Category: Travels

This summers Road Trip – Intro and Stop 1: Vienna

This past summer we did a 7 week road trip that started in Vienna and ended in Salzburg. Might be wondering how we pulled off 7 weeks of road trip and only ended up 3 hrs away, well we did one huge ass loop.

1. Vienna, Austria
2. Krakow, Poland
3. Lower Silesia, Poland
4. Dresden, Germany
5. Hanover, Germany
6. Frankfurt, Germany
7. Heidelberg, Germany
8. Aschaffenburg, Germany
9. Freiburg, Germany
10. Tuttlingen, Germany
11. Como, Italy
12. Ranco, Italy
13. Arona, Italy
14. Turin, Italy
15. Lyon, France
16. Milan, Italy
17. Strasbourg, France
18. Nuremburg, Germany
19. Salzburg, Austria (dropped car off)
20. Munich, Germany (By train rom Salzburg)

We always airbnb it except in one area (Arona) where we stay at an amazing B&B (it’s our 5th time)–>Cascina Incocco–>Which I’d highly recommend to anyone. It’s one of my favourite spots.

Some pics from the first stop on the trip:


On the way there!

Vienna – First Stop! Augustiner Yep.

A painting in Emma’s memory match. We’re ticking them off while we travel. Egon Schiele


On to Krakow!

Jun 13 – Trade Plan

It’s been a while since I posted….I was traveling for work and had minor surgery which put me out of commission re posting. I ended up closing the June trades for a great profit about 1-2 weeks ago.

I am in the July and Aug trades all of which are about break-even at the moment. They were all pretty heavy delta negative a week ago and according to OV, we should have expected some significant paper profits because of the RUT falling from 1188 to 1153, but we haven’t. Completely different position than the models suggested. I understood this and sort of expected it with any decent IV rise but not quite as pronounced as it is right now. Usually, if things calm down just a little after an IV spike, the skew changes and time decay floods in and positions start to match the expected model. This time around, this won’t happen until we pass the two big events that are causing the IV spike — Brexit and the Fed meeting. The recent terror attack and the politics surrounding it also presents some issues. For now, market makers will keep pricing inflated. Not forever, since all premium must come out but at least until those events pass and there is some breathing room. Seen it before many times. For now, I am taking the opportunity to add more bearish leaning BWBs to the trades as they’re much more decently priced. I just paid 2.70 for a BWB whereas I was paying 3.40 just a week ago. So not only are they cheaper, but they’re helping hedge to the downside.

RUT has been a bitch since Aug of 2015. We’re having outsized moves and it’s made trading challenging. It’d be nice when the beast settles down a bit. This year alone, we had a 22% decline from Jan to Feb which was followed by a 22% rise up till Apr 28th. Making money in the Rhino trades during that environment is almost impossible. Following that, we had a 7% drop into May 19 followed by a 10% rise to Jun 8th (a 25% for the entire year @ Jun 8). Again, this trade can handle 7-8% fairly decently in any given trade period of 30 days, re not LOSING money but when you get a quick 7% drop followed by anther 10% rise, you start to have challenging trade management. Despite that, June did very well especially since we got out of most of it before the 10% rise. It’s really not normal to have 8-10% moves each month with whipsaw. I cannot wait for an environment that has normal moves 🙂

Our Jul and Aug trades should be able to handle any bearish fall so long as it’s not like 10-15% overnight. They’re all good till about RUT @ 1100. The position they’re in now, ANY stabilization or drop in IV will get them to probably max profit pretty quickly. We’ve got 35 days left and lots of room to the downside and lots of theta since we’re under the tent. Should be a good month unless we have a large correction.

I am traveling for 2 months again starting June 27. We’re doing:

Vienna (7 days)
Krakow (5 days)
Dresden (3 days)
Regensberg (3 days)
Salzburg (3 days)
Munich (5 days)
Freiburg (3 days)
Salzburg (4 days)
Arona (6 days)

10-15 days left unplanned

Undetermined whats after this..maybe south of France or north Italy. Any suggestions?

