Month: May 2019

May 22 (Trade Plan)

Busted the tournament in Day 2 (200th out of 529). Ran into another damn 3 outer that crushed my stack and that was the start of the end. Exiting main hurts bad every time. I had managed to get my stack up 50% for the day. Felt good, near average. I had AQspades SB vs BTN. He raised PF in the BTN, I three bet in the SB and he called mandatory with K7s. the flop had a K on it with two spades. Check/Bet turn is an Ace, he checks I shove..he calls and hits a 7 on the river. If I had won that I’d have been above average and ready to compete for the end. I’m always super emotional after a tournament (When I bust to these ridiculous hands) after having put in hours and hours of concentration. The good side is that my game has never been better, I’ve been playing really well, I have confidence in the game I am playing and I guess eventually it’ll work out. I guess I got two day 2’s out of the trip. I busted the 1k with a BS hand as well as I previously wrote. That was 240 or so out of 1540…..One of these have to damn well connect. It’s never about the money, its all about the competition 🙂

When you’re early in the tournament you’re usually not at risk re your entire stack. It’s the day 2/3 when you need a few 80-90% EV hands to not run bad on you! I get it in with the best of it and just get run out of. I am running bad. I haven’t been able to get it in positive more than 1 time in a row deep in a tournament. Unfortunately, you need 2-3 good hands in a row to chip up and if I don’t get these I can’t win. I mean AA vs AK in 2018 vs Ryan Reiss, I had KQ on KQ8 in the barcelona to exit to 88. Or A8s vs A2o in the Barcelona main only for him to hit the 2. Blah. Any one of those 5-10% go the other way, I’d be deep running.

My trading account is hitting about 19% today which is the only positive thing today 🙂 I removed most of my Aug trades today and have dry powder. I was able to get 60 short puts sold for my factory but I wasn’t able to get on more STTs today which is annoying, well maybe not, there’s 10 min left in the day, maybe my orders will fill.

Off to Ottawa tomorrow for a comedian show and some meetings. Then I am making my way to Toronto and over to Moab for a wedding. The next tournaments will be Vegas WSOP. Let’s see how those go.

May 21 2019 (STT+BSH Trade Plan)

I just hit 18.5% for the year which puts me right on target for my expectations. I am hoping to hit 20% for H1 2019 (roughly 3.4% a month). I can compound monthly (and will) and after 3 years (36 months of compounding @ 3.5%) which should double money every 21 months..and 7x every 5 years 🙂 Let’s see how it goes with diligence and trade plan following. So far so good. Within the next 7 days I’ll close off Aug and probably Sep and I may start removing Oct as I’ve already got some good profit in there. Then I’ll just wait for another vol event and rinse repeat.

I am in MTL right now for a few tournaments, I got 240/1535 on the first one which was a speedy tournament with very quick blind levels. Busted TT vs AJ right relatively close to the bubble. I didn’t cash but was damn close. By far the best I’ve ever played, it’s not even close it’s a different level then even the last round of play and all due to the coaching arrangement I have setup w/ Ryan Laplante and CLC coaching. I’ve learned a ton and confidence is through the roof. Getting next level in the game and ready to get cracking and finally get a final table within the next year or two. If I can get some good runs near the end of a tournament that would set me up. I got deep yet again here (240 out of 1535!) but just had a cold few hours and the blinds were way to quick. The main event is 3x less speed and the WSOP events are like 10x slower. So I should have some good opportunities with the WSOP main events, MTL main and marathons.

May 14 (Update 2) – STT, Long term base portfolio and travel plans

Yesterday at about 2803 I was able to sell puts for my factory and in one single day I am now able to form a BSH for profit (free + some). I got 30 units (90 short puts) on within 8 hours. Epic.

I also started the equities portion of my long term portfolio as my base (I did a combo from allocate smartly that has a historical of 10.4% annual with a max draw down of about 6.1%). Good base portfolio. Today I got the treasuries/bonds portion on 🙂 good timing. I will now let that run itself without messing about. I had it on at 2940 area but didn’t like the timing re the heavy portion in SPY so I closed it at the highs 2949 and now just re-opened. It was more like a mulligan, my plan isn’t to mess about with it and I won’t from here on in.

YTD is now 15% (3.35% a month) and that’s on actual total equity. Nice!

I am going away for my next portion of the summer/spring vacations. I’ll be starting in Montreal for the party millions event and I’ll make my way to Ottawa to meet with my programmers in development office and then take in the Iliza show (for my wife). After that it’s on to Toronto to check out the start of my new house build there and then make my way to Moab for a glamping style wedding and after that…. Vegas for the WSOP!

In preparation, I’ve closed off most of my older STTs, cleaned up the account and prepped ONE. I have on some Aug, Sep and Oct with margin available for another 100 or so units if we get another vol spike/decline. The Aug is acting as a hedge to Sep and Oct but also has the most theta of all three months. October is now profitable (+11k) as predicted it would be by end of week.

