Quick summary:
No survey this week or the next, back August 9th
We regained momentum and got good predictions last week
Direction was again off, but precision was good
We are still up 67% in 2022, while the S&P is down 19%
Hi everyone,
as we’ve told you, there will be a quick summer break for two weeks before we recommence the survey on August 9th. We will unfortunately miss this week’s FOMC meeting - usually a very profitable week for us - but never mind. As always, we will inform you when the survey is back on and the Q3 competition continues!
In the mean time, check out your position on our leaderboard. Did you do OK last week?
We did OK. Bounced back from two weeks where we had a full set of missed directions. We were again off for DIA and SPY, but we made up for the directional miss with our precision, and will remain profitable.
As you can see from the table, we got decent precision for DJI and S&P despite a missed direction, were very good for BTC on both, and caught good direction for the 10Y yield and TSLA (amidst its good earnings report).
After the summer break and before the relaunch, we’ll send over some more data examining the performance of our other assets, in addition to S&P and DIA. Stay tuned!
Performance: TBC
Remember this time we tried something new:
…instead of the usual Friday expiry we bought options that expire a week from now for SPY (July 27th), and 10 days from now for DIA (July 29th - no possibility of buying it mid-week for DIA).
And these were the positions:
We traded 381/382 to 396/397 SPY 27/07 iron condor (10 contracts) for $620 immediate gain ($420 from the call leg, $200 from the put leg). As last time, we bought separate legs of the condor - a bull put spread (381/382) and a bear call spread (396/397), and placed stop losses of 50% on each.
We are buying a put for downside protection, 1 SPY 396p 27/07 for $7.6.
For DIA we are trading the following iron condor (again with separate legs): 308/309 to 320/321 DIA 29/07 (10 contracts) for $620 immediate gain ($180 for the put leg, $440 for the call leg).
We are also buying 1 DIA 29/07 320p for $5.6.
Did the strategy work?
Not really. First of all, despite landing just within our predicted intervals on Friday, we made only around $100 on both condors (the 4 legs). Why? Cause they didn’t expire on Friday, they’re expiring this week. The puts finished Friday at a $500 loss (still not reaching their stop-losses), meaning that if we had traded the contracts on Friday we would have had a losing week. So we left them open, for the sake of the experiment (currently +$200 on the condors).
We could lose even more this week, or we can bounce back. Either way, this is not a good strategy for us as it fails to get the most out of BASON. We are basically walking blind into this week, so we’ll most likely close the positions by the end of Tuesday or on Wednesday. And probably report a small loss.
If we had our regular condors, we would have picked up $500-600 on each, which would offset the put loss and made us money.
The experiment failed. Even if we end up taking a small profit, it’s still not the optimal thing to do. A valuable experience for us.
Our annual performance is thus unchanged at 67% for the year, and 249% overall.
Thanks for following us! When we come back in August, we’ll give you a little surprise regarding another useful trading strategy that we wanna test.
Stay tuned!
Have a great summer, and see you back soon!