Apr 18 – Trade Update

The market is now very green. I’ve heard that this is the strongest up-move since the great depression bounce, especially in the RUT. To start the year, we had a 22%+ decline (from 1200 to about 940) within a very short period followed by a 22% up move, again in a very short period (strongest in history) and preceding those two events we had the Aug 24 crash and THAT subsequent huge move up. I posted the SPX graph earlier, note that the RUT chart is much more pronounced and extreme. As you can imagine, this is the most frustrating 6 months imaginable for trading market neutral strategies. It can, hopefully, only get better. I’ve heard in groups and chats that many people have given up (frustrated) and I’ve felt like that at times recently too. I understand the environment is extreme and it’ll pass so I am trying to just manage risk and get out of this thing profitable – Easier said than done. If you backtest the Rhino back 7 years and you backtest it through the latest period, you’ll see that it truly has been a terrible period to trade these things. The RUT is now at 1134 (nearly 200 points from its Feb low) and nearly 22% up in 2 months our June trade are underwater and our May trades went from decent profits to about break-even or slightly above. If we get ANY pullback of 2-3% in the next 20 days and don’t rise too much above 1134, we’ll be profitable for the year. If we continue onwards and upwards, we’ll be negative by some amount. Again, its short-term pain but as volatility re-enters the market and if we are at any sort of top, that’s when we’ll start making a lot of money in the trades. It’s not unusual to get 8-10% returns in the Rhino if we’re under the tent. A few of those and we’ll be at expected value for the year.

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