ALL SEASONS FUND: Q1 2026 COMMENTARY LETTER
The All Seasons Fund ended the first quarter of 2026 down -3.58%.
Summary
High headline risk drives indices, choppy underneath
- Major U.S. equity indices ended Q1 2026 mainly lower, with the S&P 500 down 4.33%. While near recent highs, the path was uneven.
- Factor leadership rotated quickly between growth vs. value and large vs. small caps. Sector dispersion increased, creating a high-churn backdrop beneath relatively stable index levels.
Persistent “snapbacks” after sell-offs
- Pullbacks driven by macro headlines or policy repricing were typically short-lived and followed by rapid recoveries.
- Systematic and passive flows, along with entrenched buy-the-dip behavior, continued to compress realized volatility soon after each drawdown.
- This pattern can foster investor complacency even as underlying risks build.
Option skew signaled ongoing downside concern
- Index implied volatility hovered around long-term averages, but downside skew remained elevated.
- Investors showed consistent demand for downside protection despite resilient spot levels, reflecting concern over a larger-than-usual correction.
- The CBOE SKEW Index steepened during sell-offs and only partially normalized during snapbacks.
Elevated volatility of volatility
- Pricing of options on volatility indices and far out-of-the-money options implied heightened uncertainty around the stability of volatility itself.
- Volatility-of-volatility remained above recent years’ norms, indicating markets were willing to pay up for tail protection.
- This created selective opportunities for strategies able to distinguish between genuinely stressed tails and episodically overpriced protection.
All Seasons Fund Positioning and Activity
The Fund focused on:
- Monetizing episodes where implied volatility, skew, or volatility-of-volatility became stretched relative to realized behavior.
- Maintaining hedges against larger systemic shocks despite frequent snapbacks eroding option premiums.
Positioning emphasized:
- Liquidity and diversification across indices, tenors, and strikes.
- Careful management of short-dated risk in the face of fast reversals.
- Emphasis on avoiding very large losses to stay in line with the Fund’s goal of seeking positive returns across all economic environments.
- While this emphasis on large losses has caused several stop losses to trigger before rapid market snapbacks, historically, it has helped the strategy avoid double-digit drawdowns.
Key Risks for the Remainder of 2026
Equities
- Elevated index concentration and rich valuations in select growth and quality names increase vulnerability to adverse earnings or macro surprises.
- A credible catalyst, whether a policy mistake, earnings downturn, or geopolitical shock, could shift the regime from buy-the-dip to sell-the-rally, turning brief air pockets into a more persistent drawdown.
- Even in a correction scenario, mechanical and passive flows may still drive sharp countertrend rallies, keeping the equity return path nonlinear and volatility episodes abrupt.
Bonds and cross-asset
- Uncertainty around the inflation and policy-rate path may sustain elevated rate volatility and an unstable yield curve shape.
- Traditional stock-bond diversification is less reliable if inflation or policy shocks cause equity and duration risk to move together.
- Credit markets could face spread widening if growth slows, even as government yields decline, complicating risk-off positioning.
- In this backdrop, maintaining access to options-based convexity across equities and rates, as the All Seasons strategy is designed to do, remains central to managing downside risk while seeking to benefit from volatility dislocations.
Overview
The first quarter of 2026 was defined by a tug-of-war between resilient corporate earnings and mounting macro uncertainty, producing an equity environment characterized by sharp rotations and frequent, if short-lived, air pockets. Index-level performance masked a high-churn backdrop: factor leadership shifted repeatedly, dispersion within and across sectors widened, and intraday ranges expanded meaningfully versus 2025 averages. Against this backdrop, the USA Mutuals All Seasons Fund remained focused on managing downside risk while seeking to monetize dislocations in volatility markets, in keeping with its objective of delivering risk-adjusted returns across cycles.
Equity markets continued to exhibit the now-familiar pattern of rapid snapbacks following drawdowns, a feature that has increasingly defined index behavior in the post-2008 era. Episodes of de-risking, often triggered by macro headlines, shifts in policy expectations, or concentration risk in large index constituents, were typically met by aggressive dip-buying and CTA/systematic flows that compressed realized volatility almost as quickly as it had expanded. Historically, such snapbacks can lull investors into complacency, yet they also speak to the structural demand for equities in a world still adjusting to higher nominal rates and uncertain growth trajectories.
Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026, we believe that both equity and bond markets face a non-trivial set of risks that could sustain, or even amplify, current levels of volatility and vol-of-vol. On the equity side, stretched valuations in certain growth and quality segments, elevated index concentration, and ongoing uncertainty around the trajectory of inflation and policy rates raise the potential for sharper corrections than those seen in early 2026. History shows that periods marked by frequent snapbacks can precede more persistent drawdowns once a catalyst emerges that undermines the buy-the-dip reflex, whether that catalyst is an earnings recession, a policy mistake, or an exogenous shock. At the same time, the persistence of systematic and passive flows suggests that any such drawdowns may be punctuated by powerful rallies, keeping the path of returns highly nonlinear.
