Gatun Capital
Nobody knows what happens next. Every consideration begins there. Anyone investing decides under uncertainty — and the more unsettled things become, the more the decision is made by feeling. That is precisely where the costliest mistakes are made: selling when everyone sells; adding when everyone is confident; breaking a rule because this time it feels different.
Our answer to that is not a better reading of the situation. It is a decision that was already settled before the situation arose.
An investment of this kind demands little attention, and that is intended. Between the set dates we have nothing to decide. Anyone looking in again after a year finds the same standard they left by — and can trace every figure back to its origin.
What holds in calm times must hold in turbulent ones.
Eight principles. They describe our stance, not our procedure — that remains under lock and key, for the same reason no house of this kind publishes its own.
We decide by rules that are fixed before the situation arises. Make one exception and we no longer have a rule, and from then on nothing can be recalculated.
We measure in years, not in days. Testing across three decades means knowing periods one need not have lived through to be prepared for them.
We do not act because action seems called for. Between the set dates we wait, and that waiting is the same rule in its quiet form.
We speak openly about the care we take in testing, but not about the approach itself. The same holds for anything concerning those involved: it stays between them and us.
What we say about the past must be reproducible from the same data with the same result. Figures whose origin we cannot trace, we do not use.
A good result we first treat as a suspicion. We test it against a period we leave untouched during development, and we test its surroundings: whatever depends on one exact value alone, we discard.
A methodology that never changes grows stale; one that changes constantly never was one. We change what proves more robust across the control period — and never while a situation is unfolding.
We deduct trading costs before we look at a result at all. A calculation without costs always favours the approach that trades the most.