Stats given cover closed trades for the 30th July - 5th August
My total realized profit from the past week is 0.06% Overall the portfolio is down4.42%
Profitable trades closed: 35
Unprofitable trades closed: 6
Most traded instrument: $AMD (7 Trades)
The second big week of earnings saw sizeable moves in the Nasdaq with several stocks of ours performing well, but some more disappointing. There is an elephant in the room this week, with 3 of my closed trades responsible for holding us back from a realised profit above 1%. Twitter and GoPro. The first was an additional position I opened ahead of earnings (which followed Facebook and dropped by over 25% from it’s high’s a week ago). GoPro are the ones that I’m disappointed in myself with. Ahead of earnings I was shorting with several positions with the plan of closing before the market closed, but when it was down by around 8% it didn’t feel right to close and I took the risk of holding through their earnings. When a company has been dropping for several years the downside potential diminishes and upside potential increases. As a result I was caught out by their strong earnings and the positions took a 30%+ hit.
As with last week we had a whole heap of earnings calls, again I am collecting my thoughts on everything and will dump it all into a post eventually, some of the earnings are mentioned throughout the post as well.
Huge news this week as the ICE are looking to setup an ecosystem for trading Bitcoin derivatives. This is probably big enough to be its own news piece - I have some negative feelings about this, as does the overall market which dropped upon the news. That said, this is a big project with the head of the NYSE at the helm. Not only that but both Microsoft and Starbucks have been onboarded as clients. It does not mean Starbucks are accepting Bitcoin, contrary to popular belief. However they certainly seem to be interested in it, and it can’t be a bad sign. Similar to the CBOE, this is a futures market, however the key difference is that the contracts look likely to be settled in BTC, not the USD. This, combined with leverage means there is a real possibility of decoupling between BTC and the market at some point as the exchange is potentially unable to payout on trades that simply are not backed by real Bitcoin. This is where my disappointment comes in, as it is the same thing which led to many market crashes in the past, including 2008/9. Hopefully I can find time to write a bit more about this in the future.
Cryptos
$BCH - Two shorts, minor profit, we’re getting closer to that 5.5k-6k range on Bitcoin again, so I’m happy to take the small profits and await better opportunities.
Stocks $NVDA - One trade, 4% profit, earnings are approaching and I actually ended up increasing my position here after some digging. I’m confident that NVDA has the GPU market on lock-down as AMD focus on consoles and their CPU’s, expecting reasonable earnings but diminished sales from crypto mining.
$FB - Two trades, 1% and 2.6%, just trading the bounce, I think it has further to climb, but most funds are tied up elsewhere.
$GPRO - Five trades, three small profits wiped out by two 31% losses, disappointed with myself on taking such a risk with leveraged trades, it killed my mood for the week.
$ATVI - One trade for minor profit, closed before earnings. (Which were pretty dull, but we are positioning for Q3).
$TSLA - One trade of 4.3%, with an absolutely amazing earnings and a great call, well worth a listen. Tesla look to be broadly back on track as the risks subside. They still have a lot of work to do, but the team were extremely confident in Tesla reaching positive cashflow this year.
$SNE - Two trades, 0.07% and 2.7% profit, a brilliant earnings from Sony as well, but there are some concerns around their mobile section, I’ll likely remove it from my portfolio soon.
$SHOP - Two trades, 2.1% profit and 8.3% loss, the loss was necessary to free up funds for trades elsewhere, but Shopify still look strong to me and their earnings call was positive overall.
$AMD - Seven trades, five in minor profit and two at around the 23% mark. What a crazy earnings call, the best in 7 years. After plugging away researching and backing AMD for a few years now I feel gutted to have missed the full potential of their rally to $20, but I did some strong trades here that I’m very happy with on an individual basis. I will stick to trusting my fundamentals over the clearly manipulated price in future.
$FSLR - One trade, 2.3% loss, lackluster earnings, so I figured I’d free up some cash for a reasonably small loss.
$SQ - Five trades, three minor profit, one at 3.3% and another at 8.8%, epic earnings again for Square and they remain a focus of my portfolio. That big Crypto number I wanted was around 2x what it was last quarter, insane growth. Square are re-investing in the business very heavily right now to seize more opportunities that they have their sights on.
$MSFT - Two trades, both at 4%, just taking some profits.
$TRIP - One trade, 17.9% loss, I took a risk on their earnings and it backfired. My track record with them isn’t great, I’ll steer clear of travel stocks for a while I guess.
$TWTR - One trade, 28% loss, it was worth taking the loss as there were so many more trading opportunities ahead to use the funds in.
$SEDG - Three trades, minor to small profit, took profits ahead of mediocre earnings, similar to FSLR.
$NSDQ100 - One trade, minor profit, traded the bounce.
$SNAP - Two shorts, one at 4%, one at 8%, well, it was fun while the option to short was available, but again it has disappeared from eToro, Snapchat earnings are approaching and I still have two shorts open.
$SPOT - One trade, minor profit
Looking Forward
We are almost done with earnings, a few big ones for us remain, $ETSY $DIS $SNAP $NVDA being the more notable ones. We still saw a realised profit despite a few bad trades this week, I’m hoping to hit it green again this month. As always, comments and questions are welcome!