Results: pushing higher
6.4% return in February, 8.8% YTD
Quick summary:
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Last week we made it to another all-time high, both for the markets and for ORCA. It was a week driven by PCE inflation on Thursday, with consolidating price action before the blow-off top on Friday.
We have closed February with a 6.4% return, and are now at 8.8% for this year.
After one full year of the ORCA fund, we are up 30% overall.
This week we get a bunch of labor market indicators, and we get Powell’s Congressional testimony on Wed.
On Saturday, we’ll do more of a review piece of our analyses thus far.
The competition
Great performance up top, once again. Still very interesting to see DJI and VIX precision slightly better than SPX and QQQ overall. The powerful moves up make it all the more difficult to predict, doesn’t it? Still, very happy to see excellent directional predictions.
Keep it up everybody! And remember, consistency is key to staying in the top. And good predictions, obviously.
NOTE: For all those new to the whole thing, read more about it here or watch a video of Scott and myself guiding you through the survey, showing you all its features, and briefly explaining how the competition works.
Last week’s performance
Another all-time high week, with the SPX closing above 5,130, already beating even the more optimistic analyst targets for this year. We talked about this on Saturday, and to what extent can the current rally be characterized as another bubble.
A relatively quieter earnings week still featured key reports from Salesforce and AMC on Wednesday, a positive surprise from Zoom boosting its shares by 11% in pre-market trading, followed by Lowe's and Macy’s results, with technology firms Dell and HP rounding out the week. The big event of the week, however, was PCE inflation on Thursday. Markets opened gap up, went negative intraday, but then opened up room for a gradual creep up throughout Friday, sending us again to a new ATH.
We played the BASON signal with call options, got ambushed a bit on Thursday, so we failed to live to our full potential last week, although we did close it just above 1% for the week. This wrapped up an excellent February for the fund, with a total 6.4% return. The year is looking good as well, we are now up 8.8% YTD, meaning that we are 30% up during our first full year of trading with the fund (Feb 2023-Feb 2024).
We’ll do a more detailed overview of all this at the end of Q1.
This week is lighter on earnings (mostly retail firms), but we do have a key event on Wednesday, when Jerome Powell testifies before Congress (10AM ET).
There is also a lot of labor market data: job openings on Wed, jobless claims on Thu, and non-farm payrolls and the unemployment rate on Friday.
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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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