Thales is a macro event-driven FX investment strategy offered on the Darwinex platform. The asset manager for the strategy is Darwinex. The award-winning FX strategy is deployed on post-scheduled-event market reactions from economic releases and monetary policy decisions in G10 currencies. In both 2022 and 2023 Thales was named as the best performing systematic currency strategy by The Hedge Fund Journal.

Darwinex is an FCA and CNMV regulated brokerage and investment platform in the UK and Spain. Founded in 2012, Darwinex employs more than 60 across the London headquarters and a development office in Spain.

Aarnikotka Tutkimus (EN: Gryphon Research) is a trading signal provider and a research company based in Jyväskylä Finland. We provide trading signals directly to Thales (THA) strategy managed by Darwinex, an FCA and CNMV regulated investment platform in Spain and UK.

Aarnikotka Tutkimus Ltd. was founded in 2022 and is headed by Aatu Kokkila who together with a tight-knit team of four professionals is behind Thales, the top-performing macro & FX strategy available on the Darwinex platform. The trading team is based in Finland.

The Thales strategy is only available on the Darwinex platform.

The Darwinex® brand and the https://www.darwinex.com domain are commercial names used by Tradeslide Trading Tech Limited, a company regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the United Kingdom with FRN 586466, with company registration number 08061368 and registered office in Acre House, 11-15 William Road, London NW1 3ER, UK. and by Sapiens Markets EU Sociedad de Valores SA, a company regulated by the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV) in Spain under the number 311, with CIF A10537348 and registered office in Calle de Recoletos, 19, Bajo, 28001 Madrid, Spain

You may access the invest option on the website after which you will be redirected to Darwinex account opening. After filling out the registration form, you will be contacted by a Darwinex employee to review the investment opportunity and steps necessary to invest in the strategy.

For more information on investing, please refer to thales@darwinex.com or darwinex.com.

An event-driven macro & FX strategy is a specialized investment approach designed to profit from price movements in the foreign exchange (FX) market triggered by significant events or catalysts. This strategy type typically leverages the timely and precise execution of trades following specific events that are expected to have a substantial impact on currency values.

The tradeable event sphere encompasses economic data releases (e.g., GDP reports, CPI releases), central bank announcements (e.g., interest rate decisions, FED statements), and political events such as currency interventions or elections. The strategy is always in the market ex-post information.

• United States Dollar (USD)
• Euro (EUR)
• Japanese Yen (JPY)
• British Pound Sterling (GBP)
• Swiss Franc (CHF
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• New Zealand Dollar (NZD)
• Swedish Krona (SEK)
• Norwegian Krone (NOK

There are usually anywhere from 6 to 12 tradeable events a month.

From a few minutes to a few hours, or in some cases a few days.

Risk limits are based on a percentage of the NAV. Our current maximum per-event risk is 2.5%, with the vast majority of events are in risk range of 0.1%-0.8%.

There is no single inefficiency we trade, we trade both momentum and mean reversion.

Interpreting detail versus reacting to headlines is the edge of our process. For example, for US inflation, during 2023 and early 2024, the services ex-housing has been a key metric to watch.

The database is an integral element in our scenario building process. Key element of our edge is understanding the detail on events today and being able to say where events are similar and where different compared to history.

Where we have genuine edge compared to fully automated strategies, is that we can compare events that are similar to today, instead of operating with vast data sets that on paper exhibit similarity, but in practice do not and are subject to overfitting.

Our risk management is systematic. Our trading rules are systematic. Our position entry (building up risk) and exits are systematic.

Leverage is decided for different expected scenarios pre-event and accordingly applied post-event based on which scenario materializes which is also systematic.

Discretion is exercised in unanticipated outcomes that we have not planned for in advance and such events are always lower risk if we end up trading them.

However, even in these cases, all the systematic disciplines (risk, leverage, duration of risk, etc.) will come into play. Our motto is we trade based on rules not based on views.

