Results: off to a good start!
1.6% return in our first week of 2024
Quick summary:
The Q1 competition is up & running. Still a great time to enter - click here.
The year started well for ORCA, as last week’s mini rally was captured, without any negative impact to the downside the next day, post-CPI. We made a decent 1.6% return for the week.
With markets closed yesterday, it’s a shorter week, but packed with data. We get retail sales and industrial production on Wed, jobless claims and building permits on Thu, consumer sentiment and home sales on Fri. All of these are leading indicators of an economic cycle.
More importantly, this week is VIX monthly expiration on Wed, and a big monthly options expiration on Fri. We covered this on Saturday, for our paid subscribers, concluding that it might be a very interesting setup for the QRA and FOMC at the end of the month.
The competition
A good start to the competition as well. Week 1 leaderboard is looking lively. Notice the scores these people got in their first week. The #1 ranked user, DamsJf, got the DJI, SPX and QQQ all within <0.1 point accuracy. Incredible! All the top 10 were within 1 point accuracy. Great job everyone! Hope it continues into the weeks ahead.
A quick reminder of what the competition is about.
You make predictions each week on where the S&P500, the Dow, the QQQ (NASDAQ 100 ETF), the VIX (volatility index), the AAPL stock, and the 10 year yield will end up by Friday 4pm ET of the same week.
Survey opens up each Tuesday at 8am ET, and closes at 8am ET on Wednesday. It’s all about where you think the market will end up, and where other people that you follow on social media or hang out with think the market will end up. A bit of wisdom of crowds. Our our survey website you have a video of me explaining how the whole thing works. Also, here’s Scott and myself guiding you through the new version of the survey that came out in Q3 last year.
It is great to start early and be consistent. Consistency is key in trying to win the competition and take home cash prizes. And these are not small. We allocate $5000 to the top 20 participants each quarter (so $20,000 in total, where each quarterly winner gets $1000), plus a 3% share of ORCA’s profits at the end of the calendar year to the annual winners.
As the fund grows its AUM, so will its prizes. Soon enough this will become a competition where you might earn yourself a nice additional income for 10-15 minutes of weekly predicting. And you’re following markets anyway, so why not give it a try?
Looking forward to having you on board!
Last week’s performance
After a rough start to the year, the markets once again pushed higher last week. The Monday rally basically annihilated all the downside from week 1. This continued further on Wednesday, and we were there to capture Wednesday’s mini rally. On Thursday, however, the hotter than expected CPI made a strong push down initially, only to see markets bounce back before the end of the day. Interestingly, this week the SPX tried to break 4,800 twice in a few days and failed. Looking like a big supply zone up there. Any sustainable break above is surely bullish in the short run. But failing to penetrate over and over is surely not.
For us, the Wed-Fri looked pretty sideways again, but we were able to benefit from an initial move in our direction immediately on Wednesday. Taking profits and raising stop losses on Thu morning before the CPI-induced sell-off made sure we locked the weekly gains at 1.6%. Given that markets ended up flat on both Thu and Fri, we are quite happy with how the week ended. A much better start of the year than last year, that’s for sure!
A lot going on this week, despite it being a day shorter. First of all, the data. Retail sales and industrial production on Wed, jobless claims and building permits on Thu, consumer sentiment and home sales on Fri. All of these are leading indicators of an economic cycle, so do pay attention to them. Some more earnings coming up; Goldman and Morgan Stanley come out today, with some more financials spread out during the rest of the week. Still no tech, that’s coming up the week after.
But perhaps most importantly this week is the VIX monthly options expiration on Wed, and a big regular monthly options expiration on Fri. We covered this on Saturday, for our paid subscribers, concluding that it might be a very interesting setup for the QRA and FOMC at the end of the month.
That’s what this competition is all about. Keep an eye on what might move markets in any given week, and think about how other people might react.
And good luck!
…join the $20,000 competition!
Join our survey competition to get an opportunity to participate in our quarterly ($5000) and annual (3% of our profits) prize distributions:
DISCLAIMER: Neither the survey nor any of the contents of this website can act as investment advice of any kind. The results of the survey need not correspond to actual market preferences or trends, so they should be interpreted with caution. Oraclum Capital, LLC (Henceforth ORCA) is a management company responsible for running the ORCA BASON Fund, LP, and for organizing a survey competition each week, where it invites the subscribers to its newsletter (this website) to participate in an ongoing prediction competition. The information presented on this website and through the survey competition should under no circumstances be used to solicit any investment advice, nor is it allowed to be of commercial use to any of its readers. The survey and this website contain no information that a user may use as financial or investment advice. All rights reserved. Oraclum Capital LLC.
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