Performance Update: 2025 Review & 2026
Performance update, risk targets, and the infrastructure rebuild
Hey friends,
Today is Saturday the 28th of February, 2026. I am taking the afternoon off from building my trading infrastructure to write about my trading performance in 2025, 2026 so far, and the plan I am implementing to hit sensible risk targets for my portfolio going forward.
I am building at a speed I have never had before, but sometimes it is good to take some time to reflect and plan. I’ve gone from managing a small portfolio, to having days where I was up or down 6 figures in a single day.
For the past few years I’ve always written end of year performance reviews, on top of the ones I write through the year. I want to continue that trend as I do want to build and keep a long track record.
Highlights of today’s post:
2025 in review — from +70% YTD to ending the year negative, and everything in between
10/10/2025
Going to the ER
700+ hours of infrastructure building since October
Systematic portfolio up 15% while BTC down ~40% and alts down ~35%
Risk objectives and the plan to get there by end of 2026
The HYPE exit strategy
Let’s get started.
2025 — A Year to Remember
This last year was an emotional roller coaster. I will tell the story of how in late October I ended up in the hospital emergency room due to what I can now look back and analyze as the accumulated stress of this insane year.
Entering into 2025, I was coming off one of the best periods of my trading career. Just 2 months prior in November, I had been airdropped an amount that doubled my portfolio, and I decided to hold the entire bag for a long-term investment that ended up going from $2 (where it opened) to close to $30 in less than a month.
This was a very significant moment because this single trade made it possible for me, for the first time, to live off of trading returns alone and with some margin to spare.
When that was all said and done I had 2 options: send some of that to my bank account and put it into “safer” investments, or full ape the entire stack into my trading portfolio and roll the profits.
Oh well… If you know me, you know my choice.
I am a very aggressive kind of trader and I have not spent all of this time learning this craft to make the US median income. I want to shoot for the fences, while being fully aware of the risks that come with that. There’s no room for naive optimism in this business, and if you allow any, you will soon find out the reason I am saying this. I knew the risks I was taking, but I carried on.
One of my many talents is the ability of making significant financial decisions at the absolute worst possible times. So yeh, when I full ported this infusion of cash into my crypto trading portfolio, the crypto market peaked. I should have been expecting it.
At this time I was still mostly a long-only trader. I had a momentum model, that we discussed here many times, and being net long during this period was naturally a money loser. My portfolio took a hit, and by April, I was down more than 30% from the initial starting point.
This was even worse now because I had an account magnitudes larger than what I ever had. The losses I was seeing in my portfolio were unprecedented for me. Considering I could be up or down 6 figures in a single day, I am happy how I handled it… I was pretty numb to it all, and remained rational through the process while executing the trades without allowing externalities to control my decisions. After all, I’ve been here before, just not at this monetary scale.
April comes along and we start getting the first time where the TACO trade was still somewhat of an unknown. The US administration announces tariffs to all countries, and naturally risk assets tank in the expectation of this devastating news. I had the sense that this was probably all bogus and I wrote about it at the time, so I began buying even more aggressively than before.
I bought stocks…
I bought crypto…
Every asset in sight that I knew something about, I bought.
I want to say that I am for sure NOT a macroeconomics trader. I am just a systems trader and that’s what I focus on. But this time I was right in my thesis and the market just went up after that. Being right in my thesis doesn’t mean it was a particularly intelligent one, just the one that worked out.
My portfolio not only recovered it all but by the summer, I was up over 70% YTD at the peak and over 120% from the April lows.
It was a phenomenal time. I’d literally wake up every day to a higher net worth. I went on vacation, just chilled out, and I was having a blast.
The thing is, there was something lurking underneath all of this that I did not pay attention to. There were weaknesses that I knew my portfolio suffered from but that I chose to ignore due to my recent success. I have this tendency when things are going well to take my foot off the gas and that’s what I did. And that cost me dearly over the next quarter.
