NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-29 02:54:47)
We have seen Bitcoin range in the 50-60k for a few weeks, similar to how it behaved in the 30-40k range. The weekly looks about ready to explode here, and our crypto model portfolio is about 58% long crypto markets (24% Bitcoin). The top of the daily Bollinger bands sits around $60,800 but most of the price action has taken place below current price of $58,000 so we expect potentially a smooth and fast ride up. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-27 17:53:16)
Wanted to write a quick note about our recent signals. Our crypto model portfolio has returned +800% since inception in 2020, but over the last month or so it saw a -17% drawdown. That seems to have turned around today with a +3% return, but for anyone who became concerned with recent lack of performance, I want to stress that these results are *very* typical in terms of what to expect from our signals, and we have seen similar sized drawdowns numerous times over the last year. The strength of LSS is not to always be on the right side of the trade and there are times when individual signals don't look great. Instead, the strength of our approach is a rules-based implementation with models that cut losses short quickly, ride out the winners gradually while shifting in and out of the market in a highly risk-managed way. Just look at our model portfolio charts which are "up and to the right" with a few breaks in between, and you will see what I mean. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-24 16:31:15)
The S&P closed down, rates are down, spreads a bit wider, VIX up. With some imagination you could call this price action risk off, but I think that's a little too generous for these very blah market conditions. In crypto, the key thing you need to be aware of is that on Friday (26th March) approximately $6 billion in Bitcoin options expire, which is the largest amount ever. Institutions have well and truly gotten in on this game (they are the ones sitting on the prices as I remarked yesterday) and their maximum profit point is around $44,000. They are going to do, and in the last few days have done, everything in their power to keep Bitcoin prices down. That game is up on Friday. Buying more here. Support is either $50 or $47.5k. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-22 19:29:36)
My personal feeling of crypto markets right now is that this is very similar to what we have seen in the $10-12K range. Someone or something is sitting on the market while low key others are scooping up Bitcoin. This is not really based on any deeper analysis other than my own market/trading intuition after staring at charts professionally for over a decade... this continuous pattern of natural buying pressure, a forced dump, natural buying pressure, a forced dump. And oh look, there's a daily close, would be a shame if we press it below support. Etcetera. I am buying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies here. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-21 18:23:51)
Quick recap of our latest signals as we head into a potentially volatile new week. Our model portfolio is currently operating with a net delta of no more than +15% on account of about 40% long signals (crypto, oil, high yield) and 25% short signals (gold, US treasury and investment grade credit). Notably, we have maintained neutral positions on the S&P500, euro and Japanese yen. Here in Asia we woke up this morning to some renewed shenanigans around the Turkish central bank which has in the past spoiled broader risk sentiment and I wouldn't be surprised if that sets the tone for the next few days. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2021-03-21 02:54:49)
Crypto price action this weekend hasn't been exactly great with Bitcoin down to 57K right now and not looking super strong. In general markets as of late haven't been helped by a stronger dollar (since early January) and rising rates. About a month ago Bitcoin pumped hard to 60K and since then has not managed to shoot through it. I'd suggest caution here. The 20 day moving average (middle of the Bollinger bands) sits around 54.5K where we should find support. If that fails, we could have more room to fall to anywhere between that price and the bottom of the S2F multiple ($41,000 currently). That would be a massive buying opportunity. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-08-08 01:50:42)
LongShortSignal lists Algorand! Within the crypto space we find ourselves drawn to projects that have a scientific basis (not a great fan of those run by notorious scam artists.. without naming names here but you can fill them in yourselves). We like Cardano for that very reason and actually run our very own Cardano Stake Pool. But respect where respect is due, we can see that Algorand is a super promising project too. Or in their own words, Algorand is "the world’s first open, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that, without forking, provides the necessary security, scalability, and decentralization needed for today’s economy". We will be including them in our model portfolio shortly. -LSS Operations Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-08-07 16:41:30)
