Been traveling and haven’t had time to update the blog. When I travel, I am in constant catch-up mode with both my business and monitoring trades. It leaves little time for this. I’ve been in Barcelona for 6 days and we get ready to board an 11 day cruise tomorrow to hit Tangiers and the Canary Islands.
The April trades are making some headway despite more challenges in the market. It’s just not cooperating. Through out the week I adjusted the trades more and more conservatively without market opinion so that I had the best chance to recover while maintaining solid theta and lower risk deltas. We enter next week with a slight delta negative thus a downside bias. We’re not fully recovered YTD but I am happy with the result. The market moves have been historic and extremely difficult to trade with market neutral strategies. Nearly all the market neutral traders I know (even the “gurus”) have posted losses in the March and April expiries. I mean, what the hell, we started the year with a 22-24% decline in the RUT within a few weeks only to have an absolute epic up move that is a record in its ferocity again in a few weeks. It’s been unrelenting in each direction. It pretty much moved from 1200 to 940 in a matter of days and then moved 18% from 940 to 1105. This all somewhat happened during the April and March trades which were the only ones active this year. Our result? Somewhat negative for the year but if we have any normal decent range bound market, I am talking about like what we’d have 95% of the time, then I’ll start to crush. Handling an absolute nightmare and being down only a little bit is exciting and a testament to the rhino resiliency.
I’ve got great trades setup in May for both the SPX and RUT as well as June for the RUT. Any semblance of a normalized market should get us well profitable in the next month. The market is like a bull in a pen, after it moves a bunch, it tires. We should see less pronounced moves. I’ve got a lot of downside hedges active (very cheaply) and should be covered on most large down moves. I’ve also got some upside hedges using mechanical stock picking to help ease any more upside moves.