Our January “12 Trades for H1” Review

See how our themes and trade ideas have played out halfway through the six months.

Back in January, we published ‘12 Trade Ideas For The First Half of 2024’. This included five main themes we thought would play out during the first six months of the year, along with a dozen ways to express such views.

At AlphaPicks, we don’t believe in just writing content and putting out trade ideas that we don’t hold ourselves accountable to. Evidence of this can be seen with our Global Asset Portfolio, which we are now making public so that you can see exactly what we are buying and selling.

Last Wednesday, we dropped our Q1 portfolio review. We returned 10.47% on capital invested, beating our benchmark by 5.38%. To see all the details, you can subscribe here:

This led us to want to review our January article halfway through the time period of the trades to grade ourselves on what we got right and what we got wrong. With no further delay, here’s the summary table of themes, ideas and our April grading:

What we got right

Two of our themes hit the ball out of the park. Our forecast for gold to outperform and for crypto to continue to rally was correct, as was our call for oil to move higher.

Gold

We flagged up that investors didn’t have to make things too complicated here, noting that “the cleanest and simplest way to join this train would be via a gold ETC. An example is the Invesco Physical Gold ETC (SGLP).” Below shows the strong correlation from the ETC to the underlying gold price, with both rallying over the past few months.

For the more sophisticated traders in our subscriber base, we offered out the below structure, which has hit the maximum payoff:

XAU/USD Seagull (6 month expiry, spot ref $2059)

Sell $2000 Put and receive 0.88&

Buy $2100 Call and pay 2.46%

Sell $2200 Call and receive 1.02%

Max payoff 4:1

Crypto

Although we don’t claim to be crypto traders in any form, the positive momentum with which we entered 2024 made us confident that it could keep going.

We noted down how we’d like to buy Coinbase to express this view, which we included in our portfolio and returned over 100% on the position.

Direct exposure to any top 10 market cap coin would have also delivered a very strong return so far this year.

We’re mindful that up ahead we have both the Bitcoin halving and some potential for a correction lower, so have taken profit on our Coinbase position and are now watching from the sidelines.

Oil

We noted in our January piece that “as flagged up in our Annual Outlook, we hold a bullish view on oil into 2024. We feel there are continued output cuts due from OPEC+, alongside the potential for further geopolitical shocks and higher demand from China.”

Both BP and Shell were two stocks we noted that should benefit and correlate well with our theme. Below shows the share price movements of both so far this year (in green), with gains evident particularly over the past couple of weeks.

With Brent above $90 on Thursday and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East still showing no signs of abating, we’re still bullish in the coming months on the commodity.

What we (sort of) got right

An old boss of mine in the City would often remind me that he’d rather be lucky than good. In that light, some of our trade ideas did perform well, but not for the reasons we were expecting.