July 2026 was one of the worst months in my trading career. But I guess it could have been worse since there was a massive blow-up in the Hedge Fund world. I ended July -7.27% which is in the top end of worst monthly performances since I started the ‘IPO Fund’ back in 2019. My positions are generally pretty big with all started at 12.5% of total AUM so the PnL fluctuations are volatile but even for me, this type of month especially to the downside is a real gut check.
The good news though is I don’t use leverage and can step away for a bit and reset because I trade for myself and don’t manage outside capital. The bad news is that it’s all MY money that goes out the door when I have a down month which hurts the most. I’ve been here before though. It’s time to buckle down, take it slow, get a few winning trades cobbled together and get back on track. There really isn’t much else to say when it’s a bad month and your trading isn’t where you expect it to be.
June was yet another difficult month of trading, for me at least. Similar to May the month started with holdover positions getting hit hard in early June which put me in a hole to start the month. And I hardly traded as I only initiated 6 trades over the month. One of the reasons why I didn’t make back more money was that 3 of those trades resulted in small gains where I had caught the initial 10% move, sold a portion of the position to lock in some gains, and then got stopped out of the remaining shares for what resulted in small gains. Those trades don’t add up to much and the 3 other trades were losses on good-sized positions so the wins, which usually can cover losses, barely helped. That whipsaw type of action has taken a serious toll on me because I’m not seeing good gains on wins, just tiny wins.
The PnL for June ended up being slightly down (-0.64%) but it was much worse for most of the month. Part of me is frustrated that I couldn’t make it all back but it was a good battle to get near breakeven. And this is at least the 3rd month this year where losses piled up almost immediately after the month started with holdover positions which makes it tough to start negative when you hardly did anything to be in a bad position.
And I have to mention the Space Exploration Technologies (Ticker: SPCX) IPO given how historic it was. I didn’t trade it as of writing this but I watch it daily because it is a company that almost certainly will challenge the other Trillion dollar companies that dominate the market in so many ways.
May was a difficult trading month for me with some solid losses piled up early on April trades that held over early into the month. It was also a transition month where I started applying some new trading rules, I changed my position sizing approach, and got back into writing some Blog posts. Despite the tough start to the month the last week of May provided some good trading in IPO land and I clawed back to finish the month positive (+0.57). And I will always take a Green month as it’s always a good thing from the mental side, and the account side, to see positive PnL.
I traded a handful of IPOs in May: $AVEX (Aevex Corp), $XE (X-Energy), $HAWK (HawkEye 360), $ARXS (Arxis), $FRVO (Fervo Energy) & $YSWY (Yesway). The name I showed the least patience and worst execution in was by far $AVEX. I got very caught up in how this IPO retraced the entire move it had made from Days 1-2 and was buying all the way down and got too heavy. All of that caused me to lose a lot of the conviction I had in the name. I did get back involved and worked around a bad entry to make some money back and I still have a position but I could have had a monster had I executed better. But this debacle of a trade was what got me to really sit down and re-think my approach around sizing and when I can be aggressive with big size vs when I should be small. That took some historical review of previous years trading IPOs and ultimately it will be helpful and positive for my trading.
As I get back to writing more Blog posts I will delve deeper into the month’s trades but for now I just want to keep these short with how I did from a PnL perspective and my main thoughts on the month. May turned out to be positive and I think part of that was me sitting down and writing down my strategy and style with revamped Rules and also some perseverance when it seemed like I might give back all of the money I made in January.
Ironically my last post, which was almost a year ago to the day, was about some updates to my Trading Rules. And in 2025 after that post, I proceeded to brake a handful of my rules over and over again which led to a disastrous 2025 where I finished the year down -13.5%. By far my worst of trading not just in actual PnL performance but also from a consistency or lack thereof for almost the entire year.
