Travels and Trades

The performance in 2023 was dictated by the portfolio’s positioning in time relative to the end of 2022 and early weeks of 2024. Something that I am still getting used to is the hard dates present for reporting (quarterly and annual). It provides a bit of stress as the trades naturally ebb and flow. I find myself always wanting to produce for those dates, but I have no control over that.

Giving to 2024: The historic rise in SPX from Nov through December, something not seen since the 1960s, an almost 18% rise in the market, took away our performance from 2023 and gave it to the first weeks of 2024. It was our worst-case scenario coming out of October, but it’s funny, that worst case scenario cost about a month of time and happens every 40 years 🙂 Had the market not moved 18% and instead anywhere below 12%, we’d have generated a fantastic end to 2023. How can I complain, an incredibly rare sized rally only cost a month of time, and that was it. I must admit, I was frustrated with the end result in 2023. But that’s irrational as it’s being held to a calendar date of something that ebbs and flows naturally. As expected from the repositioning, we had some time delay, but Peak is up about 5%-6% in the first 11 days and modeling suggests a strong 10%+ month. Peak’s returns into a static 12-month period are an inaccurate depiction of the larger shape created by the portfolio of trades momentum and ebb and flow. But all that is fine. We’re tracking something like 75% from 2022 when SPX is 0%. I hate comparing our portfolio of trades to SPX since it’s not really apples to apples but in this case why not?

Giving to 2023: We entered January fresh off an extraordinary Q4 2022 – Peak returned 59.20% gross over the 12-month period. There was a huge release of premium/theta into the end of 2022 which made for a slower Q1 2023. The accelerated release in Q4 2022 took from 2023.

As we move into the 5th year of the fund, our results from inception and a strong 5th year will set us up to be one of the highest performing funds in a 5 year period. That’s fucked.  Our 5th year will be Apr 1 2025. I have very little doubt we can finish the next 15 months strong and make a mark with some of the best 5 year audited results. I am going to work my ass off to make that happen. Our research is getting better and better as is our trade developments. Automated software is helping take what would usually take man years and doing it in man minutes.

Things with sizing are naturally starting to move to utilizing the floor. Right now, I have 4 trades being worked by the floor which now gives me time to do this blog or research or manage existing trades. Not only do we get better pricing, but we free up time.

More to come! Lots of life updates and cool experiences to post about.

In mid December, I flew myself over to Vegas to play the WPT world championships. A relatively quick flight of about 1.2 hours. Took off from KVNY (Van Nuys) and landed KVGT (North Las Vegas). Took a video of the landing below

I started by playing the $1,100 to warm up. Busted pretty quickly in that and went over to the Virgin for a little card counting. What a nice room the Wynn has but they need one more conference area because the re-entry lines were insane.

My buddy ended up playing his first tournament at The Venetian and actually cashing. What a feat. During that we both had a day off so we went down to Fremont and did some counting and subsequently got kicked out of one casino 🙂 Fun times.

The main was a super deep 10k world championship event and ended up doing pretty well in it. Made a day 4 and got 115th out of 2,975 for a $32k score. I caught a brutal brutal sickness there that started to hit me day 4, and my bust out hand was on of the worst hands I played. I blame it on the sickness. Sucks because it was so damn deep and out of like 310 tables we were down to the final 14 or so. Really weighed on me for a week or so. I blew it! Having played like 35 hours relatively flawlessly to busting on a hand I’d generally never bust on. So close.

The hand was AKo in small blind, CO raised first in, I 3b and he calls

Flop JJTss (two spades)

I lead 1/5th pot and he calls

Turn Ad

I lead 4/5ths pot and he calls

River 2d I check he jams all in. I call.

I tank call thinking he has a lot of Ace X and the flush never made it, so he’d have som bluffs but none of this is what I’d normally be thinking or processing. I figured any jack would raise me on flop to deny equity to flush draws given the two spades on the board and the river A gives me top two. So I was thinking that he likely raises any jack except TJ, that he was on an ace or a draw that misses the river, I called the shove. Hate it.

