May Market Overview.
Stagflationary US data turned a tentative recovery into a full rate repricing, and all four Divitae strategies finished May modestly lower — a composed result in a month that defied directional conviction. The headline numbers, in plain terms, with the full report linked below.
What happened in May
May 2026 was a month that wanted to believe the worst was over and repeatedly discovered it wasn’t. The US–Iran conflict entered its third month and a tentative recovery in risk appetite collided almost immediately with a cascade of US inflation data. April CPI accelerated to 3.8% year-on-year, producer prices surged 1.4% month-on-month to a 6.0% annual rate, and by mid-May markets were pricing a 42% probability of a Fed rate hike by December — a dramatic reversal from the two cuts previously expected.
The repricing rippled unevenly through the majors. The Reserve Bank of Australia raised rates to 4.35% in its third consecutive hike, while the Reserve Bank of New Zealand delivered a razor-thin hawkish hold that triggered a sharp late-month repricing across the antipodean crosses. Gold closed down roughly 1.8%, and crypto saw sustained institutional outflows, with Bitcoin near $71,000 on heavy spot-ETF outflows — including a record $635m single-day redemption on 13 May — and Ethereum underperforming sharply to near $1,960.
It was a month defined less by trend than by repricing — of Fed expectations, rate differentials and how long the road to resolution would prove. Systematic models had to trade both sides of fast, news-driven reversals rather than ride a sustained move.
How the strategies performed
All four live strategies finished May in modestly negative territory — a composed outcome given the crosscurrents. The FX systems navigated two-way dollar volatility and the rate-differential trends opened by the RBA, while the antipodean crosses proved hardest to hold after the RBNZ pivot. The crypto model traded a month of broad institutional outflows.
- ARES — −0.66% (FX & commodities); the month’s best relative result
- ZEUS — −1.85% (FX & commodities)
- HERMES — −2.13% (FX, 28 pairs & gold); highest monthly win rate of the FX strategies
- KRONOS — −2.39% (crypto, BTC / ETH); a resilient result against materially weaker underlying assets
Each strategy’s track record remains independently verified through Q1 2026 (31 March 2026) by Alpha Performance Verification Services under the GIPS® approach — so the figures in the report are the figures the verifier examined.
“A composed month across all four systems — the kind of disciplined drawdown that a verified, long-run track record is built to absorb.”
Why it matters to you
Single months are noise; what matters is how a system behaves across regimes. May was a stress test of two-way, headline-driven conditions, and the strategies came through with contained, broad-based losses rather than concentrated blow-ups. Set against multi-year cumulative records — ZEUS above +870%, KRONOS above +720% since inception — a modest negative month is the cost of staying systematically invested through uncertainty.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, and verification confirms one thing only: the historical record is presented fairly, on stated criteria.
Read the May report
The full May 2026 Market Report walks through the month’s macro backdrop and each strategy’s performance in detail, with the verifier’s report linked on every strategy page. It is available in English and Czech.
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