top of page
Jay Smith

eToro Update - Week 33 2018


Stats given cover closed trades for the 13th August - 19th August

My total realized profit from the past week is -2.82% Overall the portfolio is down 3.82%

Profitable trades closed: 9

Unprofitable trades closed: 10

Most traded instrument: $BTC (5 Trades)

A really tough week this week. We suffered further drawdown in cryptos as they bounced off 6k for the 2nd time. I also closed a few positions in a couple of cryptos resulting in heavy realised losses. I shifted those funds towards XLM, EOS and IOTA (added today), and used them to earn some small profits elsewhere in crypto during the week. We also suffered from the drama surrounding $TSLA, as detailed below. This wiped out the profits we made from them last week and again pushed us a little lower for realised profit. $NVDA also dropped slightly despite a reasonable earnings call. A painful week with several surprises

$TSLA has gone through an insane roller coaster over the last few weeks. Although we made some profits on the way up following their strong earnings, we lost more as we still had exposure on the way down. I put together a small chart with a timeline of the major events in a separate post on eToro if you are interested to take a look. I am now very unsure on $TSLA both in the short term and long term, so took the decision to remove all exposure until things are less murky

$NVDA had a good earnings overall, with a substantial miss on crypto, as expected. There is good news here though. They have now removed crypto entirely from their forecasts, I believe prematurely. Cryptos such as NEO, EOS, Cardano, DASH etc will increasingly be looking towards $AMD and $NVDA for server-grade hardware in the future which could again impact earnings of these companies. Today, $NVDA also chose to unveil their new Turing architecture. As expected Ray Tracing is the buzzword and the GTX series has been rebranded to RTX accordingly. $NVDA appear to have stuck with their strategy of between 30-50% performance improvements with the Ti card breaching the $1000 price point. Nvidia is in full control of this market and expect these cards to go down well as gamers who were unable to get cards 6 months ago who then decided to wait another generation now have the perfect excuse to upgrade their hardware

Venezuela and the Petro made headlines again this week. Venezuela took the extraordinary decision to increase minimum wage by around 3000%, pegging it with the Petro. Only a few months ago I did some digging on the Petro only to see almost zero usage, under 100 wallets, all with vast sums. So far it appears this currency has not been distributed to the population. Overall it appears that the population in Venezuela is continuing to reject anything lead by the government at this point, instead continuing to invest in Nano, $DASH and $BTC. The situation really is tragic, and unfortunately cryptos are still not quite to the level they need to be to truly offer a strong alternative as a currency. That being said, it has proven to be an effective store of value, even during the bear market of 2018

Cryptos

$EOS - Two trades, one at 1.8% profit, the other at 7.7%. Pretty content with these trades, one was sold perfectly at the top. Day trading crypto is very difficult given the large spreads, regardless I was happy to seize this opportunity

$BTC - Five trades: +2.5%, -6.2% (short position that moved against us), -64%, -64%, -4%

$BCH - One short, 5% profit. Again, I’m content with this given how difficult short-term trading is for crypto

$ETHEREUM - Three trades, +3.5%, -53.76%, -73.8%. The two major losing positions were closed up above $290 ahead of a substantial drop. My ethereum exposure was still feeling a little uncomfortable

$LTC - One short position for 5.2% profit

Stocks $TSLA - Two trades, -16% and -13%, another still to be closed. The latest episode in the Tesla drama really hit us hard, wiping out the gains we made during the pump a week ago and a little more on top

$SQ - Two trades, 13.8% and 1.4% profit, just more profit taking to re-enter at lower prices. Square is on fire with the Cash App at 30M+ downloads now

$SNAP - Closed my final short for a loss of 3.9%, after listening to the earnings call it seems that perhaps my favourite stock to short is no longer such a safe option. I’m fine with this loss given our results on Snapchat over the past year

$FSLR - One trade -22.1%, Freeing up a little more cash, FSLR and SEDG are both likely to take some time to recover

$TTWO - 1.4% gain on one short-term trade

Looking Forward

$NVDA’s new GPU benchmarks should be released over the coming weeks and will give a good indication of where they sit in the market and the demand we can expect Gamescom is taking place this week, $ATVI usually releases some big news/updates at the event. Likewise we will see first plays for many major upcoming titles across the games industry

As always, comments and questions are welcome!


174 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Q2 Performance Update & Q&A

--Q2 Performance Update & Q2 Q&A-- Hi everyone, It's that time again! Yesterday I presented my Q2 Performance Update via eToro to invited...

Adding funds to my eToro account

<IMPORTANT UPDATE> Hi everyone, today’s update is not about trading, but about your copies, the eToro popular investor program and adding...

bottom of page