Half Yearly Report 2025!

Whether you have been in markets for a very long time or a short period, you will have to agree with us that it has been a wild year with twists and turns of unimaginable proportions.

Nevertheless, we have successfully navigated the chaos. As a result, it has been the best H1 since the inception of our Model Portfolio, thanks to our stupendous returns from Thematic Investing bets, buying the dip across equities, and some notable jackpots, such as capturing the Silver and Oil bull run/breakouts.

We are up by more than 16.5% YTD in comparison to the benchmark’s 14.39% return.

PS: Benchmark is 60% MSCI ACWI and 40% Bloomberg Global Aggregate rebalanced monthly.

We are making public our trade book (all closed trades).

Overall, we executed 23 trades in H1 (excluding 6 open positions), resulting in 6 losses and 17 gains.

The accuracy has been 74% with average gains of 8.65% and average loss of 3.84%.

We encountered numerous narratives, the tariffs saga, multiple wars and elevated volatility. However, thanks to our disciplined approach we were able to overcome all the obstacles and limit our drawdown during the April madness.

We experienced a maximum drawdown of -2.53% (due to our high cash holding at that time), compared to -5.55% for our benchmark.

As of 31st May, the average macro hedge fund return was just 3.4%, and thus we have achieved industry-beating returns in H1.

Source: Aurum

Let’s discuss the asset class performance and also look at some of the macro data released this week.

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Equities!

Our Thematic Investing bets have been outperformers with Thematic Investing Part-1 & Thematic Investing- Part 2 (focused on Aerospace & Defence) benefiting significantly from the rising geopolitical skirmishes globally.

Furthermore, the focus on nuclear energy by President Trump and a general nuclear renaissance wave among countries such as Canada, Japan, and select European countries has led to significant gains for us, as we had bottom-fished the flagship Uranium ETF (URA) during the chaos surrounding Liberation Day.

There were two stocks that we selected from Thematic Investing Part 1 and 2. We have exited both stocks now. The first one (we traded twice) for a total gain of 96% and 60%, and the second one for a total gain of 68%.

Nonetheless, the basket (equal-weight) has delivered a return of 107% since inception, compared to a 65% return for the benchmark ITA ETF.

Thematic Investing-Part 3 focused on the luxury theme. We were unable to buy the two stocks we selected due to valuation concerns. Nevertheless, the basket is up 54% since its inception, compared to a return of 6.6% for the benchmark LUX ETF.

Thematic Investing-4 focused on the clean energy and green transition. One stock overlapped from Thematic Investing 1 and 2 (nuclear bet), and the other stock was added to the PF. The stock is up 17%.

Thematic Investing-5 focused on the upcoming Capex boom in the AI sector. We are pleased to inform you that we published it in March, just as the AI names experienced significant drawdowns. However, we used the opportunity of the Liberation Day drawdown to buy our Thematic Investing-5 bet, and we are up by more than 45% on the bet.

Overall, after booking profits, we still have 6.7% exposure to the Thematic Investing names.

We will likely buy more if the valuations are comfortable (the target remains 15% of the total allocation).

For paid subscribers who made money buying these names, we have some good news as we are working on a Thematic Investing-6 write-up which will focus on the modern warfare (rare earth metals, drone technologies, electronic warfare etc); and most probably be out in July/August.

Let’s now discuss the open positions and our equity book in detail.