First Thing

Down 1.3% at the open, despite having taken a bracing position. Didn’t want to go completely market neutral as I believe that this market has further to fall.

As of 09:15:

• Bought 1 DX by accident. Was trying put on a stop, but didn’t change it from the default order type of limit, so it executed immediately. At least at market price. Worried that the USD will be ‘unexpectedly’ resilient because the Fed still keeps monetary policy too tight, relative to ECB,
• BTP bought, stop triggered
• SPI sold, price action, China exposure
• SX7P, extended position. Thesis is that as US rates go down, ECB be forced to go more negative, which has bad impact on EU banks, which are already pretty weak,
• UB fut. sold. UB spiked really, really high yesterday (>240!) so this is a punt on the Fed triggering proper inflation. Don’t know what this price is as a yield, but has to be way less than 2%!
• DAX sold, stop triggered
• DX stopped out (earlier)
• GE future (Eurodollar, not equity)) bought. Price is scarily high, but this is a direct bet on US rates going to zero.
• 10:21: (I wrote and installed a python macro to insert a timestamp in Notepad++. Yay!)
• 10:22: losses shrink to 0.3% so I’m leaving off any trades for now
• 10:29: P&L goes green. You sell another UB and R future. Market is expecting stimulus. You are now using $30K of margin on your UB position.
• 11:00: decided to sell BTP. It has jumped a lot. Italy is still a mess. I am now up 1%.
• 17:31: wild ride in afternoon. Initially showed losses of $91K: about 10%. This went right down to $20K. It then shot up again. Stocks bounced a long way back from their lows yesterday. Probably I should have closed all positions, but I am sure we have not finished with the drop. Anyhow, nothing much I can do now apart from hold on until tomorrow. I am still up a lot over 2 days but it shows how much really violent moves can bounce the next day.