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).

Narrowed 2026-08-30. "No independent audit" is right but was doing too much work. BI states it verified the claims by looking at screenshots of his summary statements — a documented verification step, not nothing, and more than most self-published returns get. It is still not an audit: a screenshot shows a stated balance, not the trade log behind it, and it supplies no drawdown, no volatility and no denominator of accounts that did worse. The distinction is the one this spoke keeps needing — checked that the number was reported versus checked that the number is right.

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