June Monthly Review- Opportunities Aplenty

And dealing with regret

There are months when the market just gives. June was one of them.

Headlines seemed to come one after another - China's export controls on magnets, Israel's antics in the Middle East, and company-specific guidance announcements. If you were dialed in, the opportunities were everywhere.

These months reward preparedness and those who show up fully focused every single day.

Inevitably, with the market so active, you probably feel like you missed out somewhere. Often, I find the worst feeling in trading isn’t losing - it’s underperforming setups that were begging to be maximised.

However, there is a great deal of hindsight at play here. Ahead of time, it is impossible to know with any certainty the magnitude of a potential move. Quantifiable characteristics, databases, and pattern recognition all contribute, but it remains a game of probabilities and human performance.

For the more experienced, you often know what you have done wrong. Beating yourself up isn’t going to help. I like to close out the frustration by reflecting on and reviewing the trade. What specifically did I learn, and what do I need to do better?

For more developing traders, the truth is that there is probably a real gap between perceived opportunity and your current skills or playbooks. The most common vent I hear is “I sold too early". However, if you don’t have clear rules or reps or a focus on an exit goal, how could you possibly expect anything different? It’s resulting. You didn't miss what you didn't have a system for.

The solution here is to work hard to close this gap. Get curious, get immersed, and reverse engineer the best plays.

This post expands on many of these points as I review June. Like you, I am human. I caught a few clean, botched a few, and watched some run without me. Instead of stewing over it, the idealised mindset is to reframe it as a lesson. As Nick Fabrio rightly commented on X,

"You performed how you performed....you just need to limit how long you're in a bad patch for".

Exploring the good, as well as the bad, is the method for building momentum into a positive feedback loop to bridge this.

Main opportunities

From a catalyst-trading perspective, these were the standout headlines and trades in Australia as I saw it:

• Israel’s attack on Iran: breaking news

• China’s export controls on magnets

• Morning drives in stock-specific catalysts such as AMI, AX1, CKF, CTT, DRO, IEL, and SBM

• Earnings drift, such as CKF

• Gap up fades such as DRO

Similar themes and nuances come out time and time again:

→ The catalyst should be so obvious that it slaps you in the face

→ The best trades go from the start

→ In a rapid price discovery phase, get big earlier

→ When working, be hands-off. The real money is made from maximising these unique situations

In the following newsletter, I review some of these setups, what went well, and performance gaps.

Trade write-ups

DRO 25/6/25