With markets awaiting the US-China trade deal for the past 1-2 weeks, we finally got some news on that front. The details of the deal are still very unclear and vague, so we’re still analyzing the market response and how this will play out. Overall, it seems like both the US and China intend to put this thing to bed and move on. That will most likely mean a light deal to serve as an “off-ramp” for the whole trade war thematic. However, we’re not in the guessing headlines game, so we’re analyzing market responses and adjusting the portfolio accordingly.

Over the past 1-2 weeks, we have made some decent returns on a number of thematic and sector bets, including the financial sector, where we cashed in a nice profit. Our bet on the European digital defense sector is playing out very nicely overall, although we were caught in some short-term price action on parts of that bet. We’re still very bullish on that thematic going forward. On the other hand, we missed on a short bet into the US real estate sector, which didn’t play out as expected and was cut relatively quickly. Overall, our performance of just below 4% YTD is very satisfactory in the current environment, so we will continue to work our strategy and hopefully deliver more of the same.

Our current portfolio is comprised of the thematic bets discussed above – mainly European digital defense, but also bets on the uranium industry. Our models have pushed us to a couple of trend bets in certain sectors, most notably energy and crypto stocks as well as a bet on the Hang Seng. On FX, we are positioned long the USD which might benefit from a US-China trade deal in coming days.