Where We Go From Here
It’s been a quiet couple of months around the site and I’m overdue for an announcement that impacts the future of Theta Trend.
As many readers know, I believe there are philosophical parallels between markets and life. As a first person blog, that belief has made its way into my writing and the content of the site. One of the underlying themes is the concept that we should always seek to achieve higher levels of competence. I know there are arguments for acceptance and taking it easy, but I’d rather achieve high level competence and have those concepts come about as flow. Fortunately, trading is activity where we never really arrive and we’re always looking for ways to improve.
The action of writing and sharing on Theta Trend has significantly improved my trading and created accountability that allowed me to progress more quickly than if I had kept to myself. While steady improvement is intrinsically good, I’ve always wanted “more.” By “more” I really mean that I’ve always wanted to trade professionally. Money is one aspect of that desire, but I also know that I’ll reach a higher level by working with others. I’ve wanted to take that step for some time and, at the same time, I knew it needed to be the right fit.
The reason for my silence on the site lately is that I was offered an accepted an opportunity with Swan Global Investments. I first came across Swan in 2015 when I was researching options and investing. They stood out as the leader in the hedged equity/options space with a track record going back to the late 90’s that historically outperformed the S&P 500 with much smaller drawdowns over the period.
Randy Swan created the Defined Risk Strategy (DRS) in the late 90’s and has been trading it since that time. The DRS remains the foundation of Swan’s products offerings. I won’t go into the strategy in detail, but conceptually the DRS invests in an underlying market and uses options for hedging and income generation. An underlying concept of the strategy is avoiding losses to allow for compounding over time. I found strong parallels between Swan’s approach to markets and my beliefs.
The Swan Defined Risk Strategy is available through mutual funds consisting of different underlying instruments. Specifically, the strategy is applied to the S&P 500, Emerging Markets, Foreign Developed Markets, and the Russell 2000 (Small Cap).
For those of you who are interested in the intersection of options and investing, I encourage you to read through the content on Swan’s site and especially the various white papers. The Swan team is highly intelligent, motivated, and constantly working to improve. I am very excited to join the team.
What this means for the site going forward is that the content will remain static and I won’t be available to handle inquiries. In other words, I won’t be posting new content or maintaining an active social media presence. I appreciate all the relationships I’ve developed with readers and other bloggers over the years, but I’m turning my focus and energy to Swan. Leaving the site up in a static state allows you to continue using the content as a resource while my energy is focused on Swan.
Thanks, as always, for your support.
-Dan
Disclosure: All of my discussions and presentations on the site are my own and are not the views of Swan Global Investments, my new employer. If you have interest in Swan or would like to learn more, please visit www.swanglobalinvestments.com