Execution

2:30 AM monday. week one of what i’m calling “the post-tariff-chaos era” starts in a few hours. last week was one of those that splits into a clear before and after. monday and tuesday felt like freefall — VIX went from 20 to 32 in about 36 hours, SPX dropped hard, options spreads blew out 3-4x, and my event risk throttle (which I built the week prior and wrote about here) was earning every line of code it took to build. then wednesday happened. whoever made the tariff pause call did it at 1:07 PM eastern and watching the S&P rip 8% in ninety minutes while running algorithms was… a lot.

2:30am wednesday. april 1st. no this is not a joke post. been staring at execution data for the last three hours and i have a headache. Q1 closed basically flat — detailed numbers in the march wrap. but flat is flat, and when i dug into why flat, the answer wasn’t strategy failure. it was execution bleed.

2:15am on a monday. been staring at fill data for the past six hours. march has been rough. not catastrophically down, but underperforming where my models say i should be. january was decent (+2.1%). february was a loss (-1.3%). march was supposed to recover and it’s just… flat.

woke up at 2am couldn’t sleep. decided to run a full slippage analysis on last quarter’s trades. what i found is annoying but fixable. the invisible tax # every algo trader knows slippage exists.