Since the start of 2026, I have been thinking about my overall approach to trading from position sizing to watchlist curation to who I follow and pay attention to across FinTwit. The ‘people’ I follow or interact with today about trading is much different than it was in 2019 which I probably have not taken into account as much. Markets change with cycles and so do the participants for many different reasons. I would say my ‘guys’ that I do follow or talk to is a much smaller list today but that doesn’t mean the knowledge and information I still get isn’t as valuable.
I will also add that part of putting these new rules down on my blog, at the behest of sounding like all I do is break my rules and re-write them, has been from reading the book ‘Thinking In Bets’ by Annie Duke. It’s been a refreshing read and it’s made me really think about how much I used to post on this blog which was a form of accountability that I held myself to when I would write about all my trades. I have not been anywhere near consistent in writing since 2020 so I think it’s time to start holding myself accountable again and writing more.
Trading Rules:
Only trade IPOs
Once an IPO has been trading for 12 months, it is removed from my watchlist
If I have a position in a stock when it hits the 12 month mark, it can still be traded until the position is closed out at which point it is then removed from the main watchlist
Share price must be >$10
No trading on IPO day
No more than 20 stocks on main watchlist at a given time
Only trade common stock
10% max stop loss based off capital invested
First sale is always after a 10% move from entry price (**Size of first sale will vary from trader to trader. Mine is 15% of total position**)
Only trade an IPO when it’s above Day 1 lows.
I believe if I can follow these rules, I will get back to being consistent and see better trading results. It’s never been ‘can I make money from trading’ for me as I’ve been a profitable trader for a good bit now. It’s been ‘can I be consistent as a trader’ and that’s where I’ve lost focus the last few years. And this is not something that is uncommon in trading either because it’s a very difficult endeavor. Self-reflection and honest criticism of myself have been on my mind all year and I’m not afraid to admit I’ve not held myself accountable the last few years with trading. That has to change first and putting this post out is a start.
Every few years I seem to have a period where I break some of my trading rules, which then makes me go back to review what I had written down as my trading rules to begin with. I found a few posts where I updated and/or outlined my rules which I’ve reviewed and updated slightly as seen below. Rules generally shouldn’t change much and as a good trading friend has said to me many times, ‘The first entry is the best entry’; well I think it can be applied to trading rules too: ‘The first set of rules is the best set of rules.’
Only trade IPOs
Minimum position size: 12.5% (of total AUM)
Once an IPO has been trading for 12 months, it is removed from my watchlist
If I have a position in a stock when it hits the 12 month mark, it can still be traded until the position is closed out at which point it is then removed from the main watchlist
Day 1 trading rules
Wait 15 minutes after opening print before initiating a position
Max 10% stop loss.
Share price must be >$10 –> NO EXCEPTIONS
No more than 10 stocks on main watchlist at a given time
10% max stop loss based off capital invested
First sale is always after a 10% move from entry price (**Size of first sale will vary from trader to trader. Mine is 15% of total position**)
After first sale is made, stop is moved to breakeven –> NO EXCEPTIONS
Remainder of position is trailed on different timeframes and using the 8 & 21-EMAs and the 50-DMA (**I use the Daily and Weekly charts when trailing**)
Trade IPOs in sectors that fit your style: Technology, FinTech, Semiconductors, Medical Device/Medical Tech, Consumer Goods.
Sectors & Geographical Regions to avoid: APAC, Biotechnology, Energy, Financials.
For the remainder of my trading career, my first goal is to never break a rule again. I know famous traders have said their Rules/Goals are to not lose money and then to never forget that goal/rule. Losing money is part of the game so it’s silly to say never do it. If I follow the rules outlined above, I will lose money less often and make money more often.
I will never complain about a green trading month, making money is always a good thing. But, I will very often critique myself and I almost always think I could have made more when I have a positive trading month. The numbers weren’t groundbreaking, but I was able to make 1.89% in January for an ok start to the year.
The gains were predominantly driven by a trade I caught in the first few days of the year in a speculative IPO from 2024 – Nano Nuclear Energy (Ticker: NNE). Unfortunately, I gave back a lot of open PnL in the NNE trade and then missed it completely when it went on an even bigger run. As the saying goes there are ‘haves and have nots’ and this trade was a ‘have not’ for sure.
