So for 2023. I did a lot of travelling early in the year, which did reduce my trading. (Out of office >25% of the year). I did make sure that I was at my desk for what are normally my most important days. (Natgas bidweek).
The important ones...
Natural Gas. A solid year, but nothing as great as 2022.
Crude. Very disappointing. Not that I got things wrong, it just seems like my bread and butter trades aren't there. PnL approximately 40% of what I would hope for in a year.
Crypto. Completely reversed '22 losses and more. Big year.
Nice but not the major drivers.
Equity Index Futures :- Long and right. Profits 2x '22 losses. Nice boost to total PnL.
Equities (individual stocks) :- I trade very few stocks personally but this year I did have a decent size bet on Uranium and Uranium stocks (eg CCJ, URNM + others) this year which has worked out really really well.
The less/unimportant ones
Fixed Income. This was a big nothing but frustrating. Small but insignificant but did a good job with my relative value trades. The problems were my spec trades. Had the 2s vs 10s spread on the wrong way. This morphed into being net long 2s AND 10s, which then morphed into long 10s and 30s. Very disappointing as I broke many of my own trading rules in the process. Thankfully not significant vs my energy positions and in reality just offset my other fixed income profits.
Metals. Good but relatively insignificant year, primarily driven by gold.
Clarification. Looking at my '22 numbers the 85% and 1.0 numbers are for my core 'futures' trading business and excluded crypto. Several reasons for doing that, including but not limited to the fact that I didn't trade any crypto in my primary trading account in '22. Will use same for '23.
Again lots of ups and downs, but the real driver this year was the reversal in Crypto and Equities. (Crypto last year turned what would have been a phenomenal year into just a very good one) When all combined it adds up to a really good year. Percentage? As I said before, difficult to answer. My futures (non-crypto) trading PnL was approximately 45% of my average margin requirement. This is probably my lowest ever and a big drop from last year. For reasons I'm not going to go into here, this isn't as bad as it may seem. This year my average monthly PnL divided by the standard deviation of my monthly PnL was a fraction over 1.2, which is obviously better than last and something that I think is pretty impressive.
Am I happy? Of course. If I keep having years like this I will continue to not retire!