10/10/2025 — A Day I Will Never Forget
Before we move into the last quarter, I can’t do a 2025 review without mentioning the 10/10 nuke to crypto. That is a day that has been ingrained in my mind that I can’t forget. It was a career defining moment for me, and a career ending moment for many. I can only remember one time when I felt as hopeless as I did for a brief few minutes on that night.
I have this habit of writing notes about something important that happened that day. This is the note I wrote the day after (pls ignore the typos):
That note doesn’t reflect how bad it was. In the span of a few hours, perpetual contracts on the most liquid traded coins collapsed almost 50%. You know what it’s like to take a 50% haircut in just a few hours? 50% is a lot for any portfolio, now imagine when that portfolio is 95% of my liquid net worth.
There was absolutely nothing I could do. I remember watching the tape go lower and lower and thinking, ok, this might be it. This might be the moment I have to restart fresh. Looking back, those feelings were purely based on panic, but for a moment, I was okay with it all. I did not care if it all went to 0. That is something that I still reflect on to this day — I literally felt nothing. I just observed in awe with absolute admiration for the events that unfolded.
10/27/2025 — Going to the ER
The roller coaster of the year, the highs and lows, the bloodbath on the 10th — I think it all contributed to an accumulation of stress that culminated in me ending up in the ER on the 27th of October.
For about a week or so, I was waking up every night at 4am, feeling chest pains, difficulties breathing, sometimes almost passing out and vomiting. I got a full check done and they determined it was stress induced.
This never happened to me before.
I am pretty chill and I don’t stress that much about stuff. But I guess it got to me, even if I didn’t acknowledge it. I do remember that when I woke up at night, the first thing I’d do was check the market. Imagine waking up at 4am to check your TradingView app. Yeh, that was me.
That was probably the lowest point of the year for me and I had to do something. I had to change. I could not live exposed to one thing for much longer.
So I decided something had to change. I wanted to add protection to my portfolio — I was no longer trading a marginal amount of money. I also wanted to be able to profit across regimes, not just when crypto went up. So I went all in into building the next version of my trading infrastructure, which I’ve spent close to 700 hours alone on since.
We will get into that, but let’s finish 2025 first.
The remaining quarter was also not very good. The crypto market was extremely hard to trade, ESPECIALLY if you were net long like I was up until that point. Ended up the year negative on what could’ve been a phenomenal year had I played my cards differently.
The thing is, even though I ended up the year in the red, it was one of my best years looking back. I cannot express how much I’ve changed as a trader from just October last year. It has been almost 6 months, but feels so much more than that to me.
I look back at 2025 as a career defining moment. I am happy it all happened.
I really do believe that in this business sometimes it takes the absolute worst pain to make you change and be better. I don’t know, maybe some people do it just by improving a bit each day, but I work differently. I have to be taught through pain, and in 2025, the market disciplined me.
If you look at all the painful lessons as lessons, not as something negative to avoid, you indeed grow. The problem is that people tend to throw unpleasant experiences under a rug, because it’s painful to remember. I get it, but force yourself to be glad for the lesson, and see the lesson for what it is — an opportunity to become a better version of yourself.
2026 — Where Everything Changed
Following October, I began pouring ALL OF MY TIME into crafting out from scratch my vision of what a trading infrastructure should look like. I had this idea for a long time, but I did not want to spend the time on it. After all, I was doing fine.
The idea was simple. I could no longer be exposed to just one side of the market and one strategy. I had to create something that was robust, that could trade across strategies, exchanges, brokers, wallets, and markets — and make it in a way that could be scalable and hassle free to work with. I see good systematic trading almost like a factory where research is the core product you monetize. You need infrastructure to do this at capacity and that’s why I decided to take a “step back” and build everything back from first principles.
I’ve spent over 700 hours on this since October. How do I know? Well I track where my time is spent…
The output is that now I have an infrastructure that can handle everything I need to make a systematic portfolio successful.
A research and backtesting module:
A position and portfolio management module:
An execution engine module that handles all the positions generated for each portfolio from each individual strategy. This became increasingly important as I traded larger size and naturally needed to execute efficiently. This also tracks all trade execution details so we can measure and track performance and costs.
And obviously the global performance report against benchmarks.