The general mindset of investors in 2020 seems to be that the sell-off we saw in February and March was similar to the GFC in 2008 and in a sense we have now cleansed the palate and should prepare for another 10 year bull-run. I completely disagree. February/March 2020 was not like 2008, but more like Q4 of 2018. In 2018 there were concerns about rising interest rates which caused the market to drop, while in 2020 US dollar strength and a dollar funding squeeze off the back of Covid-19 did the same. To me it seems that markets today are more comparable to the early 2000s when the dot-com bubble burst. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-08-05 17:31:52)
Good day all, we just wanted to share a quick thought with you about our latest crypto model portfolio rebalancing. As you know our models aim to keep every position’s risk contribution below 20% and we favour those assets where our signals have been most successful. We have now added a third step (or rather an in between step before the risk cap kicks in) in our algorithms that ensures that models with a higher Sharpe ratio (essentially realised return / volatility) get favoured over those with lower Sharpe. Note that this can lead to an overweighting for both models with higher returns as well as those with lower volatility as both have a role to play in a stable portfolio. But crucially models with low returns and higher volatility will see their exposure reduced. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-08-02 01:43:38)
Wanted to share a quick thought on some of our recent signals. Short calls on Tezos, VeChain and Stellar have produced outsized negative returns and the models have been persistent. This has caused our quant team to do some soul searching. Crux of the matter is that we calibrate our models on 3 regimes. If the average return in a regime is positive that gets signalled as a LONG, and negative returns get signalled as SHORT. While obviously the regimes with average return of say +7% work just fine, the positive or negative regimes that have averages closer to zero can have huge outliers and these have been causing troubles here. We will be looking to make some upgrades to improve performance. One of these is that signals won't flip to SHORT unless the models indicate the average expected return in a regime is worse than -0.75%. Expect more neutral signals for cryptocurrencies. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-31 02:27:47)
It's official! You can now invest in the Long Short Signal Crypto Model Portfolio and benefit from our strong returns without even lifting a finger yourselves. Today we listed at Tokenbox and you can now invest directly in the LSS token by signing up. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-30 03:35:16)
Our crypto model portfolio is having another amazing month. Up +29% for July and no less than +295% year-to-date. If you had invested $10,000 in January you would now be at $40K. For comparison, Bitcoin's month-to-date figure is "only" +21%, and year-to-date +61%. There's no certainty it will keep up this performance and this year has been nothing if not volatile (creating opportunities for well calibrated models!), but we feel emboldened by its pretty steady path over the last few months. In recent days we have seen about 15% of the crypto model portfolio flip to short again, which feels counterintuitive given how bullish sentiment is, but has us comfortably looking back at locked in gains. -LSS Investment Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-29 16:50:45)
Here are two interesting numbers for you: total market cap of gold was $9 trillion as of May 2020 (since when prices have gone up by some 15% so as of today it’s probably closer to $10.5 trillion). Meanwhile, total amount of outstanding US debt is $26 trillion as of today. Japan and major European countries would easily add another $22 trillion to that number to get to $48 billion of potentially low to negative yielding debt at enormous risk of the principal getting eaten by inflation of sovereign debt confidence crises. If investors in the past allocated to these assets for their negative correlation and diversification characteristics, it’s fair to conclude that story has now played out. If even 5% of investments in DM sovereign debt shift into gold, that could mean another 23% appreciation in gold price from here. -Albert Ingles

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-28 17:21:59)
“Dollar-yen diverges from stocks for longest since 2016” is a random Bloomberg headline that just popped by. When people discuss the GFC of 2008, they mostly do so by zooming in on what happened to the stock market. To view the market situation in 2020 in the same way (stocks dropped 30% and then rebounded just as quickly) is missing the point. Instead, to understand markets today you need to focus on the US dollar. 2020 is not a story of risk aversion (the S&P bounced 40% back up while risk off assets like gold, JPY and government bonds kept up strength), but it is a story of uncertainty around the dollar. From the funding squeeze in March to worries about debasement by the Fed today. To figure out the dollar puzzle today is to figure out the markets of the rest of 2020. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-28 03:00:06)
