Been a long time! Seems to happen like that with posting and my personality for some reason. I asked my friend to force me to post more often with a prop bet. It’s a good historical record of my trading and life journey and it seems to be appreciated by others. So, I guess I’ll be posting more often! I’ll do separate posts for my trading thoughts and my one for each of my recent travels. We had several big trips including a big European road trip (the first since pre Covid!) which was once a yearly thing.
After a rocket of a year in 2022 posting a gross of 59%, the fund return has slowed a bit during the first half of 2023 but it has picked up in the last 45 days or so. I still expect to end the year around 25-30% gross which with the environment shift and slow start would be an excellent result. Slow periods happen in all trade variants and is to be expected. We’re mitigating drawdown and managing risk. We took a bit of a hit in March doing just that but it’s better than the alternative.
We back-tested the period from Jan 1 to Aug 1 of 2023 to see if it matched our live results and it was the same result. Just a slower period for the style of trades. The environment is transitioning from the bearish year of 2022 and the bottom part of the option chain is starting to normalize to pre-covid era. Owning that part of the chain can cause a drag. Just a guess.
You can see the flatness of returns from 2023 in the equity curve of a very similar representation of the strategies below.
The mastermind group has really seen an uptick in development with the advent of automated backtesting via mesosim and other products. We’re seeing a large growth in crowd sourced RnD amongst the group. A lot of smart people are putting their heads together to create very exciting trades and trade types. This can provide for very exciting diversification opportunities, which is what I am all about. It should be quite interesting times ahead with trade development. My workload will no doubt go up as I investigate various changes to trades and research new trade types.
The fund structure is now US registered and we’re able to accept US investors which was a very arduous and complicated process.