How Hamas Got The Drop On Israel

Israel's 9/11 Times Seven 

In our last post (A Moment Of Clarity In The Mideast), we wrote that the ongoing Hamas attack on Israel was the worst attack the country had seen in fifty years, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. 

That's still true, but on Sunday we got preliminary casualty figures indicating that Israel had at least 600 dead so far, which makes this roughly the equivalent of several 9/11s for the small country. 

And unlike 9/11, this catastrophe has reportedly included mass rape. 

Leftists In America React

One of the notable reactions to the gruesome news out of Israel was this one, by a Somali in Minnesota.  

There were also of course mass rallies in support of the Palestinian cause in New York and other American cities, prompting some to note the lack of disquiet about the nature of the Hamas offensive. 

Others pointed out that leftists are showing what they'd like to do to normal Americans if they get the power to do so. 

So Was This All Part Of A Mossad Plan? 

That was the argument of a post shared by one of our fellow contributing editors yesterday ("No, the Hamas Invasion Was Not an Israeli ‘Intelligence Failure’"). 

Our view is that it was almost certainly a massive military and intelligence failure on the part of Israel, which raises the question we mentioned in the title of this post. 

How Did Hamas Get The Drop On Israel? 

The thread below gives a cogent explanation of how Hamas managed to launch such a large surprise attack on the Jewish State. 

As the author noted in response to commenter, this doesn't entirely explain the long delays in getting troops to the affected areas, but initial evidence there suggests leadership failures of massive proportions. After this crisis is over, Prime Minister Netanyahu will have a lot to answer for. 

In Case You Missed It

In a post last week, Beating The Market While Hedging, we wrote about a conservative investing approach that can beat the market sometimes--and strictly limit your downside risk when it doesn't. 

Here's that example we alluded to in the tweet above. 

This is the portfolio our web app created at the beginning of April for an investor with $30,000 to put to work who was unwilling to risk a decline of more than 13% over the next six months: 

And here's how that hedged portfolio did over the next six months: 

Over the next six months, that hedged portfolio was up 23.28%, net of hedging and trading costs, versus 5.18% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY). 

As we wrote there, they won't all do that well. The portfolio created a week before using the same inputs lost 7% over the next six months. That's why we recommend splitting your money up into a couple of tranches, opening one hedged portfolio now, and then the next one in two or three months, to get different names and smooth out returns. 

If You Want To Stay In Touch

You can create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).