We are quite literally LONG everything in our flagship LSS model portfolio. This portfolio is having another blow out month with total return at +13.3%. Yesterday the portfolio generated a 1.1% positive return. Main contributors were cryptocurrencies (Cardano and Bitcoin) at 57bps total. Global high yield and investment grade credit added 11bps, gold added 26bps, Japanese yen 6bps, S&P500 10bps. The only negative contribution came from US Treasuries which added -5bps to total return. Year-to-date the portfolio is up +72.7%. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-27 16:49:12)
Good morning all. Out here in Asia we woke up to Bitcoin having breached 11K and clearly breaking the downtrend it had been in since early 2018. We continue to see broad dollar weakness across currencies, rates ticking up and the S&P up +0.7%. An interesting one to highlight as well is silver, which as of writing is at $25.4 or 112% up from its lows in March, giving many a cryptocurrency a run for their money. Our open signals continue to be long for practically any asset class and that’s symbolic for the type of markets we are in. These are money making days, but keep your eyes on the ball. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-26 21:39:36)
After days of huge spikes and some cryptocurrencies going up by +300% or more year-to-date, they are now getting whacked around the head by the roaring Bitcoin bear which just seems to have woken up from hibernation. Not to worry, this is expected behavior and may cause higher market cap altcoins to stall for a while at the higher levels they have achieved, but longer term they will surely catch up when Bitcoin stabilises. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-26 17:15:06)
Markets in Asia have opened with the dollar going ever weaker. DXY is ticking down to 94.4 and technically looks like it may be headed to 88. Gold is up another .7% and we are seeing strength in JPY with the EUR and AUD still moving around indecisively. Bitcoin broke 10K on Sunday and bounced back a little but is now swinging up again, which comes against the backdrop of currently lower moving S&P stock futures (E-mini). The trend breaking narrative we first discussed last week remains intact, although our signals remain LONG on the S&P indicating we may see range-bound trading. Elsewhere in markets we see US rates little changed, oil a tad weaker at 43.2 and no huge changes across the EM FX complex. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-26 04:54:23)
... and Bitcoin just showed a $500 green candle. Predictably a lot of the altcoins got whipsawed (much of the crypto market is traded in BTC terms, making Bitcoin the granddaddy of all crypto assets in a very similar role as USD in traditional financial markets), but they are in fact just cooling off from the immense strength shown earlier today. This is something we saw coming, as per our note on Friday: “I just wonder if we may be witnessing a third trend break that will catch everybody off guard. As long as there is not an obvious catalyst for stocks strongly dropping again (but remember - the market never does what you think is most obvious) crypto may for now be able to shake off the relationship with traditional markets, and we may be ready for some range-bound stock trading and eventually skyrocketing crypto.” -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-26 01:01:35)
Wow... what an amazing return on our crypto model portfolio earlier today! +5.2% on daily basis, which easily ranks in one of the top 10 returns year-to-date. The main driving forces were Cardano (contributing +1.5%), Litecoin (+1.2%), Ethereum (+0.9%) and EOS (+0.5%). Our model portfolio is now up +276% during 2020, beating not only Bitcoin by a huge margin (it did +40% so far), but also many of the smaller altcoins. Best of all, it has done this with a volatility of 46%, which is significantly lower volatility than altcoins like Cardano which have been flying (+329% return and 90% vol). -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-25 20:45:00)
Cardano (ADA) is breaking from the altcoin pack again today, rising 10.82% in the last 24 hours to a new long-term high of $0.14426. Whilst primarily fundamental, as we are long-term proponents of this revolutionary defi project, both technical and momentum forces are helping to drive this large move. Cardano is part of our ‘flagship’ model portfolio and our crypto portfolio, and for good reason is still a LONG. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-25 17:26:29)
The cryptocurrency world just keeps surprising. Up until yesterday, this month alone we had seen Cardano up +47%, ChainLink up +63% and VeChain up 95%. In the case of Cardano (one of our hands down favorite projects in the space) we captured this entire ride up and had you LONG all the way in both individual signal and model portfolios. For VeChain our long model did +78% which is slightly less than the asset itself, but keep in mind we had you out entirely in March where VeChain dropped like a rock and lost nearly half its value... I continue to believe our models are particularly well suited to invest in cryptocurrencies. Happy Sunday all. -LSS Quant Team

NEW QUICK VIEW (@ 2020-07-25 03:02:37)
Good evening LSS Premium and Crypto members. Quick update to let you know we have added this "feed" section which features all of the latest signals, research and views in one convenient place, coupled with daily modelportfolio returns (and soon to add more we are sure). In addition, we have added this QUICK VIEWS section where we will be sharing some quick signal and market insights with you all in due course. Enjoy your weekend. -Albert Ingles