This Is a Trader’s Market. Voz is Proving It
Hey Traders, I’ve said it on our shows and I’ve written it here, here, and here: This is a Trader’s Market. Be nimble. Pick your spots. Size accordingly. Some of the biggest hedge funds on earth are getting smoked in this market. To the tune of billions. The biggest portfolio managers can’t operate in […]
JP Morgan’s 20 Billion dollar Petite Filet
How many “bad beats” does it take for something to become a “bad strategy”? JPMorgan’s Hedged Equity Fund (JHEQX) just had another rough quarterly roll. Some people called it a bad beat. I disagree. This is just a bad strategy. Mark agrees. He wrote about the messy mechanics yesterday. I want to ask a bigger […]
Japan Wants to Martingale Their Oil Problems
Dear Trader, Martingaling is a gambling strategy. A terrible one. One of the simplest, but stupidest imaginable. The idea is you double your bet after every loss, hoping you eventually win and make it all back. It goes like this: Bet $1, lose. Next bet is $2. Lose that? Bet $4, then eight, then 16, […]
When Traders Eat Investors for Breakfast
Dear Trader Traders and investors get along fine most of the time. But there are environments that favor trading and environments that favor investing. I've been calling this a "trader's market" in a couple newsletters and on State of The Market for the last few weeks. I just realized I never gave you the quickest […]
Iran Is Masking the Real Story
Hey Traders, Picture a place like Aspen or Palm Beach. The kind of towns where billionaires fly to their second homes, but regular people still live and work. Billionaires like the KKR (KKR) crowd, Blackstone (BX), Goldman Sachs (GS), Apollo (APO). Very exclusive. They go out to eat at fancy restaurants where reservations are impossible […]
A Temporary Ceasefire Within the Fed
I wanted to send a quick note on what I expect out of today’s FOMC. (TLDR: not much.) I have three kids in three different schools with three different spring break schedules. This happens to be a tight window where two overlap and my wife can cover our third. It also happens to overlap with […]
The GOAT Index and Why It Wins
I was going through some old strategies this week. Seeing what is worth upgrading and bringing to Option Pit after years away from the desk. One of them caught my attention. It's a VIX futures strategy. Built entirely around the way fear and greed show up in price action. I designed it years ago based […]
Trader’s Market: Why Hedge Fund Losses Prove Nimble Beats Size
I don’t take for granted the luxury of living in this great country. I’ve been in markets for 25 years and through every crisis along the way. There is one commonality in market crises. Traders tend to make outsized profits. None of us feel good about profiting while others are suffering. As market makers on […]
Why I scratched a winning gold trade this week
Dear trader, A month ago, every headline in my news feed was panicking about the blow-off top in gold, that it was about to crash like a meme stock. My take was totally different: gold will go nowhere for the month. That move was just market mechanics. I put on a butterfly in SPDR Gold […]
The Dollar is the Tell
Dear Trader, The Iranian Supreme Leader and most of his cabinet were killed in a US-Israeli strike Saturday morning. As of this writing on Sunday, Trump's only public statement is a Truth Social post: "we will pinpoint bomb all week or longer if needed." A few ships in the Strait of Hormuz have since been […]