flagged for exit: not necessarily a fire sale, but the next time I'm moving, this name should move too.
CRM has carried the Sell tag for weeks. This week it fell −10.4%.
The Navellier Momentum Score — a 0-to-6 grade that tracks whether a stock's earnings and margins are accelerating in the right direction — has CRM at 6, the maximum. On momentum, it's as clean as it gets. The Sell tag isn't about momentum; it's about position sizing and where CRM fits in the book as I rebalance toward a tighter, higher-conviction set of names. The tag was right. The execution wasn't.
When a sell-tagged name drops 10% in a week you still hold it, the process wins and you lose. The process had this flagged. I just didn't move fast enough.
How the portfolio did
The Blue Portfolio — my individual stock picks — finished the week down −0.90% against a week when the S&P 500 (the benchmark that tracks the largest 500 US companies) gained +0.65%.
The week's shape: Monday and Tuesday mostly flat, Wednesday down hard with the broader market selloff (the S&P dropped 1.6% that day), then a sharp Thursday–Friday recovery. The Blue Portfolio followed the same path but recovered less of the Wednesday gap. The reason: tech-heavy concentration.
Microsoft fell −6.2%. Apple fell −5.3%. Meta fell −4.4%. Intuit fell −6.7%. Those are four of the larger positions, and they all gave back more than the index on Wednesday and didn't fully recover by Friday.
The bright spot: TGT — Target, the US discount retailer — surged +10.3% on what appears to have been strong guidance after a brutal year. Target's momentum score is a 2 — not a name I'd add to, but it's in the book and this week it earned its keep.
The rest of the defensives held their ground: Royal Bank (RY.TO) up 3.1%, Lockheed Martin (LMT) up 3.2%, Public Storage (PSA) up 5.3%, DHT Holdings (DHT) up 5.5%. The portfolio's non-tech layer did exactly what a non-tech layer is supposed to do in a week when software sold off.
The problem is that the non-tech layer isn't big enough to carry the full book when MSFT, AAPL, META, and INTU all have a rough week simultaneously.
What I'm watching
The rebalance continues. The Sell-tagged names are: CRM, MA, and MCD. All three are still in the book. All three have been flagged for exit — not because they're bad businesses, but because they no longer earn their slot in a tighter portfolio.
CRM made the case this week for moving faster. MA and MCD have not. That doesn't change the plan; it changes the urgency.
No new buys. The technical entry signals I'm watching on the screener candidates haven't confirmed. I'm not adding without both gates open — the quality check and the entry signal. This week's market volatility didn't create an entry; it created noise.
One thing I'd do differently
Execute the sell list in order of certainty, not proximity.
I sold GILD because the assessment flagged it cleanly and it was the easiest name to cut loose — small position, clear reasoning, no real conviction. CRM is a harder sell emotionally because the NMS is strong and the business is fine. But "harder emotionally" and "wrong to sell" aren't the same thing.
The sell list exists for a reason. Next time I start a rebalance week, the first name I move should be the one with the clearest case for exit — not the one with the smallest position size.
If you're sitting on your own sell list
If you've flagged a name for exit and you haven't pulled the trigger yet: this is what waiting costs. Sometimes the stock stays flat and you lose nothing. Sometimes it drops 10% in a week while you're still deciding.
The process told me to sell CRM. The market agreed — about 11 weeks later. The process was right. The timing was mine to control, and I didn't.
— Mark