Pedge Fund Performance 200902

Just a quick post to relate the performance of PedgeFund for the month of February 2009. January 2009 and 2008 returns are available here.

Summary:
Pedge Fund USD
February performance: -9.1% (gross, approx)
Year to Date performance: -2% (gross, approx)

Highlights:

• Big losses on Oil related commodities and stocks
  
• Gains thanks to the precious metals (long gold and silver)
• Losses short USD
• Gains on short treasuries
  
• Gains on Puts on the Dow. I have some puts for quite some time, and bought more a few weeks ago, but unfortunately, I made a mistake: when buying out of the money puts, I didn't properly delta-hedge my portfolio and hence the put ended up making far less gains than the overall losses on the portfolio, as noticed on the performance of the portfolio this month.
  

I said last month that "Feb will be a difficult month and it's likely that such gains are not going to hold..." and it appears that I was right! I am not happy with this delta-hedging error, which caused the portfolio to be down while I was accurate on my forecast. March seems to have started on a negative note, but I expect the rebound on Oil to continue and precious metals to rebound...

On the other informative news, I friend of mine asked me if I could manage his money, since I have avoided him a lot of losses in the past several months, and that all my calls happened to be right. So I will do my best to onboard his money into the fund, which will require me to be a lot more structured in the way I work...