May 14, 2019 – Trade Plan (STT BWB + BSH)

I ended up closing out my Jul 18 and Jul 31 STT remnants at a pretty awesome profit. I am left with August, September and October. The Aug and Jul ended up acting as moderate hedges to the Oct/Sept expiration which actually put my balance higher through the modest volatility events last week and put it right positive in the past two days. I am on target for a 20-22% H1 2019 and will end June at around 17%-18%. Exactly as predicted and planned.

That’s the beauty of running these in expiration campaign style. The older ones protect the newer ones and everything just meshes together perfectly. The older ones will hedge the 3-8% drops as you fall right into their built up profit zones and anything greater than 8-10% will be likely covered by the BSH OR you’ll have time to roll (if it was a slow grind) either way you’re good and only dealing with modest drops in P/L. Feels like a beautiful well oiled machine now.

I am not straying or considering much else in terms of trade types for the main portfolio. I want a clean year of just STT+BSH and I want to be a master of just one main trade type. I doubt I’ll deviate much other than finding more efficient ways to adjust.

All in all a good year so far.

May 8 – Trade Plan STT+BSH

Interesting few days. The VIX spiked 40% yesterday on a 2% down day. The relatively binary event on Friday is causing some funky skew which is affecting existing trades and makes new ones attractive to put on.

I slammed on trades through the last few days with the lowest amount being yesterday (the best time of entry) and now I only have a bit of dry powder now and definitely not as much as I wanted. My P/L gain from April to May was fairly slow which makes me wonder if I should be less always on and more selective and patient so I have more dry powder. The problem with that approach is that your yearly returns can be more variant. If we have low vol years, they’ll suffer. It’s also difficult to know just when to put them on. I’d probably wait for a force index trigger. If we got 4 force index triggers a year and those trades made an average of 10-12% on PC with a much lower than average MDD then it would make some sense to look at this.

Here was an interesting article re yesterday:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-08/vvixtermination-what-was-behind-yesterdays-historic-volatility-move

If I got on several units yesterday, I’d be very happy with the entry. The P/L today would already be quite high and they’d be resilient AF due to being put on in an already skew/vol rich environment and you’d have less BSH costs. Tough to figure out. I will look at the number of times force index triggered (to see if it’s a reasonable number per year on average) and then backtest all those dates as entries and see just what the returns are and annualize them. Basically what I am saying, is if we start entering lower vix environments like we had in April, I wonder if I should be mostly dry powder, rather than continuously raising UEl etc I should just take lower P/L targets and go mostly cash waiting for an opportunity. Now I’ve entered into an environment where having some more dry powder would be fantastic. I can accept risks for starting 20 VIX STTs if VIX goes to 30. I am cool with that because the effects are less pronounced than when you go from a very low vix environment and you get double whammied with skew and vix changes. The effects of the first 10 VIX points is a lot more pronounced on new STTs than going from 21-31.

My newest October ones put on throughout this event are down about $500 a unit. Normal. Time is always on its side. As time goes on, the profit hump builds up and the trades gets naturally more delta negative and less and less vega negative. This means vol effects it less and less as it goes on while we’re getting natural protection from the negative deltas increasing each day. So give it another 12 calendar days and it’ll be profitable all things equal (including current vega and skew conditions). You’ll see that the most exposed time of any STT trade is the initial week or two from initiation. Once time goes on, you’ll get less and less affected by things. For instance, My Aug/Jul31 are not affected, in fact, I harvested them last week when Vol was low and they’re unaffected short a bit of a drop in the overall T+0 but with any relief they’ll be closer to the profit tent and that’s when you get the big pops in P/L. You’ll notice that the most profitable times are when we have a larger fall followed by a cessation and subsequent vol relief. Why? because you’re sitting right in that sweet spot.

Anyways,

A tally of the main account:

32.5 Jul 31 units w/ a very long runway and harvested lower puts –No significant risks or vega (but taking up margin!)
150 Aug units w/ a very long runway and harvested lower puts –No significant risks or vega (but taking up margin!)
42.5 Sep units that were affected by the drop (dropped to break even PL with loads of theta)
60 Oct units that were significantly affected by the drop (dropped to -500 a unit)

May 6 2019 – Trade review (STT+BSH)

Nice little vol pop there. When I saw the tweet yesterday I knew to expect a very rocky futures open and when it got to about -2% I almost thought we could have a repeat of Aug 24 with a -5% open only because of the swiftness of the fall and the potential reaction when Europe opened. Alas, we swiftly found footing and the market rebounded and sits currently at 2920.

Funny enough, I had a portfolio on for my base via AllocateSmartly but didn’t love my entries and sold all of it Friday along with all my other longs. Good timing 🙂 I also harvested all my older STT and BSH last week and removed a ton of risk. I mean I have 600 net long puts in May 31 expiration and my Aug/Sep STTs were harvested. I wasn’t breaking a sweat last night even if we did open 5% down. Even today, I am neutral delta without a single adjustment.

