I ran my weekly portfolio update this week and found I was down 6% since the end of the year. I am actually pretty satisfied with this. Why? Well, mostly because the S&P 500 and Dow are both down about 9.5%, and the Nasdaq composite index is down 13%.

My decent performance, at least in comparison to the major indexes, is due to three general changes I made to my portfolio: Completely avoiding growth stocks for the time being, trying to stay around 50% in cash , and investing in resources and energy.

When the market timing indicators here started turning negative in December, the standard call to trim your portfolio went out. In my case, that meant getting rid of my weak stocks, which now were the same growth stocks that had been leading the pack in the summer. It was particularly hard to say goodbye to Baidu after those fantastic gains it gave me, but I’m sure we’ll run into each other again soon.

This left me with, well, no stocks in my portfolio, which shows just how heavily invested in the growth stock leaders I was. They had treated me wonderfully during the past year, but were not at all what I wanted to be invested in as the new year approached. I now somehow had to find the next leaders to spend half my cash on, in a pretty terrible market.

So I instead turned towards the boring, uninteresting stocks of the resource, energy, and gold sectors. Honestly, how exciting is mining coal? Still, I had to give them credit for their surprising performance in such a negative market climate. So I purchased four of them: Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF), Arena Resources (ARD), Yamana Gold (AUY), and Cosan (CZZ). The first two are involved in general resource operations, the third is obviously a gold stock, and the last is a major player in the ethanol field.

To date, they have all performed positively. ARD, AUY, and CZZ have returned 5%, 9%, and 7% gains respectively. Normally I wouldn’t be happy at all with numbers like that over two months, but with indexes down 10% I can’t complain much. Cleveland-Cliffs has been the big winner, returning 30% gains since I bought it.

For the time being I’m happy. But believe me that I have my finger on the trigger, ready to jump on stocks like Google and Baidu that are now extremely cheap. I will be waiting for some reliable performance from the market in general before doing that though. I believe we are near at turning point in the market. We’ve had a steady number of 30-50 lows for the past few days, and it seems like the market is just waiting to dart one way or the other.

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