Bond markets are unlikely to offer a simple hedge in this environment. While yields have adjusted substantially from their post-pandemic lows, the path of policy from here, potentially involving a narrower margin for error on both inflation and growth, could inject additional volatility into the term structure of interest rates. A re-steepening yield curve driven by renewed inflation concerns would challenge traditional duration-heavy allocations, while a growth scare could widen credit spreads even as sovereign yields decline. For multi-asset portfolios, this raises the possibility that equity and bond correlations remain unstable, limiting the effectiveness of conventional diversification. As a result, owning convexity through options on both equity indices and rates may become increasingly valuable, particularly if vol-of-vol remains bid.
In this context, the USA Mutuals All Seasons Fund will continue to emphasize risk management, diversification, and opportunistic use of options to navigate an environment where both prices and volatility can move abruptly. The Fund’s mandate and process are designed for precisely these conditions: a landscape where equity markets can overshoot in both directions, option markets periodically misprice risk, and traditional asset-class relationships become less reliable.
Sincerely yours,
Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. For a prospectus or summary prospectus with this and other information about the Fund, please call 1-800-MUTUALS or visit our website at www.USAMutuals.com. Read the prospectus or summary prospectus carefully before investing.
Fund Objective:
The Fund seeks capital appreciation in all economic cycles.
Standardized performance as of (3/31/2026) Fund Inception (2/01/2002)
| YTD | 1 Year | 3 Year | 5 Year | 10 Year | Since Inception | |
| UNAVX | 4.78% | 0.91% | 0.98% | 4.94% | 6.12% | 9.53% |
| S&P 500 Index | 14.83% | 1780% | 18.32% | 12.06% | 14.16% | 9.62% |
| S&P 500 Target Risk Conservative Index (TR) | 9.83% | 9.66% | 7.99% | 3.51% | 5.00% | 5.03% |
Performance data quoted represents past performance; past performance does not guarantee future results. The investment return and principal value of an investment will fluctuate so that an investor’s shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than their original cost. Current performance of the fund may be lower or higher than the performance quoted. Performance data current to the most recent month-end may be obtained by calling 1-866-264-8783. Returns over one year are annualized. The Gross and Net expenses are 2.79% and 1.96%.
The Fund’s adviser, USA Mutuals Advisors, Inc. (the “Adviser”), has contractually agreed to reduce its fees and/or absorb expenses of the Fund, at least until July 31, 2026, to ensure that total annual fund operating expenses after fee waiver and reimbursement (but does not include: front-end or contingent deferred loads, shareholder servicing plan fees, taxes, borrowing costs such as interest and dividends on short positions, brokerage fees and commissions, acquired fund fees and expenses, extraordinary expenses such as litigation expenses (which may include indemnification of Fund officers and Trustees, contractual indemnification of Fund service providers (other than the Adviser)) and class-specific expenses like distribution (12b-1) fees) will not exceed 1.96% of the Fund’s average daily net assets for each share class.
Definitions:
CBOE SKEW Index: Measures the market’s perception of “tail risk”—the probability of extreme, negative outlier events (market crashes) for the S&P 500 over a 30-day horizon.
The S&P 500 Index: An unmanaged composite of 500 large capitalization companies. Professional investors widely use this index as a performance benchmark for large-cap stocks. You cannot invest directly in an index.
The S&P Target Risk Conservative Index: Designed to measure the performance of conservative stock-bond allocations to fixed income, seeking to produce a current income stream and avoid excessive volatility of returns. Equities are included to protect long-term purchasing power.
Performance data quoted prior to October 13, 2017 represents the past performance of the Goldman Navigator Fund, L.P., a limited partnership (the “Predecessor Partnership”). From its inception on February 1, 2002, through October 13, 2017, the Predecessor Partnership maintained investment policies, objectives, guidelines, and restrictions that were, in all material respects, equivalent to those of the Fund. The Predecessor Partnership was not registered under the 1940 Act, and was not subject to certain investment limitations, diversification requirements, and other restrictions imposed by the 1940 Act and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Code”), which, if applicable, may have adversely affected its performance. On a going-forward basis after October 13, 2017, the Fund’s performance will be calculated using the standard formula set forth in rules promulgated by the SEC, which differs in certain respects from the methods used to compute total returns for the Predecessor Partnership. Please refer to the Financial Statements section of the Fund’s SAI to review additional information regarding the Predecessor Partnership. The Navigator Fund name was changed to the All Seasons Fund on July 21st, 2021. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
SYMBOL: UNAVX