The CTFC is something we look at at the start of the week – a part of the process of assessing positioning. However, CTFC can be a bit misleading in positioning for FX, so we have a look at various other sources such as investment banks' reports and internal data we can get our hands on.

All psychological biases are best controlled by having systematic rulesets.

Although we don’t believe in return targets, we have returned 12-15% net of fees on an annualized basis with a moderate drawdown for VAR 6.5%.

The strategy is offered at 6.5% VAR with 95% confidence. This means that only 1 in 20 months should we expect a return outside the -6.5% to +6.5% range.

Thales has a verified 10-year track record starting from 2015 to the present day.

Historically, the performance of the strategy has been exceptional on a risk-adjusted basis. Performance metrics change dynamically over time, but for example, in 2022 and 2023 the strategy had a Sharpe ratio of 2.5.

Based on historical data, Thales has a low to negative correlation to equity and bond markets, as well as to hedge indices (e.g.  SP500, AGG, ACWI, Barclay HF Index). You can see our comparative return performance here.

Based on historical data, the per-event win/loss ratio has been around 42%. Per trade hit rate is roughly 30%, as there are sometimes losing trades during an event that still ends up profitable.

A significant majority of profits are on the most liquid pairs.

Very infrequently and we have always been aware of the risk, therefore the gaps have been quite minimal. For example, we don’t hold events if they are close to our stops.

We don’t like to trail stops or take profits. In short-term FX, trailing stops are a terrible, arbitrary idea. If we hold a position, we keep the stop at break-even and assess how far the market could go based on history.

We can let 25-50% of the position run for up to two weeks provided we are profitable and stops can be reasonably held at break-even. Such circumstances usually occur only when our position aligns with the trend and we are already significantly profitable after a day.

Always. Scaling is an integral part of both the entry and exit process.

Information needs to change for us to reverse positions. This occasionally happens when there is a statement, after which there is a press conference. These situations are most prevalent  for the ECB and Federal Reserve where the press conference tends to overpower the statement therefore affecting our scenarios.

We track very carefully our execution costs and regularly engage with the operational team of Darwinex and their liquidity providers to make sure we are securing the best pricing.

It is quite dynamic. Some events have always been very tradeable, such as the Fed and ECB. When it comes to data events, between 2015-2017 the most important economic releases across the main G10 moved the corresponding pairs. Now since 2022, it has been mainly about the US data.

Yes. We can trade everything that is market-moving. Most of the time it’s the statements and the accompanying projections and then the follow-up press conferences that are most market-moving.

Speeches can be also market-moving. However, usually, speeches stick to the script from preceding statements, but if the information has changed, for example, important data in between, they can be quite market-moving.

Minutes are very rarely market-moving, as the information is stale.

It's an ongoing process. It's very difficult to predict in advance what central bank will move markets most for a given year.

For example, Bank of Canada used to be our best event in 2021, then since 2022 it has been a choppy event as BOC’s monetary policy has very tightly followed that of the Fed.

Quite often it is possible to prepare for special, emergency, or ad hoc events. For example, for the Japanese Yen interventions, we could prepare and subsequently capture alpha because we had a lot of historical data for them and could roughly guess when they would intervene. However, such events are the exception and do not constitute the majority of our trading.

From a return perspective, the strategy tends to outperform when historical FX volatilities are at least near-10-year averages. In comparison to long volatility strategies, Thales also exhibits positive performance in low volatility environments.

In the short-run (3-6 months) we cannot predict as that is random, but we believe the opportunity set is exceptional over the medium-term (2-3 year horizon). We are prepared to take advantage of both a regime of lower interest rates and weaker economic growth or a stagflationary regime.

Overall, as result of higher inflation, changing geopolitics and high interest rates compared to past decade, we think over the long run there is an opportunity set of a lifetime for those who have a strong process to take advantage of macro event-based inefficiencies.