Yet Another Winning Year For Hindsight Capital

With the miserable year of 2020 over, it’s time to return to the offices of Hindsight Capital LLC.

- John Authers

For those unfamiliar with this great, albeit imaginary, hedge fund— which I visit every year at about this time—it invests with a strategy guaranteed to beat all others: hindsight.

Certain limits are imposed on the fund: Hindsight makes all its trades at the beginning of the year and can’t change them; and it must make broad sectoral bets, not buy individual stocks. It can, however, make “long-short” trades, betting on one asset to rise and a different one to fall. Hindsight also bases itself in the country with the year’s worst-performing currency—in 2020 that was Brazil— which has the effect of improving its imaginary gains.

At the beginning of 2020, Hindsight was already aware of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, and able to predict its effects. Here are some of its most profitable trades.