Q1 in The Books.
That was the end of Q1 and it was not too eventful for my book aside from a few positions which I’ll get into.
My feel is that most of Q1 was a search for signals from the Fed and waiting on data to come out, at least that’s the feel from most managers that I got. The S&P500 was saved from taking out the yearly lows earlier in March which was a great save for most managers years considering the horrendous 2022.
Then there was this push to end the quarter, which was just pure manipulation, in my opinion. But manipulation is the name of the game anymore and when you look at the Feds battle against inflation it’s just not working. We get the data coming out pointing to that it remains steady, but the real number is likely north of +12% if they actually included the right numbers in CPI data.
These are certainly strange times given the fight against inflation and interest rates where they are. Yea, something finally broke and that started with these banks funding ponzi co’s from the last cycle.
Most of what I am looking for in my framework are dislocations, thematic tailwinds and select event-driven ideas and there was just not too much in Q1. In fact, I found myself trading more futures/futures options just to drive some cash flow for the book.
Real Estate Longs
I tried to step into some real-estate names in January. The NAIL ETF was up over +55% in January alone.
One thing that I like to do is build my own “ETFs” with select names and while NAIL was part of that idea so was RKT (look at the January return on this) and LEN - among some others.
But they stalled out as you can see at the end of January so testing that and cutting it was good for some coin. But the key, as I see it, is to try to catch inflections ahead of time and I might just revisit some of this again in Q2 starting with small positions.
PTON Short
Issue 6 in the TLV Report I discussed Peloton short. That was as clean as it get’s and I feel like that went under the radar by media/fintwit. The January rally allowed this shitco to pump and it traded down over -30% in just two weeks, more in the weeks following.
Financials
As for the rest of the banks, to be blunt, I could care less. They always tend to do dumb things and get bailed out in one way another so whatever. I was there in 08 watching these idiots blowing it all up and here we are again all because they couldn’t/wouldn’t hedge out risk so….
Schwab is a name I like and talked about here. There’s been a lot of cluster buys on this as of recent and earnings are coming up soon. Again, I don’t really like to invest into bank stocks for numerous reasons, but this presents an attractive opportunity. I cut my original long but below $45s this gets me interested again.
Concluding
As for what Q2 brings it’s like higher energy prices, gold to new highs and I hope, for the sake of my book, some more event-driven issues to get into. The market at large (buying it not buying it) is not my concern, sure, I’ll trade it but buying and holding standard names is not what I do.
There are also two new shorts that I’ve spotted, both of which, I think have great downside potential and are not widely discussed yet, so looking forward to that.
If you are a new reader to this blog or a past reader then you know that I decided to end TLV. I spun off The FANG Tracker portion of it. If that is of help to you, then you can get the subscription here.
But for now TLV will just be available to DeltaOne members and original subs. This let’s me get back to putting out research and ideas for those with larger accounts and those who are after longer duration (2-6 month) ideas.
Thanks for reading and I hope that Q2 is profitable for you!
Dan
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