Monthly Report

Every month: what the portfolio did, which system added or detracted, and the market context that explains it. Past facts, no projections.

June 2026

-2.49%

The portfolio closed June at -2.49%, in line with the Darwin market as a whole (INDX index: -2.43%), in a month dominated by a hawkish Federal Reserve pivot that reshuffled every market we trade. Year to date the portfolio is roughly flat (~-0.5% YTD). Benchmark context: S&P 500 -1.1%, gold -11.8%.

The month in three acts

Act 1 — The jobs report (June 5). The US added 172,000 jobs against 85,000 expected. The market repriced rate expectations overnight: from anticipating cuts to pricing a 50% chance of a hike by November. The dollar strengthened and gold fell -3.3% that same day, breaking to its lowest level of the year.

Act 2 — The central-bank double session (June 16-17). The Bank of Japan hiked on the 16th; the Fed, in Kevin Warsh’s first meeting as Chair, held rates at 3.50-3.75% but with an unmistakably hawkish message: the dot plot flipped from projecting cuts to projecting a hike in 2026 (median 3.8% by year-end, PCE inflation forecast raised to 3.6%). USDJPY climbed to 161.8, its highest since 2024.

Act 3 — The Iran de-escalation (June 18). The US-Iran agreement reopened the Strait of Hormuz: oil collapsed from ~$92 to ~$70 as the geopolitical premium evaporated, and the Nikkei strung together eight consecutive up sessions to all-time highs (+5% on the month). US tech, by contrast, suffered the unwinding of Magnificent 7 positioning — AI capex concerns plus the hawkish Fed — with its first four-day losing streak since February, only rebounding on the 29th.

Event of the month: gold without a net

With no rate cuts in sight and a strong dollar, the asset that pays no yield lost its appeal: gold fell for a fourth consecutive week, broke below $4,000 mid-way through the final week and erased its entire 2026 gain, bottoming on June 24. Each system in the portfolio lived this event according to its nature:

  • NSML (+1.00%) — futures trend-following. It positioned short in gold and captured the decline; that offset a sideways Nasdaq hostile to its index positions. One of the two systems in positive territory.
  • PIP (+0.51%) — multi-asset breakouts. Its best fronts were gold (where downside breakouts kept following through) and the Nikkei in full post-agreement rally. The DAX, with no clear trend, was its drag for the month.
  • SIP (-2.64%) — multi-asset retracements. Its book behaved normally across 26 of 27 assets (FX and indices mostly green); the loss was concentrated in gold, where the pullbacks it bought found no bounce in a market driven by a deep macro shift.
  • VXNP (-2.28%) — Asian-session mean reversion. Same diagnosis: its FX legs performed with precision (over 60% hit rate on EURUSD and GBPUSD), but gold in a violent trend is the opposite of its calm-market premise.
  • EUNI (-3.51%) — ETF rotation with selective, staged entries. Its defensive leg (gold) was precisely the asset in free fall, and its growth leg (QQQ) was caught in the tech unwind. When the safe haven is the risk, the rotation has nowhere to hide; its staged entries cushioned part of the blow.
  • YXMD (-6.93%) — structural ETF swing with direct execution. The hardest hit of the month: its immediate exposure to structural moves, an edge in clean trends, left it facing head-on a directionless QQQ and a gold market in deep correction. A month outside its regime, not a failure of its logic.
  • MRDW (-3.77%) — long tech stocks. The Magnificent 7 unwind was precisely its anti-regime: upside breakouts reversing one after another. Only META closed its month positive; the June 29 rebound came too late.

Portfolio synthesis

June leaves a complete picture of how the portfolio is built: seven systems with independent logics responding to the same event in opposite ways — trend-following captured gold’s decline short, breakouts exploited the downside, and mean reversion and the ETF longs took it head-on. That mix is deliberate: average cross-system correlation is low (~0.19), and months like this one show why — no single philosophy works in every regime, and no individual loss dominates the result (the month’s largest negative contribution was -0.99 points). The aggregate, -2.49% in a month when gold fell -11.8% and the Darwin market -2.43%, reflects a portfolio that absorbed a meaningful macro shock within its historical risk parameters: the portfolio’s maximum drawdown since inception remains -9.6%.

A descriptive commentary on past events; nothing above constitutes a return projection or investment advice. Per-strategy returns are official Darwinex figures (normalized to 6.5% monthly VaR). Past performance is not indicative of future results.