Plenty of profit taking last month as we exited several positions in our trading portfolio as positions retraced by 10% or more. This includes over 50% in BP and more than 70% in Glencore. Our short trade on oil was already paying dividends in March, up over 13% on an unleveraged basis before OPEC+ jumped in during April (of which more next month).
Bitcoin
We jumped back into Bitcoin in March largely because we could see a much more bullish character to the market. We are not currently running a dedicated crypto portfolio, but never say never. Ongoing issues around the global banking system again demonstrated to traders that it might pay to diversify into some areas of the market that are not dependent on the tired old infrastructure. With BTC now trading well over $30,000 we are in the money on this one.
Ocado [LON:OCDO] Short
We had a short lived short trade in place on Ocado ahead of its last set of results. Ocado continues to operate in a tough market especially now it can no longer rely on the pandemic to support its results. There is some definite momentum building on the short side of Ocado stock right now. We took a short position at 462p on 10 March. The trade stayed in the money but we were forced to close it out as the share price turned against us on 28 March. This is starting to look like a temporary rally with more short sellers entering the market in the last week or so. Bear in mind Ocado was one of the worst performing stocks in the FTSE 100 in 2022, and is down 56% over 12 months.
Tsukada Group [TYO:2418]
Tsukada Group is a financially very solid Japanese stock which is still in post-pandemic recovery mode. It runs hotels and wellness venues in Japan and has been working its way through the backlog of wedding events that has been created by the pandemic. The company makes a lot of money from hosting expensive weddings. We think Tsukada has more to give and has all the characteristics of a longer term buy and hold opportunity, even after you factor in its immediate profits in the last 24 months.
Synectics [LON:SNX]
Our final buy in March was Synectics, which is a London-listed specialist in surveillance technology. This is a very small company with a market cap of £20m, but it is selling into an enormous growth sector as governments and private enterprises become more obsessed with security than ever before. This is however a very tightly held stock with over 65% still owned off-market, so you may have problems buying a lot of it. We liked the fact that it owns proprietary technology and also boasts an international client base.
Sold in March: Lloyds, Glencore, BP, FIS, Ocado (Short), Cloudbreak Discovery
So how are our picks getting on?
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