Mar 27 – Traveling Trade Update (Rhino)

Been traveling and haven’t had time to update the blog. When I travel, I am in constant catch-up mode with both my business and monitoring trades. It leaves little time for this. I’ve been in Barcelona for 6 days and we get ready to board an 11 day cruise tomorrow to hit Tangiers and the Canary Islands.

The April trades are making some headway despite more challenges in the market. It’s just not cooperating. Through out the week I adjusted the trades more and more conservatively without market opinion so that I had the best chance to recover while maintaining solid theta and lower risk deltas. We enter next week with a slight delta negative thus a downside bias. We’re not fully recovered YTD but I am happy with the result. The market moves have been historic and extremely difficult to trade with market neutral strategies. Nearly all the market neutral traders I know (even the “gurus”) have posted losses in the March and April expiries. I mean, what the hell, we started the year with a 22-24% decline in the RUT within a few weeks only to have an absolute epic up move that is a record in its ferocity again in a few weeks. It’s been unrelenting in each direction. It pretty much moved from 1200 to 940 in a matter of days and then moved 18% from 940 to 1105. This all somewhat happened during the April and March trades which were the only ones active this year. Our result? Somewhat negative for the year but if we have any normal decent range bound market, I am talking about like what we’d have 95% of the time, then I’ll start to crush. Handling an absolute nightmare and being down only a little bit is exciting and a testament to the rhino resiliency.

I’ve got great trades setup in May for both the SPX and RUT as well as June for the RUT. Any semblance of a normalized market should get us well profitable in the next month. The market is like a bull in a pen, after it moves a bunch, it tires. We should see less pronounced moves. I’ve got a lot of downside hedges active (very cheaply) and should be covered on most large down moves. I’ve also got some upside hedges using mechanical stock picking to help ease any more upside moves.

Aug 19 – Trade Plan

We are now 4 days into our cruise and about 11 days from being back home in Cayman.

Right now we are in Trondheim, Norway and have so far seen Flam and Alesund and a whole series of Fjords including one that was listed as the number one thing to do before you die by National Geographic.  The four of us went out in a rib and toured around.  Was fantastic but I am not sure what else can beat it 🙂  

The market hasn’t done a whole lot except hold range despite negative headlines.  This tells me that perhaps we are ready for a leg up. But only time will tell.  The long term bollinger bands are about as tight as they have been for 65 years.  So either way there should be quite an explosive move but in what direction remains to be seen.  The market corrects at least 5 percent each year and it hasn’t yet (well the RUT (8 %) has and most individual stocks have, but not the SPX).  

I got out of all the August trades at 5.6% (half tranch of MIC, two rock trades, an m3 and a few bearish butterflies). We were in both August and September trades for the month and soon come we should be at profit target for those and they will be closed soon and can conclude the months results which are very positive.  

Our protector portfolio is up about 4.5 percent for year while spy is at around what 1.5%?

   
    
    
    
 

Jul 29 – Travels

We’re back in Arona, Italy. Where we will spend most of the remaining parts of the road trip. After that we’ll be ending the trip with a Norwegian Fjord cruise and then we’re back in the Cayman Islands.

We’ve put on about 8k km with our Tesla driving all across Europe and we’ve paid zero for gas.  It’s a pretty epic road trip especially in an electric car.  It hasn’t gotten much attention despite Tesla tweeting about the smallest road trips (I think one was someone going from UK to Amsterdam).  Really?  That’s like one leg of 30 on my trip.  I thought it’d have been interesting taking an electric car from Malta all the way up to Sweden.

Here are some pictures of Arona.

