Smolinski’s H1-2026 after-action review (Business Insider)

A Business Insider piece (Kathleen Elkins) walking through Erik Smolinski‘s 19-slide after-action-review deck for the first half of 2026. Smolinski is a full-time discretionary options trader who runs his trading as a business — “big businesses have quarterly earnings reports; that’s an AAR” — and this is the clearest practitioner example the spoke has of the evaluation layer done by a human, not an automated backtest.

This is the boundary of the spoke: Smolinski trades discretionarily, so there is no trading system here to page. What routes it in is the method — a data-driven, quantitative review discipline built on the same evaluation/validation clause the spoke owns (strategy-optimization, backtesting) — plus a reusable market-analysis concept (market-regime-analysis).

Reported performance (self-reported — flag)

• Jan 1 – Jul 6 2026: account +33.44% vs 10.79% for the S&P 500.
• Trailing 12 months: +57.01% vs 21.49% for the index.

These are the trader’s own numbers, reported second-hand by BI with no independent audit or risk-adjusted (drawdown / vol) context — treat as a self-reported snapshot, the same caution the spoke applies to the founding bots’ self-published returns (see synthesis).

What the deck actually does

• Regime analysis — the slide he calls the most interesting. H1 2026 plus early July split into five distinct market environments: a low-volatility grind, a ~9% geopolitical drawdown, a V-shaped recovery, a June pullback led by mega-caps, and a more dispersed, lower-correlation rebound. The takeaway is speed: four-to-five regimes packed into a compressed window. Lesson for investors — stay calm as conditions change, and be wary of decisions anchored to longer-term trends that are themselves in flux.
• Broadening leadership — the “Mag 7 drives everything” regime is “not in vogue”; he sees wider dispersion within large/mega-caps and across market-cap segments, with small caps doing particularly well. (“Mag 7” = Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia.)
• Dip-buying speed — the half’s only ≥3% pullback fell 9.1% and recovered in 11 trading days, three days faster than the median for comparable 2021–2025 drawdowns. He reads it as underlying drivers still intact — while explicitly cautioning that one fast dip-buy is not proof every future decline reverses as quickly.
• H2 risk watch — a renewed rise in interest rates; at review time futures priced a possible Fed hike at the September meeting, which could curb small-cap momentum and restore mega-cap/tech relative leadership. He closes with three H2 scenarios.
• Methodology self-critique — a final slide scrutinizing his own analysis: where the data came from, how claims were tested, and where conclusions are weakest. The data stack is deliberately freely available: yfinance (market prices), the Fed’s FRED (economic / interest-rate data), and the Cboe SKEW Index as a tail-risk gauge.

The retail takeaway

Smolinski argues any investor benefits from a scaled-down version: schedule a structured checkup (quarterly, or at least annually) and ask whether the holdings still match goals and risk tolerance. His concrete starting move is a benchmark panel — compare your holdings against five tickers, SPY, QQQ, IWM, TLT, GLD (S&P, Nasdaq-100, small caps, long Treasuries, gold) — and ask “am I okay with this?” An AAR may just confirm the portfolio behaves as intended, or it may surface excess fees, persistent underperformance, or a holding that no longer serves its purpose.

Why it matters here

The founding corpus is automated systems (predict → decide → execute); their evaluation is a backtest or an eval toolkit (strategy-optimization, trademaster). This source shows the same evaluation function performed by a disciplined human on a live discretionary book — a quarterly after-action-review standing in for the automated feedback loop. It widens the spoke a step toward general quantitative-finance practice (the domain’s stated growth edge) without being a trading system. It also introduces the market-analysis vocabulary the automated sources never needed: market-regime-analysis and benchmark-panel comparison.

Related

after-action-review · market-regime-analysis · erik-smolinski · strategy-optimization · backtesting · algorithmic-trading · synthesis