This may seem relatively simple to put together but it takes a long time to make something work at this scale and well. The backend that manages this entire infrastructure — making sure that all strategies across portfolios, wallets, exchanges is working like clockwork, all the data is tracked appropriately, safety protocols are in order — that’s where all the development is.
Also another big feature is that I made the backtesting module completely integrated with the live trading execution module. This means that I can just plug in new strategies that I researched directly into live execution with the push of a button.
All of these small features require a lot of thinking and development time to ensure they’re working at capacity. Only when you get into the weeds of it, and decide to build everything from scratch and not take shortcuts, will you see how complicated this gets at the tails.
All of this work culminated in a performance that I am really proud about. Bitcoin is down close to -40% and altcoins -35%, while my systematic portfolio is up 15% since inception.
But now that work is just getting started. I’ve spent the last 6 months mostly putting infrastructure together, in a way that I am confident to put my money behind it, and to manage my portfolios at capacity. As you can see, the AUM allocated to this infra has been scaling steadily, and is now a large chunk of my portfolio.
Now I still have goals I want to hit in my portfolio and I am far from hitting them. These are not return goals or something like that, but rather from a risk perspective. Let’s talk about them.
Objectives to Reach in 2026 and Beyond
I wrote this thread back in December 2025 with the goal of putting on paper my portfolio performance from a risk perspective, and today I will expand a bit on it as it touches on all the targets I want to hit this year.
Let’s start by briefly touching on the entire performance up until the end of 2025. I don’t want to talk too much about it as that is part of all the posts we did on the portfolio performance updates page, but I do think we did not touch on it from a risk aspect.
Until the last day of December 2025, the global portfolio grew by 1874.1%.
Obviously the volatility is insane, and something that no normal person should go for. I have taken very large concentrated bets at times and will probably take more in the future. I don’t particularly see something wrong with that if you know the risks you’re taking.
However that’s not a sensible target I want to set for the majority of my portfolio right? The bulk of my portfolio should ideally be mostly controlled volatility, risk aware, robust long-term strategies. Or at least that’s what I want. I will always have a portion of my portfolio allocated to more “degenerate” bets, but it shouldn’t be a significant portion of the portfolio. It’s just not worth the risk and the stress MOST of the time.
Up until late 2024, for a long time, I had essentially a long alts, short BTC exposure in my long-only momentum model. I had a few manual interventions in late 2023 which caused me to actually be uncorrelated to alts, but that’s all that it was. At the peak, you can see that most of my portfolio was just dominated by altcoin performance. I noticed that, and it was super uncomfortable to have your entire portfolio dictated by what the altcoin market was doing.
Approaching the end of 2024, I began scaling down as the market was also dying out and my beta to the market approached 0. What’s interesting to me is that my beta to a standard trend model was practically 0 and at the peak of April it was negative. I actually thought this was wrong but no. What I was doing was fundamentally a long alts trade, and that is what is reflected here. I was not aware of this risk at the time, but now looking back, how dumb was it!
In November I received the HYPE airdrop and for a long time my performance was mostly dominated by that massive HYPE exposure, as expected, given that most of this time my portfolio was at least 50% HYPE, sometimes more, and the remaining in long-only trend.
To this day, the beta of the global portfolio is still close to 0.5 to HYPE and 0.8 to alts. But if we zoom in after October, you can notice how my beta to trend has been creeping up a lot. That is because of the new models I have been working on, and that is something reflected here.
Ideally, we don’t want to overbet on a single asset when we can put that cash to work on the systematic side.
My thesis for HYPE played out. I did well. I took risk when risk was there to be taken. But having that much exposure going forward is something I just don’t want to do.
To this day I still carry ~46% of HYPE exposure but I will explain the reasoning of why I still carry it later on.
Also I don’t want that beta to trend to be so high. This is where adding truly diversifying strategies over the next few months will come in. Ideally by the end of 2026, I can refer back to this post and show that my risk exposures got to the target we set out, and that’s what I’ll be working on.
