Statements were posted yesterday evening – we finished down for the month of August unfortunately due to some bullish option bets we made in crude oil. Our models indicated a very favorable return distribution for crude oil trading back above $100 that simply did not work out. Those trades had a 59.77% probability of working with a 2.8 to 1 payout. Give us a thousand of those opportunities and we take all of them. Probability theory is our religion, and we follow the statistics. As of this writing, crude oil is back below $90 so we manage our risk and move on. Our core futures model traded well despite the seasonally slow period of August or the “summer doldrums” as it’s well known in Wall St circles. We certainly saw spurts of volatility throughout the month but overall, August was consistent with its seasonal pattern. Post Labor Day – markets will be firmly focused on mid terms elections and as we’ve stated before we will see a significant amount of volatility this fall.
Also note, we’ve been busy updating our co-located servers at the exchange and have even had some consultations with running our orders through an FPGA (field programmable gate array). Essentially a fancy mechanism for increased order routing speed and reliability for attaching automated orders to our signal generation. It’s been a months long project. Once we get past this, we’re going to share some data/analytics on the site which unfortunately we haven’t been able to get to yet. Stay tuned and have a fantastic Labor Day weekend!
PS: Here’s our model on that pesky crude oil and the forward-looking return distribution!
