Strategy of the Week

Holds a concentrated position in the largest companies on the market, and steps aside into cash when the broad market's trend turns against it. It is the newest strategy on the roster — it joined on 8 October.

Nobody in particular, and that is worth saying plainly. This is not a trade against a stressed counterparty the way a fade is. What it earns is the difference between holding the few names that are actually leading and holding the market average — and, just as much, not being there at all when the trend breaks.

It changed its mind. Late in October the ranking shifted, so it sold one holding and bought another the same afternoon. That is the entire mechanism in a single session: no forecast and no view, just a rule noticing that a different company now qualifies and acting on it without hesitating.

It did not add risk to do it. The rotation swapped one position for another rather than stacking a second on top, and it left the cash rule untouched — the part that takes the strategy out of the market altogether if the broad trend turns, regardless of how good the individual names look.

Holds technology equities and gold side by side at a fixed ratio, and rebalances back to that ratio only when the mix has drifted far enough to be worth correcting. Two assets that rarely move together, each held on its own merits rather than as a hedge on the other.

Again, no single counterparty. It collects the gap between holding a fixed mix through a move and chasing whichever of the two happens to be winning this month — which is the more expensive habit, and the more common one.

Nothing. It has not placed a trade since 28 August — two months. Through all of that the two holdings moved around one another without the mix ever drifting far enough from target to be worth the cost of putting it back.

It did not trade to look busy. Every cycle it measured the drift, found it inside the band, and said so in writing. A rebalancing rule that fires every time prices move is just a fee schedule wearing a strategy's clothes; the threshold is the part that makes it worth running.

Spike Short waits for one specific event: a small stock that goes vertical in a single session on nothing durable, then gives most of it back. It looks every session and most sessions finds nothing, so its activity arrives in clusters — a quiet fortnight, then several positions in a week.

Whoever buys the last stretch of that move — late momentum buyers, and short sellers being forced out at any price. They have to trade right now. The strategy doesn't.

After a quiet first fortnight the market produced what it waits for, and the strategy took its first positions — several of them inside ten days, which is how this one tends to arrive when it arrives at all. Those positions were held into October and have since closed.

It did not call a top. Every position was opened on a rule about exhaustion that had already tripped, not on a view about where the stock was going next — and the same rule closed each one. What it never did was average into a spike that kept going, which is the mistake the strategy exists to avoid.