Travels and Trades

Planes, Gains and Automobiles 2023

The big aviation trip of the year was the flight from LA to Toronto and back during the march break holidays. It was a bittersweet departure as I had just picked up (the day before) my new car and I really wanted to play with it, drive it, enjoy it, but instead I got teased and had to park it in the hangar just hours after as I had an early departure the next day. Such a sweet machine but maybe a bit too much. Whatever. You only live once.

I flew myself and my family to Toronto and used the flight back as an opportunity for additional training in Instrument flying. On the way back, the family flew commercial, and I met up with a friend and my instructor for a 4-day training session/boys’ trip. I am instrument-rated, but I like to manage my risk and occasionally get solid refreshers and higher stress training. Mitigating risk. The CSIP that does it is also a friend, so the trips are always fun. It’s been sort of tradition to fly one way with him as we usually go back to Canada on holidays.

On the way to Toronto, we flew through the desert and over the rockies and into the midwest plains. The usual first stop is Page, Arizona (Lake Powell) and from there we typically stop in Omaha or somewhere like that, usually for the night. It takes about 9.2 hours of flight time to get from LA to Toronto in this plane. The jet version is about 5.5 hours. Not bad.

So in the picture below, we were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. Just kidding, that’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote, but the picture above the clouds was in fact above Barstow.

Pretty uneventful trip, took 2 days, flew IFR most of the way which makes it very easy. You’re part of the system and on a air highway, so things just flow better. When I arrived, I instantly headed up for some relaxation at the favorite part of my house. A few local friends came over and used the weeks to see family and friends.

On the flight back, the plan was to get to LA relatively quickly then use a few days to get more used to flying IFR in the LA airspace. We flew first into Milwaukee to clear customs, always easy, and ended the night in Omaha. I actually like Omaha quite a bit. Always have a really good time there. Unfortunately, it was raining this time so it was a bit more annoying.

The following day we departed for Salt Lake City which was a bit out of the way, but we just didn’t feel like doing Vegas again and none of us had been, so it seemed like a good idea. It was. Good learning moments and also very cool scenery.

Pretty complicated airspace given the mountains and class Bravo. So, my instructor task loaded me by having me cancel my IFR clearance into SLC and reroute to a small airport sandwiched between the bravo and the mountain peaks. Was high task load and brought in a bit of problem solving. The airport is just below Ogden in the image below. Fun stuff both in departing and arriving 🙂 Good training.

The next day we made it back to LA where I reunited with my car (and my wife) for a quick dinner and that was that! Successful flying and some good lessons!

Risk, back-testing and drawdowns

When I first started out in options a decade ago, there were only basic backtesting systems, namely Option Vue (which, actually just recently went out of business due to lack of adapting and other reasons). It was not only cumbersome and slow to test but the datasets were very limited, we didn’t have the option data in a variety of market types to really test out strategies. We basically had EOD data pre 2011 and I believe 30 min data after that. That gave us what? Like 3 years of good testing ability. Further to that we had less expirations.

This is an era where trades like the Modified Iron condor were popular. These sets of strategies were borne from the limited data set I mentioned above. They had produced consistent unchallenged small gains for a handful of years only to be dinosaured when the inevitable bulldozer came while picking up these pennies (ie Aug 24, 2015). With this new data set and many more to come (Bear 2016, Low vol 2017, Feb 2018), many other trade types started to be developed, using a much more varied market data set. It was also when the first inklings of the pre-PMTT group came about when I started a skype group to talk about the Rhino trade. From the ashes of these previous trade systems, our group was born when Ron took the reigns and created PMTT.

There’s been a lot of talk in my group about curvefitting and having OOS periods now that we have access to automated tools where we can essentially backtest loads of iterations in very quick time. It’s true, when I backtested the HS3EZ, 488 and 484+2LP it took 100+ hours to properly do. I had one set of parameters and if I changed them, that’s another 100 hours :). I am certain I’ve spent 2000 hours+ backtesting in the last decade, if not more. We can now test that AND any changes in a few minutes. This creates a problem of fitting data by removing losing trades by filtering w/ new parameters etc etc. I am betwixt between the two camps of thought when speaking about the PMTT type trades only. When I am looking at the algo trading or TAA, I am firmly and obviously very focused on OOS testing and curve fitting. The edges are less and the variables much more variant. You’re searching for small edges that need a LOT of data to confirm because the edges can be or can come from something much more ambigious as is the case in algorithmic trading. It’s a definite concern for PMTT types of trades, but just not as much.

The PMTT type of trades are not the same thing as algo trading or trading futures or utilizing parameters like the TAA guys use which have less pronounced and even ambiguous edge with much more variables and variability in those variables. Our edge comes from the very robust premium inherent in the market of which acts like insurance and the pricing of this insurance is less variant and affected by less variables than other non-option trade types. The pricing of an option is via the corresponding greeks which I view as almost like a device of rubber bands which can only stretch and pull so far. We don’t need 1000 samples of bear markets and 1000 samples of low vol periods. There’s only so much that can happen in our structures. With that said and related to my betwixt comment I believe that any strategy created from a limited data set needs OOS testing before going full hog, especially if you’re only testing from 2020+. Which I am currently seeing a lot of. I firmly believe we should be using all data available to us to create these strategies (that means 2014+ at very minimum). This gives us the 2014 Oct crash and unrelenting V-Rally, the 2015 crash, the 2016 prolonged slower bear, the 2017 low vol run up, the 2018 crash, the Oct-Dec 2018 bear, the 2020 crash and subsequent huge 2021 rally and so on. I think a strategy can show returns in a full test in those markets as well as random sampling within AND it has a solid hypothesis and theory of why it should work, then it is robust enough for me to slowly add in.