 

   

  

  

  

  

Travel Update

Been a while. We were in Copenhagen for 7 days followed by Stockholm for 8. We’re now making our way to Hamburg with a 2 day stop in Roskilde, Denmark. We decided against driving through Norway and opted for a Norwegian Fjord cruise on Holland America to end this whole thing in August. We booked which what we were told was the last room and it was an obstructed ocean view and somehow got lucky with an upgrade opportunity to the Neptune suite (booking cancellation?).  Before that though, we are going to go back to where we started which was the Lake Como/Arona. It’s our favourite region in Europe. We’ll stay there for 9 days and then head up and stay in Strasbourg and then Bruge before going to UK to board our cruise.

The rest of the itinerary looks like this:

Roskilde, Denmark

Hamburg, Germany

Lake Como/Arona, Italy

Strasbourg, France

Bruges, Belgium

All of Norway by cruise

Cayman Islands (Home)

 

 

 

Jul 7 – Travels

We’ve made it to Copenhagen.

Like the city and its vibe quite a bit but its damn expensive. Seriously.

Berlin was a very bizarre city. I really have no idea how to quantify it or my experience there. I really don’t.  We happened to stay in a vegan neighbourhood which was awesome!  That was a total fluke as well. Glad we stayed in that part of town, it happened to be the best part, super artsy, lively and kid friendly. At first it was intimidating, the characters there are bizarre and it looked like we were in gangland with all the spray paint. After a day, you realize it’s harmless. Overall, I can’t see myself ever returning to Berlin. It was not a favorite.

I had the unfortunate experience of watching a man die. It was really messed up. We were walking to our segway tour and a man was on the ground with a worker outfit getting CPR, his legs were twitching and stopped and they seemed to give up on the CPR with shrugs and looks of hopelessness. Very eery. The thing I remember most is all of the bystanders faces. Just blank.  I don’t know what happened but I’d guess maybe electrocution or heart attack.

We toured the Berlin wall, saw the holocaust memorial museum which was the most impactful of its genre. I’ve been to a concentration camp and other sites but this one was next level with its presentations of individual cases/experiences.  Very impactful. Highly recommended everyone sees that some day. What an atrocity.

We drove and ferried from Berlin to Copenhagen and arrived in good time.

More to come

 

 

 

Wurzburg -Trip Report (Ash)

Wurzburg

After leaving Rammingen we had about a 2 hour drive to Wurzburg. We rented a house just on the outskirts of the city, about a 10 minute drive out. The house itself was great, especially for the kids. There was a huge playroom that was filled with cars, lego, colouring books, stuffed animals and a huge car carpet with roads and buildings. The kids were in Heaven! This was definitely one of the nicer airbnb’s that we’ve stayed in.

Driving into Wurzuberg from the house was pretty easy. Once you get into the city, there was plenty of parking lots all around with paid parking. We never had a problem finding a place to park. Wurzberg itself is a beautiful city and the history is also pretty amazing. It was small, easy to navigate and had a great vibe.

In April of 1945, 90% of the city was destroyed in 17 seconds from the Allied bombers. 5000 people were killed and the medieval and historical buildings were completely destroyed. It took the Trümmerfrauen (rubble woman) of Wurzberg 20 years to complete the rebuild of the city. It was done mostly by woman as the majority of men perished in the war. Looking at the city now, you would have no idea the state it was in 70 years ago, it truly is a beautiful city.

The food in Wurzburg was pretty awesome. We were excited to see that one of the top 10 places to eat in the city was a vegetarian restaurant called Veggie Bros. Its basically a glorified falafel restaurant with different kinds of wraps, salads, juices and sauces. They make their own vegan mayo as well, which was absolutely amazing on their french fries. A great find for us as we are all vegetarian.

The main site we had in our sights (no pun intended) as the Residenz. Well, it made the entire trip, it was literally one of the best things we’ve seen.  It is up there with the Segrada, Vatican and St. Johns church in Valletta.  Astounding. Highly recommend as a bucket list “must see”. The next site was the fortress which we decided to visit when we had poor weather.  We checked out the museum and walked around. It was anti-climatic compared to the Residenz, however.