Alternatives

The numbers speak for themselves. The market for short-term options has proliferated during the past year and is now hitting daily notional volumes of US$1 trillion, according to a recent report from J.P. Morgan Global Markets on February 15th. And it isn’t just institutional traders using zero day to expiry (0DTE) call and put strategies. In fact, a growing number of retail investors is also trading them, lured by the opportunity to gain big returns in a small window of time.

Not surprisingly, anti-beta equity strategies did very well for investors who followed them in 2022 – after all, performing well when the stock market as a whole is doing poorly is exactly what such strategies are supposed to do, and 2022 was a very bad year for equities. Now, investors are hoping 2023 will bring respite from central banks’ punishing interest rate hikes and a resurgent stock market, and many might be thinking equity hedging will no longer be a winning strategy. They might be wrong.

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Against the US dollar, the Japanese yen is at a 24-year low. Over the same period, the domestic purchasing power of the dollar has almost halved, whilst that of the yen has barely moved.

The market cap of cryptocurrencies peaked in late-2021 at $3.0 tn and has since plummeted to around $1.3 tn. The primary catalyst for this decline has been an increasingly hawkish Fed with financial conditions tightening by the most since the global financial crisis. The drying up of liquidity has negatively impacted all risk assets, but with an especially pronounced impact on crypto.