He has all KQs. I three bet from sb and his calling range is all broadway suited which TJJA board hits all day long (every QJ,KJ,TJ,AJ,KQ broadway) beats me. It’s hard for any Ax to call the turn bet so I am beat almost always and he has no natural bluffs really. He’d also likely check down Ax

Flawed thinking from being sick. He had KQs and thats that.

The competition was pretty tough, all the best players in the world were there given it was a world championship so bagging day 2 was an accomplishment to me.

The start of day 2 we found ourselves sitting next to Igor Kurganov (well respected high stakes player) and found a double up against him. A table move had us over with relatively inexperienced players and stacked up through the day.

We found a bag for day 2 at 585k chips from 100k starting day 1.

On to day 3, the table was pretty damn talented so I didn’t have an easy time. Ended up 1.5x my stack for the Day 4. Their were a few dudes at the table that made jokes that I looked like a Euro Kevin Costner and both of them ended up becoming multi millionaires a few weeks later, go figure, apparently it was lucky to make fun of me! One ended up winning the entire tournament for 4.5mm and the other dude ended up winning a Pai-Gow jackpot (it was POSEV at the time) for 6.5mm. How weird.

Ended day 3 with 1.29mm and reached a peak of about 2.1mm early in day 4 before busting with my hand.

Stacking up 125 left!

Flew back home that day defeated, a bit sick and when I landed and got home it was game over. The worst sickness (worse than covid for me) that I’ve ever had. Two weeks of hell that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I got lucky though, I literally would not have been able to fly the plane even 5 hrs after that for like 2 weeks I was so sick.

Next tournament is a really big one. The PSPC and PCA in Bahamas in just a week. The PSPC is a 25k entry fee where they give away 500 or so seats to amateurs etc. It’s given away by a series of festivals, random pickings and events. Naturally all the pros flock to it making it almost like a Pro-Am. There’s no rake on it and it’ll be the biggest 25k ever done. Top 20% cash and get their money back so I am definitely going to play it. I’ll also be playing the PCA main plus the BSOP nationals. That’ll conclude poker travel until the world series in the summer.

I’ve been taking up mixed games which I am loving. The goal is to be fluent enough to play the 2-7 low ball triple draw, Razz, Omaha 8 and HORSE games in the WSOP. I don’t know how likely it will be to be good enough to play the 10ks but that’s the goal.

Peak had accelerated gains into the end of the new year and ended with 59% gross return. Was not expecting that. I thought like maybe we match 2021 or inch towards 50%. Nice ending to the year and a nice boost to the performance fees that we only get once a year 🙂

In 2020, we had a gross of 40% (extrapolated due to starting in April)

In 2021, we had a gross of 44%

in 2022, we had a gross of 59%

What a nice 3 year to start to setting up a fund. I was pretty nervous at the start, with all the eyes watching and the pressure of performance and managing other peoples money. It’s something that’s hard to explain. I mean, we’ve got an auditor (Grant Thornton) looking at us, we have our independent fund admins looking at us, we have our independent directors looking at us, and most importantly we have investor expectations (both reasonable and unreasonable) and we have to deal with this each and every reporting period. For a guy that’s always been in the top position, it’s kinda hard to answer to people 🙂 but whatever, I go on these calls as myself (you’re not getting me in a meeting wearing a suit or a sport coat, it’ll be designer t-shirts and hoodies, I’m good. The success and performance speaks for itself.

I’m often asked why I opted to manage other peoples money, because it really doesn’t add that much more % wise to my personal bottom line. But I feel like it’s worth it to have accountability, but most importantly, it’s creating a new pathway that can create unknown opportunities down the road, we’re creating reputation and a very complicated structure to allow for further expansion into other areas and trade types. We have no idea where it will lead and I think keeping that momentum is important because it’ll shape the future. One thing I didn’t expect was the weird (maybe because I am getting older) pleasure I am getting in actually feel like I am contributing to society in a positive way by helping our investors setup their retirements. It’s really cool to see their balances increasing and being part of the team that helped do that.

All of this formality initially did bring me some trading and performance stress 🙂 That said, the yearly mandatory zoom meetings with the auditors, directors and admins is kinda fun because we’re crushing it, it was especially fun this year when 95% of the funds they deal with are down or consider -10% a success. I even cheekily asked “So guys, tell me, what’s it been like dealing with all these accountability meetings with funds that are down 20%+? Is it awkward?” I shouldn’t say that. It isn’t easy having the responsibility and especially when I first started, there was definite stress and a larger than life expectation I had on myself to really make sure the systems were setup and we traded appropriately.

