A Quarter of Extremes: A Trading Firm’s Q1 2026 Review
From the Market of Islands to the Iran War
Dear Practitioners,
So we arrive at the first quarterly review of the year.
As ever, the purpose here is not merely to recount headlines, performance, or events after the fact, but to attempt something closer to structural diagnosis: to understand the shape of the environment itself, the kinds of opportunities it permitted, the adaptations it demanded, and the forms of trader behaviour it selected for and against.
Market summaries, predictions, and retrospective certainties are abundant. Any serious practitioner should already be reviewing the quarter independently. Yet what remains far rarer is direct proximity to how traders themselves actually experienced these conditions in real time: how they navigated them, survived them, failed within them, adapted to them, and in certain moments extracted extraordinary performance from them.
“The Traders Behind the Market” remains Asymmetrist’s guiding premise for precisely this reason.
Q1 2026 ultimately became a quarter of extremes. The year began still trapped within the compression and low-opportunity conditions inherited from late 2025—what elsewhere in these pages has been termed the “Market of Islands”—before reopening into one of the most headline-driven and opportunity-dense environments witnessed for years through the Iran War theme and the broader repricing regimes surrounding it.
As so often occurs in markets, one environment became another before many fully realised the transition itself was already underway.
What follows, therefore, is less a chronological recap than an attempt to understand the deeper logic of the quarter: the clustering of opportunity, the emergence and decay of themes, the relationship between volatility and trader development, the nonlinearity of performance, and the strange reality that entire careers can sometimes move further forward in several weeks than in several years preceding them.
Good trading and good reading to you all,
Bogdan
Unlock Source, Depth and Sense
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Across the AXIA trading desks.
January-March 2026.
London (England) · Limassol (Cyprus) · Split & Zagreb (Croatia)
The beginning of the year was but a continuation of late 2025: tighter-range markets, lower volatility, and diminished opportunity density before the violent reopening of headline-driven markets during the Trump Tariff Saga from April 2026 onwards.
Indeed, we still retained the “Market of Islands” environment—alongside the difficulties and imperatives of navigating it—right up until the end of February 2026, where opportunity density diminishes and the fruitful landmass of engaging in almost anything, when volatility is high and opportunities abundant, becomes flooded, leaving only islands.
In a sense, this was the opposite extreme to Q1 2025. The broad opportunity density of that period gave way to the low-opportunity conditions of Q3 and Q4 2025, only now for markets to violently swing back in the other direction once more. Though, as ever, one should never discount that the extreme cannot become more extreme still.
What then of the Market of Islands? It requires the trader to sit upon their island—their skill set and competency domain—and nail to perfection their once-in-a-while, otherwise-starve opportunity, never fully knowing when the next may arrive. As expanded upon in Asymmetrist’s Living Library Episode: Between the Headlines, it is to catch the only foodstuffs—birds—landing upon the island at irregular and unpredictable times.
Does the trader instead swim out towards other islands where one hopes the birds may soon land? Or stay put and avoid expending too much energy swimming from one island to the next: opportunity cost, learning cost, psychological cost. Yet staying too long carries its own risk too: starvation.
Many traders across the AXIA team were experiencing this problem and, if they were, it is representative of the same issues many others around the world were likely experiencing too.
So before we get to the big one—the Iran War—it is just as important to look at the first two months of the quarter. That is to say: never let hard markets go to waste.
Someone’s hard markets are another’s best markets. Specifically, to discover, learn, and eventually perform upon the skill set required to make hard markets into best markets means that the best examples of those very conditions are already unfolding in real time in front of you, likely at their clearest, most accessible, and most executable, rather than relying upon old information or patterns from another period entirely.