I also made some money, and currently still hold shares, in Rubrik (Ticker: RBRK). It’s been a slow moving trade but it is working so far.
The biggest ‘miss’ on the month was actually more like the biggest drubbing. I had been waiting for months to take a shot at Astera Labs (Ticker: ALAB). I initially tried it around $116/share on 1/23 and somehow was selling shares the next day @ $126. I thought I might have nailed the entry. But the following day the stock completely reversed and I got stopped out. Another one where I gave back open PnL. But the real drubbing was on Monday, Jan 27th when DeepSeek sent shockwaves across the markets. I guess I thought I was smarter than the market and certainly showed my stubbornness. I lost over $9k in ALAB on 1/27. I bought some shares back on 1/28 and made back a small fraction of what I lost. Looking back on the ALAB trade, I had all the right information in front of me to wait and avoid the massacre. I also had all the information for when to take a high quality, low-risk entry which if I had would have resulted in a 25-30% gain and a really nice trade. But I ignored everything, overtraded the stock and took a big loss. I will take the bright spots from the loss though in knowing I follow the right people and have access to the right information. I just didn’t filter it the right way.
We’ll see what February brings. I expect continued volatility and I do believe this year will be one where you have to ‘earn it’ to make money. I don’t think it will be an easy year, although it never is and anyone who says otherwise is full of it.
The 2024 trading year is officially in the books. I won’t delve into it too much here but I hit my annual goal of making 30%. Below is a monthly breakdown of how the year went. There was a pretty big hiccup in May (-6.26%) but I was able to grind those losses back and then in October I had a really solid month (+10.44%)
My guess is that I left at least 10% in additional gains on the table by trading, or not trading at all, the following IPOs horribly: LOAR, SDHC, TBBB, ULS, & VIK.
With the 10% I left on the table from plain old bad trading, I lost ($31,455.65) in IPOs that are in sectors I should never, and will never again, trade. Those are sectors like Biotech, China, non-IPOs (NBIS), and sub-$10 microcap IPOs. I figure between the below real losses and the bad trading, that in dollars I left $50,000 or so on the table in 2024. That is real money.
I am looking forward to trading in 2025 and hope to build on what was a decent year in 2024. A lot of that will be dictated on how the IPO landscape looks in 2025. I expect more IPO activity in 2025 but that does not mean it will be good trading. As always, there is always another trade.
It’s been a long time since my last Blog Post this year, and that isn’t because I haven’t wanted to write about the IPO world or haven’t had trades that I want to discuss. It’s mostly because of the lack of IPOs in general that makes writing on a consistent basis difficult. Back in 2018 when I started writing about IPOs there were 10+ legitimate IPO deals per week for almost the entire year. That got even crazier in 2020 and 2021 (when I shut this down for a year because I was trading for an IPO-focused Hedge Fund).
With the above said, this post is not to rant about IPOs still not being ‘back’ as some on FinTwit have claimed at different points this year. It is about providing a PnL update through three quarters of trading in 2024. The ‘IPO Trader Fund’ closed Q3 at +30.35% YTD. That was aided by a big October, which was mostly driven by a big trade in Reddit (Ticker: RDDT) that I actually closed out of on October 30th. In fact, most of my year is from RDDT as I’ve traded it a bunch of times but this last run, which started when I started building a position in early September, was a monster.
My yearly goal is to make 30%, which I got from Stan Druckenmiller who famously averaged 30% for his career. I have not hit this goal since 2020 so it has been a long time but I have kept at it and kept fighting back despite the IPO market basically being closed since November 2021 (there have been deals since then of course, but the volume has been a fraction of what I was used to when I made the pivot to focus solely on IPOs).
The IPO Index (Ticker: IPO) is still -42.15% off ATHs as of the close on 11/1. That is still healthily in a bear market as far as I’m concerned.
