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What happened between mid Feb 2016 until end April 2016?

Was there a significant event during this period? All of my algorithms have a drawdown of 3-4% during this period and I was wondering if anyone else noticed it?

2 responses

I generally see the first quarter of 2016 doing well in the majority of my strategies.

A couple of thoughts... the Fall of 2015 was a downturn in the market ( it's included as one of the benchmark periods in Pyfolio). Maybe some code is looking back to that time through long term moving averages or other technicals. Big change from fall of 2015 to spring of 2016. That may be impacting the 2016 positions and therefore returns. Another thought, the market was up during the first quarter of 2016, if the portfolio has a high concentration of shorts (perhaps because of logic alluded to above) then those shorts could be what's causing the drawdown.

Thanks Dan for the valuable input. Let me see if that is the reason.