Today, I am using the bounce and increased volatility to add some bearish toned STT. The bounce gives me better delta and the increased vol allows me to have a longer upside runway. Pretty much all I’ll be doing today.

My newest Oct STTs are taking a bit of heat, down about 300 a shot x 40. They were quite positive upper expiration line and roughly +50 delta but I have -delta older ones and I am adding some bearish toned ones now. Within a week or two they’ll be positive if all things remain equal. As time goes on, the trades get more and more -ve delta.

I gather I’ll get the account up to about 20% for end of June for the year. Which is roughly the target. I am hoping for 25% but we’ll see how this plays out. If we have more downside, then I gather I can get even more as we enter the tents of matured trades but if we runaway upwards, it’ll just be the standard lower profit. My goal is to consistently hit a yearly 50% with STT+BSH on total account value w/ compounding and opportunistic over-leveraging on significant down moves up to 1.2x. I won’t be deviating strategies or diverting any funds away to other trades. This is a year long real money test of real market conditions and actual trade results for the STT+BSH combo.

I’ve been researching T5 a lot lately but it’ll be far separated from my main account. There’s a lot of opportunity with that trade and its juicy AF but it’s more fitting of my older previous life as a professional gambler. You have to look at it like a weighted coin flip in your favor but with regular total losses. I have to analyze Kelly criteria and risk of ruin as well as all the trade mechanics and market environment entry type stuff. Big project. Re what I mean : if you have a 55/45 edge in a coin flip, and you have 50k total, how much do you bet per hand to eliminate risk of total ruin so that you can infinitely take advantage of that significant edge? Is it 5k a flip? 2k? etc. You have to analyze this differently then something where you put all your equity in every trade and try to eliminate max draw down. Rather you accept the 100% win or loss and determine the edge and calculate the bet size. Should be interesting.

Travels: San Diego

The first leg on the trip was San Diego but it wasn’t easy to get there. We went to our flight at about 3pm only to find out that there was a massive storm in Houston that grounded all flights. They told us we’d be delayed by 4-5 hours. Cool enough, we went home only to find out at about 10pm that the flight was canceled until the next morning. The thing was, we had a connection in the AM and the system wasn’t seeing that we’d miss it (we landed at 10am but the connecting flight departed at the same time….10am). Suffice to say, they barely sorted on the phone and we had to take separate flights (Ash with 1 and myself with 2) but with an 11 hour stop over! When we got there. it was chaotic but we were able to get on an earlier flight altogeher and also got a 450 dollar credit. Not bad.

We arrived in San Diego at 7pm and all was good!

This ended up being a cool shot of us in old town San Diego. A touristy little area.

Thought this was a cool building. Supreme Court as far as I can remember.

Candid shot of our walk downtown

Emma and I doing a selfie

Center of San Diego

Candid Isla shot on the “weeee” as she calls it

Down by the harbour


Epic bar, I think it’s the oldest one in San Diego. That’s a bunch of beer taps above.

Drinking some beers

Famous vegan restaurant in San Diego. Cool design inside. Was supposed to be a metal music vibe

Delicious vegan sandwich

Some more delic. Vegan food

K-Bomb being silly

A joey is in the pouch

Emma posing near the flamingos (did you know they eat shrimp to get their color?)

Safari (Ethical and not a zoo). Super cool shot.

Safari (Ethical and not a zoo). Super cool shot.

On our way to LA!

May 1 2019 (STT BWB+ BSH trades)

Just got back from my 3 week west coast trip. We made our way from San Diego up to Portland. It was the first trip since I started trading that I didn’t have stress or issues in the market. A true testament to the new strategy. I could do everything simply from my phone and I barely had to load up ONE. It was beautiful. Refreshing. Man what a nice feeling!

My trading tasks would basically entail looking at market 3x a day and either add new Bubs fresh, raise the UEL or harvest the lower longs. I knew based on my summaries before I left that I needed to slowly raise my UEL on existing trades (Aug and Sep). So I knew ahead of time I’d add a pos UEL bwb in those expirations by a specific amount. When we had a red day, I’d get ‘er on. We did and that was that. I also wanted to get on more new ones which I was able to do finally today. I also harvested my lower longs as they decayed and that removed risk. So yeah, essentially, it was a breeze. I just put on some BWBs whenever we had some red days or vol pop and I harvested the lower puts up and that was it. Stress free. Due to some skew issues the vol collapse didn’t net much in terms of P/L but it’ll come soon.

Today I am putting on some Oct BWB trades now that we’re -0.80% after the fed. I got on some BSHs earlier, now I am putting on the corresponding BWBs with this nice little vol pop of 9%. I just put on 40 units. Might get another 10 on if I can. PC is about 200k per 10. Good to go. About at 1.1x PC and not much left to do for another 2-3 weeks 🙂