To tie this up, the thing I learned in my trading life is that the management of risk is the most paramount thing above returns. Manage that and the returns come. They come because what seemingly seems like an arithmetic loss (buying long puts for $5k a month let’s say) feels like you’re spending $5k but in reality and geometrically (multiplicatively) and over time (several time series) the draw downs it saves on events allow you to actually compound better. You’ll be surprised to know that buying those puts actually brings in a return over time. The most noticeable affects when I first started was occasional second guessing and just how often you triple check things but we have extra eyes and systems for that now. I also have a huge confidence in my team, the systems and myself.

All in all, a successful start and I feel like this year is actually our most important year as we pass the 3 year mark. Can we keep it up?

Peak is up about 44% YTD gross. We ended 2021 at the exact same number. We still have 25 days and I expect it to probably hit 47-50% to end the year. The year did start off pretty challenging but by May and onwards, the management was stressless and relatively straight forward. We were and are relatively indifferent to the swings of the market, and there were many, especially October. It was a lot of fun to watch the CPI releases and the whacky 5% moves in each direction and not really care. It’s interesting to note that direction doesn’t really matter in terms of how the portfolios perform. It is because of the setup of the systems and how these things mature together over time. The older trades mature and hedge off newer trades and we have diversification within the trades themselves including the tail positive exposure.

Our main concern or risk is when we move from a period of low volatility to a sudden shift to high volatility. Once in the regime, the trades are matured and setup in a way where direction of the market is not so important. Of course, we have to manage things and adjust risk but most of the time we don’t even know what market direction we prefer 🙂 If it screams up, we get the benefit of the vol crush but end up pretty stunted in potential return if it keeps going up, it taps out with a modest return if you will, but it’s easy and its a good modest return. if it screams down, we enjoy the activation of our convexity. If it grinds up, we’re walking it up with adjustments and trade initiations and benefiting from the volatility decline. If it grinds down, we’re enjoying the movement into our higher premium sections of the risk profile. All in all, relatively indifferent. It’s how it was designed. I don’t want to be beholden to market direction and I don’t want correlation to the broader market, especially now.

We’re now going into the end of the 3rd year of the funds existence and we’ve managed to produce similar returns to our backtests. Our “out of sample” match our “in sample” and despite 2021 being a very bullish year and a completely different environment than 2022, the years returns nearly match exactly. 44% and as of today 44%.

As usual, the focus is always on the reduction of risk through diversification, it is the series of returns that is most important to us. It is the multiplicative result of a series of results that matters the most, not the single edge or expected value of any trade. If you have a strategy that does 30% a year arithmetically but has a 50% draw down in year 5, it’ll do worse than a low variance portfolio that does 10% a year with no major drawdown multiplicatively. Our research continues to be on adding a trade type that compliments our systematic approach and that helps reduce the variance within the time series.

We decided to get out for a date night and took the Cirrus up to Lake Tahoe. From Van Nuys it was only about a 1.5 hour trip. We departed Van Nuys and did a pit stop in Camarillo for some fuel (both for the plane and ourselves). Camarillo has one of the best airport restaurants ever. In aviation, the best restaurants are at the airport. It’s a way to get people to fly for that $100 hamburger (the $100 is in relation to the gas it costs to fly there :)). It makes it fun to get out in the plane and try new restaurants. I’ve been intermittently fasting (one meal a day) for a bit but decided today was a day we could break the fast, after all, it was vacation date night/day. Lost like 15 pounds in 6 weeks doing it.

The flight to Camarillo is only about 8 min so it’s pretty quick up and down. We take-off, get handed off to Van Nuys departure and within a few minutes are talking to Camarillo tower arranging the landing sequence. The departure from Van Nuys can be pretty annoying sometimes, they’ll prioritize jets as they burn a lot on the ground. I was holding short and ready to go when the tower moved me to a corner so 3 jets could depart. They put baby in the corner. I totally could have taken off quickly and in time, so it was odd they did that. It caused delays and took us about 30 min from start to get airborne. Conversely, from Camarillo it takes about 5min. I’d love to get a hangar in Camarillo but it’s booked up for like 5 years. The only thing available is a shared one, I might consider it but I don’t know.

