YTD - April 2026

April review

Up 0.02% (lol), bringing YTD returns to 76.81%.

The portfolio was down for most of the month, but eventually came around, closing at breakeven. The max drawdown was approx 10%, and actually started from end-March to mid-April. I missed the rebound in the indices completely due to my bearish bias. Biggest losing position was trying to short the indices. Various other losses were due to impatience - such as trying to catch the bottom in energy names. These were offset by gains in commodities (brent, corn, wheat, sugar) and chemicals.

Some thoughts

• I was too bearish on the global economy, and missed the signs that the indices wanted to go higher. Not the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last - but this is an area where I need to be more flexible.
  • I had some gains from ES puts bought near the start of the war, when the trade was more asymmetric (i.e. muted market response despite what was to me very negative news). Soon after I closed that trade out, I got short again on the bounce, which in hindsight, had much less favourable r/r.
  • I wasn't even thinking of getting exposure or watching themes with relative strength during the pullback (i.e. memory, neoclouds). This is something I will be working on in the coming months.
• It's best to not bet against the government, no matter how little it makes sense to me.
  • Some examples:
    • When oil futures spiked and collapsed, and many oil market professionals / traders expressed disbelief at where prices were.
• Constant jawboning by the US administration to push markets up
• Related: PTJ's comments from his recent interview come to mind. The idea of not fading governments will work until it doesn't, and key is obviously to be mindful enough of when things may be reversing course. But my general idea is that it is probably easier to go with trends than to fade them - especially when said trends are driven by government policy / political necessity.
• If I really want to bet against them, I should at least wait for technicals.
• Prior to the war, it felt like there were more themes to trade. Precious metals, industrial metals, chemicals, energy - all had their own drivers and reasons to move, and they weren't always correlated. Since the war started, it feels like their correlations have all moved much closer to one. This has reduced a bit as the war has dragged on, probably due to the market starting to realize and price in longer term supply chain impacts that can't be easily undone. For the most part though, it feels like there are now 2 types of positions - war-on vs war-off. On one side, there's energy, chemicals, and anything that will benefit from shortages caused by the war. On the other side, everything else, together with, surprisingly, gold. While I know this is an oversimplification, and that there are names with catalysts independent of the war, I have not been tracking them, and this has revealed a weakness in my approach to finding names to trade. As mentioned above, it is a wake up call to start broadening my trading universe.
• As I consolidated accounts at the start of April, I am still adapting to the larger nominal P&L swings, and will need time to adjust. Sticking to percentages is easier said than done, but I am confident that I will adapt soon.
• It has been a very headline and social-posting driven market. Many of which were actually just lies, used to manipulate price action. Being aware of this, I probably should have been more nimble and been content closing out trades with smaller profits - at least until the dust settled and it started to become more apparent that the market no longer reacted any more.

Summary

I could have done better this month, but am grateful that I managed to claw my way back from the 10% drawdown. While I think I read parts of the market and geopolitical events well, a lot of events in the past couple of months have been unprecedented, and threw off my mindset and trading process. I also think I complicated things by thinking about fundamentals more than I should have, instead of putting more emphasis on price action. A lot of work to do. Looking forward to the next month!