Global Macro Trading Journal

Daal said:
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It looks to me that what is going to make this SPY drop tough to portfolios is the fact that people are bleending from both sides of their books. Sometimes in 3 parts (stocks, bonds and gold). This was one of the reasons why I was preferring cash to bonds ever since Trump got elected. I was long bond futures recently but I got stopped out quickly after that. Thats why I didnt buy cash bonds but used futures instead, its a lot easier to bail out and admit you are wrong than if you own the actual bonds (and feel like its ok to lose money because 'you can hold to maturity').
I'm not sure where this carnage ends but it seems to me that there is potential for quite a bit of selling, maybe was much as we had earlier in the year
 
Daal said:
It looks to me that what is going to make this SPY drop tough to portfolios is the fact that people are bleending from both sides of their books. Sometimes in 3 parts (stocks, bonds and gold). This was one of the reasons why I was preferring cash to bonds ever since Trump got elected. I was long bond futures recently but I got stopped out quickly after that. Thats why I didnt buy cash bonds but used futures instead, its a lot easier to bail out and admit you are wrong than if you own the actual bonds (and feel like its ok to lose money because 'you can hold to maturity').
I'm not sure where this carnage ends but it seems to me that there is potential for quite a bit of selling, maybe was much as we had earlier in the year
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I dont expect a recession anytime soon so that could limit the decline. The median SPX decline outside a recession is -15%, the average is -19%
 
There is a potential short trade coming in terms of shorting Naz/QQQs into a big enough bounce with a stop at a logical resistance area and a target at this -15% median decline (and since QQQs are more volatile, the drop would be larger). Of course, its really hard to hold through the whole thing but the idea is that a big bounce in the market/QQQs could offer a highly skewded risk/reward trade if one is patient enough to wait for it and uses a good stop area. As Tencent shows, when the tech market turns, the fundamentals dont really matter and things get pounded hard
That said, chasing a short into market weakness I think its a mistake. I will be patient for some sort of bounce so my risk reward is clearly defined and good
 
Buffett bought BRK shares at ~$205 (my estimate) according to his interviews and PRs after they announced the new buyback program. He has ~$80B in cash to buyback stock. The stock right now is at $206, so its an interesting situation. Of course, his estimate of intrinsic value can be revised down if things change (like stocks declining) but given that the bulk of the worth is in private business which are very unlikely to be marked down, the stock right now is an interesting opportunity
 
Its not really macro but it does contain some market knowledge its good to be aware of. I wrote an article talking about the differences between the open, close and mid-day periods
http://www.beathft.com/?p=164

Some results from the backtest
-As a block, the mid-day period (often hated by day traders) has more of the daily range and volume than the open or close
-Its very easy to manipulate backtests to support whatever you are trying to prove
-The close and the open do 1.5-2x the range and 2x volume of the mid-day period, if you adjust by time passed. Its like trading on fast foward, wheareas mid-day is like trading on slow motion
 
Lots of perma option sellers are lured into the strategy because of its 'positive expectation', they will read studies on why options are consistently 'overpriced' and hence think that its a great deal to sell them. I did a little monte carlo simulation on a normal trading system vs a typical option selling type system. I then compared how one stacked up against the other.

System 1
50% chance of a -1 return
50% chance of a +2 return
1 trade per time period

System 2
97.6% chance of a +1 return
2.3% chance of a -20 return
1 trade per time period

The systems both have the same expected value (roughly), so in theory they are the same but in practice they are completely different. The risk adjusted returns of System 1 just blows System 2 out of the water.

I did several simulations of 2000 trades each. These are the results for System 1. MAR is CAGR/MAX DrawDown. Bet size is 2% of the account (a typical rule of thumb used by traders)
upload_2018-10-12_7-59-53.png


System 2 using 2% bet size

upload_2018-10-12_8-1-35.png


Risk adjusted returns are a lot better on System 1.
I guess this explains why options are 'overpriced'. Option sellers extract expected returns at the cost of ruining their risk adjusted returns (and maybe their health).
There is no free lunch in selling options, most of the financial world runs on risk adjusted returns (like hedge funds), most people can't tolerate certain drawdowns without going crazy/killing themselves, lots of traders would be fired if they used something similar to system 2.
The cost of going against convexity is worse risk adjusted metrics, so that leads one to believe that the benefit of adding convexity is an improvement in risk adjusted metrics. Effectively, buying options can be a way of juicing one's performance metrics. This shows that folly of 99% of ET traders looking to sell options (like Sweet Bobby), they are trying to come up with a system that already has something bad going against it. Why choose from a system pool so severely disvantaged? System 1 type system pool has several things going for it, its a lot better pool to choose from

conclusion: Dont add anti-convexity bets into a portfolio unless you really know what you are doing. Expectation has nothing to do with it, its about the payoff distribution over a long enough period of time
 

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I guess some people are drawn to these option systems because
1) They dont have the confidence that they can find other positive expectation systems. They dont feel competent or motivated enough to find/develop them so they just stick to the first simple system that they can find and understand
2) They are seduced by the relative 'smoothness' of the equity curve. The high win rates. The K-Ratio measures equity curve smoothness. System 1 has a avg 0.64 K-Ratio after 20 trials of 2000 trades each, System 2 had a 0.71. That combined with the high win rate attracts a lot of suckers
 
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Currency and coins per capita have grown at a CAGR of 6.25% since 1965. Kinda interesting, you would think that because of debit/credit cards and things like paypal it would have grown less
 
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