Annual Letter

To the holders of the Trinity Mandate,

This is the second annual letter the desk has written to you, and it covers the year that ended on the thirty-first of December, twenty-twenty-five. It is meant to be read slowly. We have always believed that the people who allocate to this mandate deserve a full accounting in a single place — not in fragments scattered across a portal — and so we sit down once a year and write you this document. If you are reading it on a screen, we hope you print it. The cream paper and the small folio number in the corner are not ornaments; they are how we ask you to feel about the figures that follow.

We will tell you, in turn: what the year produced, the principles we leaned on to produce it, the three decisions that mattered most, the three lessons we learned, where the position book stands as you receive this letter, what we still owe you, and what we expect of the year ahead. We will be candid about the mistakes. We are confident about the design.

The mandate closed twenty-twenty-five with assets at or above eight hundred and eighty-five million dollars, against the two hundred and forty-five million dollars at which the year began. Net realised performance, gross of the carry distributed to holders in October, was the figure cited in the disclosure you received with this letter; we do not restate it here for the same reason a tailor does not restate the measurements: you have the paper, and we trust you to read it.

The number that interests us more than the headline is the one we do not advertise: the count of closed positions in deficit during the year. That figure is zero. It has been zero for the entire history of the desk and we expect it to remain zero, not because we are clairvoyant, but because the mandate's sizing rules do not permit a closed loss to occur. Either an instrument moves in our favour and we let it run; or it does not, and we wait. We do not wait briefly. We do not wait elegantly. We wait until the position is in profit, or until the trade is invalidated and the risk is returned without a closed deficit on the book.

We mention this because it is the single rule that, if relaxed, would change everything. Our holders sleep at night because of it. We will not relax it.

The mandate has three instruments — XAU/USD, US30/USD, and XAG/USD — and three rules. The first rule is that we trade the cleanest structure available on a given day; if the structure is not clean, we do not trade. The second is that we size each entry such that an adverse move does not impair the holder's base capital, only the unrealised. The third is that we close into profit, not into time.

That is the entire system. It is, in twenty-twenty-five terms, embarrassingly small. But the discipline required to follow it for two hundred and fifty-two trading sessions, with no exceptions, is what produces the figures you receive. Most of the desks we respect have a similar small set of rules. None of them write a letter telling you about it because none of them survive long enough to accumulate the kind of holders who read letters. We have, and we do.

The first was to refuse, in March, the forty-million-dollar ticket from a sovereign vehicle whose due-diligence team would not name the ultimate beneficial owner. We left the meeting in twenty-three minutes. We do not regret it.

The second was to add a third instrument — silver — in June, against the protest of one principal who held that two were enough. The principal was right that two are enough; the instrument was added anyway, on the ground that the desk's edge in the metal is real, and that paying the principal's ego in opportunity cost would have been a strange way to honour our holders. He has since agreed.

The third was to close the desk to new capital, briefly, in September. The decision cost us forty-four million in committed inflows. We re-opened in October, after the operations team had absorbed the prior cohort. We will close again, without warning, when we judge the operational tempo demands it. We ask you, in advance, to take the closure not as a slight but as evidence that we are paying attention.

One. A holder who is sent the right letter on the right day will allocate a second time without asking. We did not believe this when we began writing letters. We believe it now.

Two. The instruments we trade are agnostic about the year, the regime, and the consensus narrative. The mistake is to be agnostic about them. We have tightened our pre-session work from forty minutes to seventy-five, and that — not any new indicator — has produced the marginal improvement in entry quality that you will see in the September-onward distribution.

Three. A relationship manager who knows your children's names and remembers, without prompting, that you are flying out of Geneva on Tuesday is worth more than four percent of returns. We hired three more this year. We will hire three more next year.

As of the date of this letter, the desk holds long exposure in XAU/USD, a small short hedge in US30/USD against a year-end re-pricing scenario, and a flat book in silver. Net delta is modest; the gross book is materially smaller than at any point since June. We are not bearish; we are simply unwilling to put holder capital into a market we cannot read with the precision we owe you. When the structure clarifies, the book will move.

We owe you three things, and we organise the firm around delivering them in this order: first, the full and timely return of your capital on request, in the currency of your choosing, without friction; second, a candid quarterly accounting of how the desk has performed, including the days that did not go to plan; third, an annual letter — this one — in which we sit with you for an hour and tell you what we have been doing with your money.

We do not owe you the strategy. We owe you the result of the strategy. Holders who confuse these two are, with respect, not people we want as holders, and we will redeem them, politely and quickly, when they ask.

We expect twenty-twenty-six to be a good year. We expected twenty-twenty-five to be a good year and the principals were right by a margin none of us anticipated. Neither belief is a forecast; both are an articulation of a posture. We will be in the markets that suit the system, on the days that suit the markets, with the size that suits the holder. We will not be elsewhere. We will not be ambitious about expanding the instrument set, the team, or the book's leverage. We will be ambitious about the small things — the time it takes to clear a wire, the precision of the morning brief, the warmth with which your relationship manager picks up the phone — because the small things are the only things a holder ever actually feels.

Thank you for the year. Thank you, more than that, for letting us keep your money.