Plans for my HYPE Exposure in 2026
I am going to be very straightforward here. I’ve never held any significant position for more than a few days or weeks other than my long-term US equities portfolio, some BTC, and now HYPE. I really like the project, and I do believe it will continue to succeed. But I must think from a systematic trader point of view.
There have also been tax reasons for me to hold this position — in my country it’s tax free on crypto gains that are held for over 1 year (with some caveats). And I have been holding this for almost 1 year and half now.
My thesis is still solid and I think it has good legs to materialize. Not only that, but in an era where increasingly AI agents will take financial decisions, they will require fast venues to do financial operations and Hyperliquid is positioned to capture a lot of that flow. We’ve started to see some of that, for example with the Alpha Arena context where they deployed AI agents to trade and used Hyperliquid as the venue.
There’s concerns I have, especially regulatory in future less lenient crypto administrations that are hard to estimate for. I am not a fundamental investor, that’s not my forte. If I see something extremely mispriced, be sure that I will be there. But if something is fairly priced or the upside is just not that significant for me to take a big swing on, I will refrain from that and let my systematic portfolio capture those returns.
By the end of 2026 I expect to have lowered my HYPE exposure from 45% to less than 15%. That is a chapter I look forward to putting an end on.
There is another interesting dynamic though that I have found just by looking at my day to day exposure. Right now having HYPE in my portfolio is giving me a free-ish hedge. I say that carefully though. What do I mean? Well, my entire book is mostly net short (vol adjusted) at the moment, and the only thing giving me net long exposure is my Hyperliquid long-term position.
This means that when the market goes down and HYPE with it, the portion of the portfolio on the systematic side is dampening that drawdown. Especially because HYPE has held so much better than the vast majority of altcoins.
When the market goes up and my portfolio suffers from being net short, the HYPE leg covers that and usually even more. And we can observe that from the global portfolio view — the portfolio still does move with HYPE, but the volatility is dampened by the systematic side of the portfolio, which is a good side effect I didn’t plan for.
There’s a few risks here and this shouldn’t be seen as a hedge obviously — this is just what I observed so far. There’s a bunch of idiosyncratic risk (regulatory, exploit, etc), and if those risks were to materialize, the short book ain’t saving my HYPE long losses then. So the protection is really just on broad market beta moves, not HYPE specific tail risk.
So what I am thinking about exiting my long HYPE position is that when/if the market recovers and my portfolio becomes tilted net long alongside HYPE, I start scaling off my HYPE position, because then the portfolio would be completely net long. That’s the strategic approach I’ll take. Right now let it act almost like a hedge while at the same time I do believe it has significant upside potential. As that upside starts materializing, I begin scaling out of it and shifting that risk back to my systematic portfolio.
Conclusion
There’s not much to say to end this post that hasn’t been said already.
Here’s the risk targets we’ve set through today’s post:
Lower HYPE exposure from ~45% to under 15% by year’s end
Reduce beta to trend by adding truly diversifying strategies
Shift the bulk of the portfolio to controlled volatility, risk-aware systematic strategies
If you take one thing from my experiences, it is that although I have been in this game for 8 years now, I still have a lot to learn. There’s a lesson in there.
It seems that this is a never ending game of perpetual learning. You have to look at yourself as an eternal student. There’s no masters here, just people a few years ahead on that learning curve.
I feel like every year I have so much more to learn. I can’t really describe it. You’d think that by a few years you’d have a broad grasp of what good trading is, but no — the more you dig, the more you find your own inadequacies.
The market also forces you to be extremely honest with yourself. There’s no office politics, charm, or anything else that can save your performance, like in other careers. Here you have to be at the peak of your game, or you will pay. Maybe that’s why there’s so many people that like to talk trading, but very few willing to open their track record for public scrutiny.
I am just learning the game. Every year I become a bit better, hopefully.
There’s so much more to do and I am going to get back at it.
I hope you liked today’s post. Have a great weekend.
Disclaimer: The content and information provided by the Trading Research Hub, including all other materials, are for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any type of security or investment. Always conduct your own research and consult with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions. Trading and investing can involve significant risk of loss, and you should understand these risks before making any financial decisions.