Is now the time to ditch stocks and buy bonds? Gold? Should you just go to cash? These types of asset allocation decisions are hard enough in the calmest of times – and downright impossible when overwhelmed with fear and panic in times like the past few weeks as stocks have given back a good […]
Category: Markets
09
Mar
2020
Is $15 Crude Oil in the Cards?
On Wednesday. March 4th -April Crude Oil futures closed at 46.78, which left it down -22% on the year… not a good look. Monday, March 9th at 12:30 in the morning, Crude Oil was down -41.6% from that ugly close just 2 business days earlier, putting in a low at $27.34 !! Wow. That is […]
06
Mar
2020
Asset Class Scoreboard: February 2020
Well…that was a rude awakening. Volatility came back with a vengeance in Feb, logging the 5th worst VIX spike in the past 20 years. And it wasn’t just stocks… world stocks, real estate, and commodities all got smacked into the red. Coronavirus fears spiking, Presidential election twitter posts…..all the things we mentioned in our 2020 outlook […]
04
Mar
2020
How’s your (Alts) Portfolio Doing?
Last week was a great time to look in the (portfolio) mirror and ask yourself what you see. As Taylor Pearson of Mutiny put it succinctly on Twitter: If the stock market dropping 5% causes you to freak out, it’s probably a good time to re-evaluate either/both: 1. The effectiveness of your portfolio’s diversification 2. […]
27
Feb
2020
Protecting Against a Market Mutiny with Tail Risk, Convexity, & Long Vol on The Derivative
Has anyone been having fun the past few days? The “market”, as if there’s only one, has been in free-fall as the world tries to figure out what this Corona Virus will look like in terms of a possible global pandemic, down -8% in a week. That’s not a terribly huge move in the grand […]
25
Feb
2020
5th Biggest VIX spike past 20 years?
Did that feel like the 5th scariest day in the markets the past 20 years to anyone? Sure didn’t here in our shop, with groups like Breakout Funds, Deepfield, and others scoring gains on the Covid-19 fueled sell off. But the VIX saw it’s 5th largest spike on a daily basis in the past 20 […]
20
Feb
2020
January Manager Performance Snapshot
We field a bunch of calls at the start of each month asking how that hedge fund, this emerging manager, and that mutual fund did last month, and thought to simplify things for you with this categorized list of different alternative investment performance for the month gone by. Note: These performance numbers and calculations include […]
06
Feb
2020
Asset Class Scoreboard: January 2020
“And down goes commodities….early in the first round….” That’s no way to start a 12 round bout, but commodities go as crude oil goes , and energies were shooting down in January on the heels of economic and travel worries behind the Coronavirus scare. On the flip side, U.S. Stocks & U.S. Real Estate picked […]
04
Feb
2020
Move over Bitcoin – $TSLA is here
Maybe you’re one of those passive investors who doesn’t follow individual names… Maybe you’ve been stuck on an island talking to a volleyball. Whatever your reason – if you haven’t seen the price action in Tesla $TSLA shares this year – you’re missing one heck of a show. It’s like 400 million people in China […]
23
Jan
2020
First comes futures, then comes the Bitcoin options.
The CME is on a rolllll, launching their second new product in recent months (right behind the micro E-mini). In their words “…..in response to interest in cryptocurrencies and customer demand for tools to manage bitcoin exposure, CME options on Bitcoin futures (BTC) are now trading.” Many would say you can’t really have a successful […]