I am optimistic that 2025 brings more IPOs to trade. But, I do not think the IPOs of yesteryear will be the same types of IPOs that are the big winners going forward. There will still be high-flyers like RDDT but the names that I missed big on this year are not the types of names FinTwit likes to trade: $LOAR, $SDHC, $TBBB, $ULS, $VIK. Go check the charts on those five IPOs. Conservatively I think I left 15-20% of PnL on the table by not trading any of those well. LOAR was a double, and the other 4 are up > 50% from their respective lows (some closer to 80-90%). Why did I miss or not execute on these names? Because they are all ‘slo-mo’ type IPOs that do not have crazy momentum like the shiny, high-flying IPOs. I used to like having a single ‘slo-mo’ IPO in the portfolio at any given time but that is more because there weren’t as many of those types. I think in 2025 there could certainly be more of these that are quality companies that simply are not dare I say exciting stocks. But they are great to ride on a trend and because they are usually underfollowed the upside can be even greater than one realizes.
Let’s see how the last two months of the year play out. I would like to take some calculated shots but I am more likely to be defensive and protect my 30% gains unless I see high-quality, low-risk setups in some of the IPOs on my current watchlist.
While March was yet another positive trading month on the year, it was also another month where I felt that I left a good amount of money on the table due to poor trading and a continued lack of both discipline and patience. There were some bright spots though with a few new IPOs hitting the markets so I will try to take some of the positives and apply them to next month. Here’s a screenshot of the March PnL –
In reviewing my trades from March, there are a few standouts. I initially traded two of the new IPOs – Astera Labs (Ticker: ALAB) and Reddit (Ticker: RDDT) – extremely well between Day 1 on the initial days. ALAB was a monster out of the gates and I never got to add to the position so it was always a 6.25% position (which is half of my standard 12.5% sizing). I traded it well for the most part. With RDDT, I was able to get to a standard sized position and the stock had a 40% move in a single day including the after hours action. I nailed it for a solid gain. However, I proceeded to give back the majority of the PnL trying to buy RDDT on the pullback which turned into a disaster (more to come on this in my April PnL post). I also took a sizeable loss in another Biotech trade which was flat out breaking my rules that I had laid out in the February post where I said I wouldn’t trade Biotech IPOs going forward (and hint hint I did it again in April!).
The fact that some new IPOs hit the calendar in March was encouraging but I still want to see the calendar get more activity. Having options will help me gain my confidence back because I will be looking at more stocks, more charts, and seeing more price action.
February was another positive trading month, but much like in January I continued to feel very rusty with my trading and out of sync with the market. The lack of new IPOs continues to be a factor that I know is impacting my trading and psychology towards the market. I don’t have that confidence I’m used to mainly because I’m not reviewing a lot of new stocks I’m just looking at the same 3-4 names over and over again. That to me doesn’t help keep you sharp (at least for me it doesn’t). I need my mind to thinking of new possibilities and setups across a watchlist of fresh IPOs. Here’s a screenshot of the February PnL –
For the month PnL, it came down mostly to some holdover shares in ARM that I rode into the ER report early in the month and some holdover shares in CAVA that I finally sold. Other than that, I actually think most new trades in February were losing trades and those were mostly in the Biotech IPOs that came out. After losing ~$9k on multiple attempts at trading the Biotech IPOs, I think I’m done with that sector for good. There has been a major oversupply of Biotech IPOs in the last 3-4 years and I really don’t have an edge with these types of names. I don’t have a science background and to be honest, I don’t see the coverage across my networks for Biotech IPOs that I used to see and that is where I was able to gain a slight edge.
There is not much else to say on February from a trading perspective. I am hopeful more IPOs will start to come out in the coming months given the strength of the market. But I don’t know if private market valuations are really where they should be and I can see private investors and private companies continuing to be stubborn with where they think valuations and portfolio companies should be marked on the books vs what they are hearing from investment bankers who get IPO deals out the door. Time will tell.
IPO Plunger 