RIBALD FAILURE

I’d like to offer excuses for my ill performance, capping out the summer without style.I finished the month +0.55%, followed by July’s +1.68%, and June’s +7.62%, clearing about 10% for the entire summer. On the surface it seems like an ok and genteel return. After all, one is busy during the summer and junior is inexorably at the trading turret. Everyone knows the real trading starts in September, after fund managers come back home after a sojourn into depravity and snowy nights on the beaches of NY and Rhode Island.

I tried hard today and really hyper-fixated but still came up short, down 66bps. I went breakeven for a minute and then the market crushed lower at 3:30, forcing me to acquiesce. I ended with a pastiche of SAAS IPOs and some old man stocks. I am torn between wanting the market to totally capsize and my desire to trade in a good tape. This has not been a “good” tape to trade and hasn’t been since February. That doesn’t mean you can’t trade well — it only means the difficulty level is higher. Hence, someone like me, a consummate professional, can only muster 10% over a 3 month stretch, harpooned over and over and hamstrung by discipline and PTSD from previous market crashes that dissuades me, eternally, from taking too much risk.

On the other hand, my Quant gained more than 5% for August, stretching gains to over 28% for the year. This investment process is simple and clean. I will be selling all current Quant positions tomorrow and re-allocating the same day, using the Stocklabs algorithms and some fundamental criteria I favor for the selections.

My trading positions at the close were: BASE, HVBT, BBIG, TNA, KMB, PEP, HSY, TASK, QCOM, BLL, KR, CFLT, DOCS.