Been a long time since I posted which seems typical of my behaviour with this blog. A lots been happening, I just left Cayman enroute to Canada where we’re moving into our newly built house (will post about that separately, it’s pretty damn cool too!) but we made a month long pit-stop in KTYS (Knoxville) to pick up a tool that would help me with one part of this blog, traveling. I bought a plane.
Ashley and I both had nearly completed our PPL back in 2008 but had to leave urgently right (like literally a week) before our Check-out ride to Cayman. We had intended on coming back within a month to get it done but we just never did and then we had kids…andddd that was that. We hadn’t picked it up again until now because it was just impossible in Cayman. Anyway, we ended up purchasing an SR22T Cirrus which is one of the safest prop planes out there, it has its own parachute system (entire plane) and the automation is astounding. It’s fully autopilot and has synthetic vision, live traffic, weather on board etc.
Cirrus has been amazing to deal with, literally one of the best companies I’ve ever dealt with. They came (for free) to pick us up in the Vision Jet because we were sorta stranded in Cayman due to it being Covid free and being locked down to the rest of the world. My rep finagled it by calling it a demo. The normal protocol is that they’ll come pick you up in an SR22 (one person) and bring you to Knoxville to take delivery. In this case, they picked us all up and in the SF50 Vision G2 Jet.
That was a blast. Maybe or maybe not – am I trying to build up experience and hours to get into one of those lol. A bit of a dream.
The other thing, Cirrus just started a PPL program and we’re the first students to partake. We’re here in Knoxville for a month training every day in our plane which is pretty cool. We’re less than a week away from Solo. In our off time, we’ve been mostly hiking and enjoying the outdoors since in Cayman, we were quite limited to just the beach.
We started off flying the club plane (because our delivery was Nov 18th). I have some slight PTSD from the training. So the call sign 8-6 Mike Juliette brings me some pits in my stomach. The instructor was extremely tough on us.
During training one day, we landed and saw our plane had made it to KTYS (Knoxville) for prepping before delivery. Got a snapshot before they put it away.
Here’s some delivery day photos. What a day. It really was like 10 years in the making. The original plans we had in our 20s was to become pilots and live that freedom. Just life and kids got in the way. Now with the kids in distance/home school there was no better time to dedicate a month to training and eventually instrument rating in the winter to finally be able to cross country. The thing is damn fast and has a great range. 1000nm (~2000 km) and boots at 187-200 kts. It can go to 25k feet too and is equipped with oxygen and FIKI systems.
Here’s our first Cross country (Ash flew there and I flew back)
As for trades,
I pretty much de-risked into the elections and was mostly ATM trades. I’ve added 10-20% sizing in the last week or two but am looking towards eventually setting up a 488 campaign now that we’re out of high vol. I did put on some Feb ATM SPX trades and I am playing with similar BWB setups in TSLA (given the recent momentum move up and iv spiking again). So I’ll be looking for opportunities in 488 and BSH factory build up as well as dabbling in ATM. That’s about it.
I am >30% for the year and happy that I’ll probably hit 40% for 2020 and move on to a more stabilised systematic approach in 2021.