The Quarterly Review: A Prop Firm’s Eight-Figure Kick-Off.

Across the AXIA trading desks.
January-March 2025.
London, England, and Limassol, Cyprus.

… Then came April. And what a quarter it was!  

The clocks finally changed, the brake broken, and it seems that European equity can go up. Or, perhaps until Liberation yester-day gave you a discount.

Consider, in no particular order—on-brand for the markets, yes?—what had to be digested over the past quarter: The evolution of the Trump Tariff saga, DeepSeek disruption, European budget reactions to the Russian-Ukraine war—Germany’s debt break story; Bund’s a-sorry. And… ah—yes. Remember those ECB and BoE cuts? FOMC holding and perhaps others folding. Gilty anyone?

Nevertheless, this is where the multi-dimensional market operator must thrive. VIX goes up—your P&L must do too. You must be positioned this way. Otherwise, it is exactly when you forget this inconvenient truth that you’ll get a real nasty surprise. No refunds.

But oldboy!—remember, the worst is reserved for Goldilocks strategies that thrive on a decent VIX number, but when it goes up too much—liquidity is fleeting, duration is weeping—and that special environment is what really separates the traders with pure long-tail, convex-style payouts; those that can consolidate performance in such a disrupted market state. Of course, Q1 2025 was none of the latter—this was March 2020 action—but as a reminder of what volatility really can do; to blow a hole into the market’s actual functioning and… reality.

Further, consider this from the Introduction of Traders of Our Time:

“In a zero-interest-rate policy and highly accommodative world, many asset classes grind up. The world becomes more one-dimensional—“if x, do y” scenarios. Like a controlled scientific experiment, many of the variables were isolated and seemingly snuffed out. In a complex web of many variables, a dynamic world is where the human trader thrives. But if only a handful of variables become relevant, especially if it becomes central bank policy, then much edge and profit is to be had among the server racks of speed and automation until they later start to eat each other, too—but that is another story.”

To add: a one-dimensional world is fantastic for investors—and incidentally those proclaiming a new regime and world order: passive investing, quant funds—and yet an ‘if x, do y’ world sounds the death throes of the human discretionary trader. As it had been from 2013–2019; roughly. The same for static, rule or mandate bound investors; human, algorithmic, mechanical traders or otherwise.

So what did the dynamic, complex web of Q1 2025 look for a futures-based (long-short agnostic), multi-product, multi-edge discretionary trading floor? Firstly, reimagine the scenes of A Tale of Two Truths, which describes most action days or weeks of January to March. Of course, all action periods differ, but inaction is the same. As described in Sitzfleisch. There was no real one-off, big event but an accumulation of ticks, a harvesting of volatility, and a general rising tide of P&Ls as the markets thrashed around.

How much accumulation? The AXIA prop desks globally clocked in over $10 million this Q1. Time to look back, and then forwards.