GR_STRATEGIES
The spicy gossip from my trading diary in 2025!
Real-time results since January 2023
by:
Georg Reiter
| daily updates
Dear Friends and Fellow Investors!
Reflecting on 2025, it was less a year of smooth trends and more a year of stress tests — for markets, for systems, and for discipline.
While headline indices once again delivered strong absolute returns, the journey was anything but straightforward. At several points throughout the year, politics, narratives, and rapid sentiment shifts moved markets more than fundamentals.
The renewed dominance of Donald Trump in the political landscape reshaped expectations across asset classes. Markets oscillated between optimism and caution: deregulation hopes, fiscal uncertainty, trade rhetoric, and geopolitical tensions created a constantly shifting backdrop.
Volatility was not an exception — it was the baseline.
For diversified and systematic portfolios like mine, 2025 was not about chasing headlines, but about navigating an environment where signals were shorter, reversals faster, and conviction harder to maintain.
| Date | GR_Strategies_USD | DAX | SP500 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23.01 % | 16.39 % | ||
| 75.89 % | 78.29 % | ||
| 20.47 % | 20.72 % | ||
| 1.44 | 1.40 |
Performance since start 2023 (EUR):
| GR_Strategies: 62.85 % |
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | |||||||||||||
| 2024 | |||||||||||||
| 2025 |
VIX Surges — A New Lesson in Volatility
While the VIX spike in August 2024 was widely seen as an exceptional event, 2025 made one thing clear: elevated volatility was no longer the exception — it became a recurring part of the market environment.
Rather than one single shock, markets experienced repeated phases of stress. Expectations were repriced quickly, often followed by sharp reversals. Volatility came in waves — sometimes without a clear trigger — reflecting fragile confidence and shifting narratives.
This environment punished false security and rewarded flexibility.
To put this into perspective: at these levels, markets stop moving in straight lines.
In 2025, higher volatility did not fade away after one sharp move. Instead, markets went through repeated phases of stress, followed by partial and often short-lived normalization. Risk was repriced again and again — often before participants had fully adjusted to the previous shift.
Unlike the volatility spike of 2024, which calmed unusually quickly, 2025 played out as a series of volatility clusters. Short periods of calm were repeatedly interrupted by sudden repricing, policy uncertainty, and changing macro expectations.
In such an environment, the goal is not to predict the next spike, but to stay prepared. The systems I rely on did exactly that: they reduced exposure when uncertainty rose, increased it again when conditions improved, and stayed flexible throughout.
Looking back, it may seem that staying fully invested would have benefited from selected rallies. But the real risk in 2025 was assuming stability in a market that repeatedly proved unstable. Systematic risk management mattered — not to avoid every drawdown, but to keep temporary stress from becoming lasting damage.
Years like 2025 remind us: volatility is not the problem. Unmanaged exposure is.
Why GR_Trendfollowing (= CTA) Strategies
Remain Essential
in My Portfolio
For trend-following strategies, 2025 was undeniably demanding. Trends emerged, accelerated, and then abruptly collapsed — often within weeks, sometimes within days.
As a result, systems were frequently stopped out — not due to poor design, but because of the market’s fragmented and rapidly shifting structure. This was not a year of long, smooth trends. It was a year of false starts, regime shifts, and compressed holding periods.
Importantly, this behavior is not a weakness of trend following — it is its insurance premium. Trend systems are explicitly designed to accept small, repeated losses in order to remain positioned for the rare but decisive moves that ultimately define long-term performance.
In chaotic regimes like 2025, trend following does not promise comfort — it provides survival.
Performance since start 2023 (EUR):
| GR_Trendfollowing: 51.86 % |
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | |||||||||||||
| 2024 | |||||||||||||
| 2025 |
Diversification Under Pressure
In strong equity phases, diversification can feel frustrating. 2025 was one of those years where concentrated equity exposure would have looked attractive in hindsight — until volatility reasserted itself.
For GR_Strategies, diversification once again proved its value not by maximizing short-term returns, but by containing risk during political- and macro-driven turbulence.
Exposure across asset classes, styles, and time horizons helped absorb shocks that would otherwise have caused lasting damage.
Diversification did not optimize for excitement — it optimized for survival.
Systems Over Opinions
More than anything else, 2025 reinforced the importance of process over prediction.
Narratives shifted rapidly throughout the year — from optimism around growth, to fears of trade wars, to relief rallies, and back to renewed uncertainty.
Attempting to trade these transitions discretionarily would have required constant opinion changes and near-perfect timing.
The systems, by contrast, remained consistent. They reacted, adjusted exposure, reduced risk when necessary — and stayed operational throughout.
There were no errors.
No overrides.
No emotional decisions.
In an environment where opinions changed daily, the systems did not.
Looking Ahead to 2026
2025 delivered something invaluable: clarity.
- Clarity about market structure
- Clarity about how volatility behaves across regimes
- Clarity about where systems perform well — and where patience is required
Several refinements, informed directly by this year’s data, are scheduled for implementation going forward. These are evolutionary improvements — grounded in real market stress rather than theory.
Closing Thoughts
2025 was not an easy year — but it was an honest one.
Markets tested discipline, resilience, and conviction. The strategies endured, adapted, and remained aligned with their long-term design.
That is not a coincidence.
It is the result of preparation — and
trust in the process when the noise gets loud.
Invitation
I invite you to follow my journey with daily performance updates and open positions:
Here’s to a 2026 filled with resilience, growth, and innovation. I remain focused, grateful, and optimistic — and I thank you for being part of this journey.
With passion and determination,
Georg Reiter
A Second Year Without Helmuth Vollmeier
This marked the second full year since the passing of Helmuth Vollmeier, during which development and trading continued without his direct presence.
And while time moves forward, some things do not become easier.
Many decisions still begin with the same quiet question: What would Helmuth have done?
Over time, that question has become practical rather than emotional. It helps keep decisions grounded, focused on structure, discipline, and risk awareness.
His approach continues to influence the way systems are built and maintained — with restraint where enthusiasm might otherwise dominate, and patience where speed could invite mistakes.
Carrying this work forward is not about looking back, but about applying a standard that still holds.
This is the link that brings you a bit deeper into further analysis work
and strategies!