Track Record: the 2022 Bear Market

The year the market broke, scored by somebody else.

2022 was the bear market. The S&P 500 spent the year grinding lower and the buy-and-hold crowd spent it explaining why the next quarter would be different. What follows is the High Delta short-term options record as it stood through that year, on a platform that computed every figure independently. Contrary Thinker did not score this. Trade Exchange, Inc. did.

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Who scored it

Between December 2021 and 2023, Contrary Thinker published short-term options ideas on the Trade Exchange app under the channel Contrary Thinker: High Delta Short-Term Puts and Calls. Trade Exchange, Inc., a New York company, computed and displayed the performance figures on its own platform. Every number on this page was read off a Trade Exchange channel card.

Contrary Thinker was named on the platform's launch roster, published September 29, 2020. The platform described its own model in that release:

Trade Exchange is a trade alert marketplace featuring experts with verified track records. Self-directed investors can find experts suited to their needs, see each expert's performance history, and execute trades directly in their linked brokerage account or a simulated trading account, all within the Trade Exchange app, available now in the App Store and in Google Play.

Source: Trade Exchange, Inc. launch release, September 29, 2020, carried on Newswire.com, Yahoo Finance, ACCESSWIRE and AccessNewswire.

Contrary Thinker appears fifth in the roster named in the same release:

Experts on the Trade Exchange include: Altos Trading, Alpha Insights, Aspen Trading Group, Bull & Bear Trading, Contrary Thinker, East Summit Financial, Fibocall, Fractal Wave, Greenfield Capital, If/Then Market Timing, the Inger Letter, LaDuc Trading, Jonah Lupton, Market Analysts, Prendergraft Research, Rick's Picks, Sharper Trades, Barry Steinman, Steady Trader, StockInvest.us, Sunshine Profits, Trader Review, Trading Stock Alerts, Travel Trader, Turbo Trading, Daniel Turov, Vantage Alerts, the Wallstreet Forecaster, and Weather Shares.

Both passages are quoted verbatim from the third-party release and are not edited. Trade Exchange has since wound down and its site is gone, so the roster listing stands as a dated historical fact of 2020 rather than a current listing. The surviving evidence for the performance figures is the set of channel screenshots captured while the platform was live, held in the Contrary Thinker archive.

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The 2022 numbers

The platform reported cumulative figures, running from the channel's first idea. The table below is the last card captured in 2022, dated December 15, 2022. Every value is the platform's own, read off that card.

Measure	Card reading, December 15, 2022
Total performance	+999.85%
S&P 500 over the same window	-13.84%
Ideas scored	294
Days elapsed	378
Window covered	December 2, 2021 to December 15, 2022
Win rate	39.80%
Average win	+194.49%
Average loss	-44.85%
Payoff ratio	4.34
Expectancy per idea	+50.41 percentage points

Payoff ratio and expectancy are computed from the win rate, average win and average loss printed on that same card. Nothing else on the table is calculated.

The shape of the year, endpoint to endpoint. The first card captured in 2022 is dated February 13 and the last is dated December 15. Both readings are the platform's:

Card	Performance	Ideas	S&P 500
February 13, 2022	+227.20%	40	-2.23%
December 15, 2022	+999.85%	294	-13.84%

What is not claimed here. The channel opened on December 2, 2021, and the earliest surviving screenshot is dated February 13, 2022, by which point 40 ideas had already been scored. There is no card dated December 31, 2021 or January 1, 2022. A clean calendar-year return, a calendar-year idea count and a calendar-year index comparison would all have to be interpolated from figures that do not exist. They are not published, and no figure on this page is interpolated.

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Waypoints through 2022

Each row is a single dated card, captured while the platform was live. Cumulative figures throughout.

Card date	Performance	Ideas	Days	S&P 500
February 13, 2022	+227.20%	40	73	-2.23%
March 14, 2022	+414.74%	69	102	-6.87%
April 7, 2022	+370.19%	96	126	-1.35%
May 9, 2022	+595.19%	136	159	-11.60%
June 16, 2022	+697.31%	180	196	-18.55%
July 24, 2022	+843.97%	212	235	-12.30%
August 31, 2022	+706.60%	235	273	-12.86%
September 30, 2022	+841.27%	253	303	-20.26%
October 27, 2022	+1,061.64%	272	330	-15.65%
November 9, 2022	+1,123.19%	281	343	-16.95%
December 15, 2022	+999.85%	294	378	-13.84%

Sixty three cards were captured in 2022. The eleven above are the waypoints. The full set is held in the Contrary Thinker archive, one figure per screenshot, nothing rounded and nothing reconciled.

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Method

High Delta is short-dated, high-delta puts and calls. The positions are directional and they are deliberately short in duration, which is what produces a win rate under forty percent alongside an average win better than four times the average loss. Entries are contrarian and taken at sentiment extremes, where the crowd is most committed to the move that is ending rather than the one that is starting. The instrument is chosen so that being right about direction and timing pays several times what being wrong costs. That asymmetry, not the hit rate, is the whole point of the vehicle.

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Where the method runs now

Trade Exchange is gone. The method is not. The same contrarian timing work, the same volatility reading and the same insistence on asymmetry now run inside Strategy and Tactics, the Contrary Thinker service for self-directed investors, active traders and small fund managers who want the structure under the surface rather than the story on top of it.

Read what Strategy and Tactics covers, and see where the timing work points next.

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