Give Me A Break
On A Winning Streak But Can’t Stop Losing
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been absolutely on fire at the moment. If you’ve been following this Substack, you’ll know that I’ve hardly placed a foot wrong on my calls recently.
After a short break, I picked up writing again in early January, and made several big calls.
My broadest was my Long UK call, on 17 Jan – taking a bullish outlook on gilts, sterling, and UK equities (FTSE 250), somewhat bold given gilts and sterling often travel in opposite directions. The chart below shows our success, with wins across the board. Even looking beyond the dollar, sterling has outperformed against the euro (up 1.9% since 17 Jan), which was our preferred pair for the view given uncertainty on the dollar with recent rates repricing.
We also put out a short Tesla long NASDAQ relative value call on 1 February, citing: Multiples on TSLA are insane, Musk is doing the most on DOGE and is doing it haphazardly - the Musk premium might quickly become a Musk discount. Since then, TSLA has traded down from USD404 to USD356. Since then, the NASDAQ has also trended up. Win on both legs - result.
We’ve also had some smaller wins elsewhere, seeing upside on EURUSD, EURCHF, and USDTRY in line with prior calls (see my Linkedin feed), and even the few places where our views haven’t worked out, we’ve largely seen sideways trading. For instance, this rant on 30 Jan about how stupid it was to reflexively follow the Fed, calling for a reversal in rate repricing after another major market overreaction to hawkishness from Jay Pow with rates largely sideways since then. Our bearish S&P 500 call from 5 Feb is a little in the red, but really not by much.
The wins have been really winning and our losses haven’t really been losing.
I bet you’re wondering why I’m being such a knob and blowing my own trumpet so much at this point? Well done, we get it, you’re great whatever – prick.
The point of this post is to point out the ridiculous situation I’ve been in where I’ve been completely right on pretty much all of my views, but I’ve completely botched the execution of everything, and my brokerage account is in the red since the start of 2025.
It’s actually incredible how I’ve managed to piss this up. Look at these losses since the start of the year (I left off the wins, the few ones that there were… cry). The biggest one was the second leg of our Tesla trade (with the Tesla long up GBP258) so that’s fine but wtf are the rest? Most of these I didn’t have a semi-decent view on or I managed to lose money on a winning idea by putting my stops too close and leverage too high (I was gambling).
I need some accountability. Which is where you guys come in. I’ve made the decision to start publishing my trading account on this blog. This means that before I put on a trade, I can stop for a second and think whether I’d be embarrassed putting out in public the trade before I put it on.
Me and this account have been through some emotions together. I put £5000 in it in April 2024, and successfully took my capital down to £4250, before figuring out what I was doing, scrapping my way to £5900. Then I thought I knew better, I was probably bored and I have essentially gambled that number back down to £5230.
So enough is enough, I’m going to make some money off my macro ideas, and I’m going to be accountable, to you. Hopefully you find this entertaining/pity me enough to read this sob story.
So where are we now? Well, as of February 18, we’ve had a terrible day, down £208 that it would have been great not to have lost. We lost it through lack of discipline, oversized positions, and gambling (we got short MSTR then back out again within 20 minutes for a £34 loss- what?).
In terms of open positions, we’re long spot gold, 3 x £1 contracts, up £80.
We like long gold with structural buying from central banks, geopolitical/policy risk, debasement/inflation risk, and we like that gold didn’t suffer as yields climbed over recent years or in H2 2024 as might have usually been expected. If yields climb again, it’s probably on debasement risk which sees gold do well again. I’m seeing win-wins here, with according to some the main risk here being that Bitcoin takes gold’s place as the ultimate global safe haven (hahahahahahah what).
I don’t have an explicit price target (which is probably not good practice) but we’ll get there - I want to see how things behave if we get through 3,000. We have staggered stops, at 2888 (below the round number at 2900) and 2857 (below 12 Feb lows).
What else do we like? Still gilts up, long UK equities, stronger sterling (vs EUR especially). We like USDTRY up but intraday only as we don’t want to hold overnight and pay carry, and we also like EURUSD up too. I could probably make an argument about lower US yields too, but I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about fully there yet and you know what we said about gambling…
So there’s a blitz through the background and some current views. In future editions, I’ll be focussing a lot more on the macro outlook and my current views, but for now, so long!
JB Macro is my blog, where I splurge out my brain (normally) once a week. I’m building a following for my passion, writing about economics and markets, and I would love to have you on board. Please consider pressing the subscribe button below (it’s free!!). Thank you, James.
This newsletter is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest. The views expressed herein are the opinions of JB Macro exclusively. Readers should conduct their own research and consult with professional advisors before making any investment decisions.