November is over and it is time to take a look at how did it go.
Last November we stayed in Georgia, with limited travel mostly just around Tbilisi. For our 4-year-old daughter hired a swimming coach, who turned out to be a 7-time Georgian champion in butterfly-style swimming.
Additionally secured our first buy for real estate in Tbilisi and won an online bid for the plot of land in Latvia. Both properties are planned to sell for a profit once fully acquired. Tbilisi apartment could be ready by June 2024, while the plot of land in Latvia - in the first quarter of 2023.
In the past month, I was trading, buying, and investing mostly in crypto. Though I have some stock investments - for the moment, I'm focused on growing my crypto portfolio through trading options and futures on Coinbase and Deribit Platforms. During November I was trading with ETH, SOL, BTC, and ADA coins. As most of my active trading is focused on ETH and SOL coins I will focus only on these two, as they also contribute the most at the moment to my crypto investments.
Brief stats of Crypto Portfolio:
- Invested: $1,623.87 (+$350.52)
- Value: $1,124.79 (-$352.83)
- Growth MoM: -$703.34 (-62.53%)
- Growth Since inception (September 2022): -$499.08 (-44.37%)
November come with a crypto crash with crypto prices tanking, unfortunately, my humble portfolio shrank by more than -44%.
When investing or trading with crypto I'm always worried about the downside risk, just at the end of November, after the crash, I started to implement hedging strategies to the portfolio to mitigate the downside risk with futures. It seems it helps. As by the end of the month I managed to keep my boat straight in the stormy crypto waters.
I feel sad I didn't start using short-selling as a hedging strategy some months earlier - It would definitely help to avoid the Crypto Crash in November 2022. Well - hopefully, it will help in the future.
Here I made a longer article about short selling as hedging: How To hedge Ethereum with short selling Perpetual Futures on Ethereum
The biggest drop comes from the Solana coin (-62.92%), while our Ethereum holdings managed to show a humble, but still a positive growth of +1.30%, despite Ethereum price dropped more than -19%.
I was trading options on the Deribit platform with both ETH and SOL coins + started hedging coins with short-selling futures.
I really feel sorry I didn't start hedging at the start of the month, if so - portfolio value most probably would be with some 20-30% growth
Now, from now on I've decided to short-sell any new buys on the coin market + sell call options on the position.
For example: Buy 1 ETH at $1,267 -> Short Sell 1 ETH at $1,267 + sell a call with 1-7 DTE expiry for a 0.5-2% premium.
In that manner, if the coin will drop, say to $1,000 in the next few days - the short future will compensate for the loss. You will take a loss from coin buy -$267, but the short future will gain +$267. + you will keep the premium from selling the call option.
In case ETH will rise, say to $1,500 - your short future will lose -$237, but the coin itself will gain +$237 and you might get troubled with the call option (which is already another topic). In any case - it's much easier to make a profit in raising the market, and there shouldn't be problems to roll up and forward such call options, or exiting the trade with profit (even with losing call options)
Option trades
After the SOL crash, I started very aggressively selling call ratio back spreads and made some impressive gains, in the end managing to capture a whooping 14.83% return from options trading, In case SOL someday will recover - that will contribute greatly.
- SOL: 3.25062231 (14.83%)
- ETH: -0.12456731 (-19.22%)
Regarding ETH - I was trading with margin, and actually got squeezed out of the market, and agreed to take about -0.1 ETH loss, but was not taking actual dollar/euro loss. Such things happen time after time, and mostly are related to liquidity issues, when trading on margin.
Forecast For November 2023
I've no idea where will Ethereum or Solana head in November 2023, but I'm looking to grow my portfolio to about $7,000 in the next 12 months. That would ask about a $5,500 increase - looking to get there using dollar cost averaging, trading options, and hedging with futures. Most probably I will have Bitcoin and Cardano in my portfolio by that time too.
How was your November in Crypto trades? Leave a comment! Readers and I would love to hear!
