The last weeks of the year are unlikely to see any new trends emerge, as the traders who did the best are probably already on holiday. So it was this week, with markets rejecting the idea that the Fed will forge their own path, and continuing to price 6 cuts for 2024.
This sent the Dollar lower, and gold higher, and made small cap stocks the outperformers again.
The only volatile day for markets was Wednesday, and FDX was the worst performing S&P 500 stock that day due to missing earnings. I guess this tells us that Santa doesn't use Fedex.
This probably wasn't the reason for the market sell-off on Wednesday however.
The significance of Wednesday could be that trades executed then settle today. If you just want to take profit on your magnificent 7 trade, then better to sell on Wednesday so that the cash hits your account before the holiday week.
If a price movement is the result of an uninformative order, then price should revert to prior levels, and that's exactly what happened.
Oil edged higher despite the rally in rates, as the ongoing disruption to Red Sea traffic increases demand from shipping. As yet this is a small move though, so the market evidently thinks that the situation will soon be resolved.
The laggard on the week were stocks in Hong Kong, which sold off today as a result of China announcing new regulations for gaming. The idea is to prevent people from becoming addicted to gaming and spending too much money on them. It is probably sound social policy, but Chinese stocks need all the help they can get, so the timing of the move seems poor.
We moved to cash in the Unbound Absolute Return Portfolio, leaving us with a gain of 159bps relative to cash for the year.
Another week of liquidity easing was again bad for the Unbound Asset Allocation Portfolio.
There were no outsized moves, but with more Fed cuts being the only significant driver for markets, every asset performed in line with the easing regime.
On the week the portfolio was down 42bps relative to benchmark, leaving it down just shy of 500bps for the year.
The 60/40 benchmark was up 15% though, so this still means that the portfolio was up 10% in nominal terms.
Our tactical equity portfolio was short consumer staples against energy.
Energy was the top performing sector on the week, but the moves were not large enough to overcome a horrible entry at the open on Monday, so for the week we actually finished down 2bps.
This meant that the portfolio closed the year up 77bps relative to SPY, and up 27% in nominal terms.
Benchmarked portfolios
Portfolio | Benchmark | Current Active Portfolio | Current week | YTD vs Benchmark | IR since inception |
Unbound Absolute Return | Cash | See below | -8bps | 159bps | 0.6 |
Unbound Global Asset Allocation | 60% ACWI, 40% AGG | -10% IVW, -10% IVE, 10% -10% ACWX, -10% AGG, -10% IAGG, 10% UUP | -42bps | -492bps | -0.5 |
Unbound Equity | SPY | -5% XLP, 4% XLE | -2bps | 77bps | 1.1 |
An archive of our prior weeks is available here.
Stock trades
In John's short term portfolio (Daily discussion on forum) we bought BABA on Monday.
Portfolio | Ticker | Date entered | Entry | Last close | Size |
Short term | NNDM | 4.62 (avg) | 2.40 | 100% | |
Short term | MDLZ (s) | 69.55 | 71.21 | 100% | |
Short term | BABA | 73.81 | 75.28 | 100% |
Closed trades year-to-date = 28
Closed trades that made money = 5
Closed trades that lost money = 15
Closed trades that broke even = 8
An archive of our closed trades is available here.