Investment Strategies

Welcome 2021 – What strange times we live in Below is the daily and total PnL (+$31,471,258.63) as publicly posted on reddit by user “u/DeepFuckingValue” who allegedly started investing 50K into the now infamous GME stock. If you follow his older posts you will realise he is a solid researcher who formed a thesis about an undervalued stock with unrealistic short interest. He shared his thesis publicly and was somewhat disregarded but stuck to his … Read more

2020 – a.k.a the year from hell (but not for investors) 1918 – The Spanish flu pandemic. By now, most of us have such pictures of ourselves or our loved ones so that our grand-children can show their kids some 100 years from now. It has been an extraordinary year by any measure. The events of 2020 are unprecedented and beside the spread of COVID-19 include, amongst others: The Australian wildfires burned through 47 million … Read more

Market surge in November  U.S. and foreign equity markets had an exceptional month due to major progress towards a coronavirus vaccine and expectations of easy monetary policy from central banks. The S&P 500 is up +10.9%, EFA (Developed countries) +14.3%, EEM +9.2% while hard hit economies like Italy and Spain are up +25% and 27% respectively.   Safe heavens under pressure The surge in stocks has put competitive pressure on safe-haven assets such as bonds … Read more

Election volatility October turned out to be a volatile month that ended up negative for most assets classes: The U.S. market lost -2.5%, gold (GLD -0.5%), Treasuries (TLT -3.4%) while the U.S. dollar was flat (UUP +0.1%). Our strategies pretty much followed the market correction with performances ranging from -0.2% to -3.1% for non-leveraged strategies. The HEDGE for this past month was almost half in Gold and half in TLT, so the large drop in … Read more

Election and volatility On September 22th, we received the following message as our main broker increased margin requirements for U.S. stocks: Consequently, to protect (the broker) and its customers, … will increase margin requirements by as much as 35% above normal margin requirements leading up to the November U.S. election. With the increase fully implemented, the new requirements would be 67.5% Initial and 33.75% Maintenance (vs 50% and 25%) In effect, this is similar to … Read more

As a follow-up to the changes implemented last month in response to the delisting of UGLD and ZIV we are implementing again some changes: New 2x leveraged Universal Investment Strategy New 2x leveraged US Market Strategy New Portfolio configuration & reoptimization To keep the newsletter manageable we’ve detailed these changes in a separate post. All strategies positive. Another good month for LI strategies and portfolios, most returning 3-5% for the month of July. July’s notable … Read more

Back to normal? All strategies came in positive for the month with a range of returns from a low of +2.8% to a high of +14.5% for the Maximum Yield strategy. Year-to-date figures are mixed but reasonable around a mean of -2%. The S&P 500 is down -9% while emerging markets (EEM) are down -19%. Looking at the table above, it does not reflect a world where whole economies are frozen, cities are in lockdown, … Read more