I’ve got a deposit down for the Vision jet and I have been on the list for 2 years but they’re telling me its going to be another 2 years..I’ll have to find hangar space that fits that thing. Everything from now until then is training and gathering experience for that.

Here’s a shot departing Camarillo

Flight was uneventful, we arrived and landed r/w 36 (which was an interesting approach given the mountain right in front of us). I had to kinda keep left then dive down for a controlled approach pretty quickly.

Once on the ground, we ordered an UBER to the hotel which was a short 15 min ride. Easy. The #Cirrus life I guess.

We just got some beers, hung out in the hotel and then got dinner. We ended with a bottle of champagne in the hotel room and that was that.

The next day was pretty cool, we had a massive tail wind and we got to see (from a distance) some sort of rocket launch. We left at 11 and were back around 12:15. Hard to get used that.

I ended up getting my IFR (instrument rating) in Canada and am working on the conversion in the US/FAA. I hope to have it all done by this week. In the next post, I flew from KVNY (LA) to CYYZ (Toronto) and back. Which was very interesting, and a great experience.

As of this writing, the fund is up about 27% for the year. We’re focusing mostly on campaign style complex OTM setups and left tail campaigns, however, we’re still doing opportunistic “ebb and flow” ATM trades as opportunities come up. The whipsaw environment provides for good opportunities.

We expect to end Q3 at about 40% given the timing, type and composition of the structures we’ve got on right now. They’re in a sweet spot with a load of room and much less gamma then we had in Q2 and Q1. This is assuming the market follows a similar volatility path as it has the last quarter. The goal is to end the year at about 55-60%. We surpassed 100% total returns sans fees the last quarter which represented 2 full years and 1 quarter.

The focus is always on reduction of volatility and risk to allow for better geometric returns and a focus on tail event risk mitigation. This is our main focus and how we approach trading.

It’s been a pretty standard quarter, no stress as we didn’t enter from a low to high vol environment like we did in Q1. Standard trades and standard setups. On the research front, we are looking at macro portfolio theories and concentrating on the writings of Spitznagel and Taleb but I think we’re just about fully absorbed with that information. We’re moving to setup a US facing feeder fund which is taking a lot of time, efforts and setup.

I just got back from the WSOP where I had spent a total of 3 weeks. It was a pretty decent successful trip though I did bust the main event on day 2 which always hurts the most. I don’t like my last play in the main as it wasn’t necessary given the length of levels. I had 28bb and squeeze shoved 99 from SB vs a raise and call from CO and BTN. The CO woke up with QQ and that was gg. I ended up with a 9th of 300 (a final table) in a Venetian event, a 204th of 4400 in the 800 deep stack, a 44th/1240 on the 3k NL and a 399th of 5702 on the Little one drop. My game was eons better than it was last year and I continue to study and study. I also played a Razz 1500 after minimal study just to get a feel for mixed games and because I just felt like trying something new (I’m sure it was a total punt). I plan on getting into mixed games and started studying Razz and 2-7 triple draw. I wanna be at a level where I can reasonably play tournaments in mixed by WSOP 2023. I’d love to find a coach for that.

On the travel front, I had a lot going on, I attempted to fly the plane from LA to Toronto early in June but we got stuck in Nebraska due to weather and turned around back to LV. I ended up playing a few tournaments and got that 44th, so it was a good consolation prize. We then hoped on a flight back to LA and I then drove the Urus from LA to Toronto with my two dogs and a buddy. We had two flat tires but other than that a smooth trip. We stopped in Utah, Colorado and Des Moines and made it back in 4 days. I spent a few weeks in Caledon at my house and then flew commercial back to LV for the WSOP main event. Then attempted to fly the plane back again (I still don’t have my IFR ticket) and hit weather in Chicago and had to leave the plane there until I can get back there.

Pictures of the Failed trip to Toronto

The first stop was Lake Powell and landed at the famous Page airport. What beautiful terrain.

Finally here is the start of the bad weather that forced us to turn around in the other direction.