A Review of 2023
Portfolio Performance, Trading Strategy and General Thoughts
👋 Hey there, Pedma here! Welcome to the 🔒 exclusive subscriber edition 🔒 of Trading Research Hub’s Newsletter. Each week, in this series, I share my personal trading experiences and journey, offering you the behind the scenes into how I manage my own portfolios, my trading performance, new research for trading strategies and general content aimed at helping traders with the experience I’ve accumulated for the past 6 years.
My mission is full transparency by building a public track record of my performance. As I navigate through the markets, I'll be sharing every step of the journey – the ups, the downs, and everything in between. It's not just about trading; it's about growing together as a community.
Thoughts About 2023
The year of 2023 has been of exponential growth to me. Not because of the returns I’ve had but because of the experience and knowledge I’ve gained this year. We can never know for sure if the knowledge we build up is useful, unless we get direct feedback from the practise of the knowledge we gained. If that practise leads to a successful outcome, then it’s useful knowledge. The markets are one of the most efficient machines at giving direct feedback for your ideas. If your ideas suck, you will pay the price to the market. It’s simple as that.
It’s funny to think about how I thought about markets even just 2 years ago and how different I think about them today. That is both funny and interesting to me. I am happy to think that myself 2 years ago was somewhat naive. It shows to me significant growth acquired through countless hours of banging my head against the wall. I am an eternal student of the game, and the game has taught me that remaining the student, is the optimal way for exponential growth.
2023 started slow to me. Looking back, I was still doing a lot of “dumb” stuff at the start of the year that I wouldn’t consider a good business decision now. Don’t get me wrong, my net worth in crypto has been steadily rising since I’ve basically started trading this sector, but I still needed some upgrades to how I approached risk.
A never ending curiosity into what can be improved in your game is what you need to succeed in this business. Like a master playing chess. There’s no end game here, only the endless pursuit of excellence. That’s what we, aspiring great traders, should always seek.
When I started out I didn’t even knew how to properly work excel. It took me countless hours to get me where I am at. If I charged normal rates for those hours I’ve spent studying the markets and improving my skills, I’d have a small fortune on my hands. But that’s what it takes. A relentless attitude towards self-improvement and the betterment of your skills. If I, a kid without proper education was able to get here, I think that anyone can get there, and further, if they apply themselves with the proper attitude towards learning this business.
You can get faster by going to traders with actual track records and ask them about what they do. Most of them will be pretty secretive but might offer some advice on how to get there instead of a direct solution, which is fine. We must understand that this business is highly secretive because if you have a strategy that works, you don’t want to be handing it out freely. Imagine that you discovered that someone in your region sold an item for 50% less than market rate, and you could get that item reliably, and sell it fast to a consumer at retail prices. Would you go around in your town tell everyone about it? Or would you be more secretive, take advantage of that market inefficiency for as long as you can until it stopped working? Same with trading. Strategies have limited capacities and if enough people pile into them, they tend to stop working.
Anyways I got a bit off topic here, here’s some of the summarized stats for my performance in 2023:
Total Returns: 70%
Win Rate: 41%
Ratio of Average Win to Average Loss: 3.49
Average Holding Period: 13 days
Annualized Sharpe: 2.75
Longest Drawdown: 33 days
Max Drawdown: 12.57%
I am very happy about these results. I didn’t expect to be this much to be honest with you so it was a nice surprise when the market started to trend. This is a key aspect to any trading business. It’s not like other businesses where you can make a decent forecast of returns for next quarter or year. The market will ebb and flow between regimes that favor your system and they can’t be predicted. This is also one of the reasons I don’t make myself yearly return goals. That doesn’t make any sense. My yearly goal is to merely beat, on a risk adjusted basis, the benchmark which I am using against my own performance. That’s my yearly performance goal.
My Largest Trades in 2023
Asset: HIFIUSDT
Total Return: 223%
Asset: FRONTUSDT
Total Return: 181%
Asset: AKROUSDT
Total Return: 176%
Asset: SOLUSDT
Total Return: 108%
Asset: INJUSDT
Total Return: 87%