In regard to risk and draw down, I also believe you can appropriately reduce overall risk with solid well thought out and well tested diversification and trade development and you can in fact limit max draw down on the portfolio of trades by doing this. By limiting draw down you increase geometric returns.

I don’t think drawdown equals risk.. It is just not that simple. You can diversify, you can mitigate, and you will have better geometric returns because of that. Risk mitigation=return. My life is just focused on this aspect, reduce risk and draw down for better geometric returns. There is volatility tax and it’s much more attractive to limit your draw down to allow for better compounding. I always say this, but its the time series of returns, the pathway we take in our bets, that is the most important.

WSOP and Mixed Game results

From May 24th until about Jul 11th my hobby time focus was on the World Series of Poker of which I mostly played mixed game formats like Razz, Omaha 8, Triple Draw etc. I had been getting coaching pretty actively for the preceding 6 months specifically in mixed games and it mostly paid off.

In my first series dedicated to mixed games, I cashed in 3 world series tournaments with the best being in the Omaha 8 limit WSOP event, where I got 24th out of 1150 or so runners. My best result in any tournament to date. Despite getting to the final 3 tables out of like a starting 130 tables, it still hurt, and it still felt like worst thing ever. I have a feeling that nothing but a 1st will be satisfying, what a terrible hobby to choose for gratification 🙂

I had chip lead at one point even got some attention from the poker press (and the cool photo below) but alas, I wasn’t able to close it off and made the final 3 tables before busting shortly after. The blinds increased pretty quickly towards the end and a series of bad hands just decimated my stack. No regrets though, just unfortunate luck.

After that, I ended up playing in the Razz 10k and it was a bust but I did get berated by Phill Hellmuth for about 3 minutes which made it all worth it. It’s almost a mixed games initiation. Made my whole series worth it. It might have been worse than this clip

I then ran into a series of bad luck hands that busted me in two day 2s. The worst being a 2-7 triple draw hand where I made #2 on 1st draw (7-6-4-3-2) and got beat by #1 on his 3rd draw. Horrible. Same as this hand

The next one was in a Razz hand where I had a 2-3-4-5-6 and ended up losing to a wheel. Both day 2s and both near the money. I did end up cashing in the triple mixed event in 49th and the 9-game mixed event for 40th (most difficult tournament and skill requirement). Successful bunch of events especially the 9-game.

In March, I had ended up getting 56th in the Wynn Millions no limit tournament, my first tournament after the WPT world championships, I felt pretty confident after this run lol. This was one of my deepest runs in no-limit. I didn’t mind busting this one, felt like I had as much luck as I could have. This December, they’re running the millions with a 40mm guaranteed, the biggest prize pot guarantee ever I believe. I’ll be there! Probably the first tournament I’ll play since the July main event (which I busted on day 2 with AA).

So the year for poker was kind of successful, I had the big score in December of 2022 at the WPT world championships, the deep run in the Wynn millions and the 3 mixed game deep runs. I’ll take it. I’ve taken a long break from poker (kind of like I did with this blog) and haven’t studied or looked at it since July. I don’t plan to until November.

Trade and Fund update

Been a long time! Seems to happen like that with posting and my personality for some reason. I asked my friend to force me to post more often with a prop bet. It’s a good historical record of my trading and life journey and it seems to be appreciated by others. So, I guess I’ll be posting more often! I’ll do separate posts for my trading thoughts and my one for each of my recent travels. We had several big trips including a big European road trip (the first since pre Covid!) which was once a yearly thing.

After a rocket of a year in 2022 posting a gross of 59%, the fund return has slowed a bit during the first half of 2023 but it has picked up in the last 45 days or so. I still expect to end the year around 25-30% gross which with the environment shift and slow start would be an excellent result. Slow periods happen in all trade variants and is to be expected. We’re mitigating drawdown and managing risk. We took a bit of a hit in March doing just that but it’s better than the alternative.

We back-tested the period from Jan 1 to Aug 1 of 2023 to see if it matched our live results and it was the same result. Just a slower period for the style of trades. The environment is transitioning from the bearish year of 2022 and the bottom part of the option chain is starting to normalize to pre-covid era. Owning that part of the chain can cause a drag. Just a guess.

You can see the flatness of returns from 2023 in the equity curve of a very similar representation of the strategies below.

The mastermind group has really seen an uptick in development with the advent of automated backtesting via mesosim and other products. We’re seeing a large growth in crowd sourced RnD amongst the group. A lot of smart people are putting their heads together to create very exciting trades and trade types. This can provide for very exciting diversification opportunities, which is what I am all about. It should be quite interesting times ahead with trade development. My workload will no doubt go up as I investigate various changes to trades and research new trade types.

The fund structure is now US registered and we’re able to accept US investors which was a very arduous and complicated process.

Deep run in the Vegas WPT World Championships

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.

Day 2 bag. Feeling ecstatic at this point. Have a shot

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!

The height of my stack just over 2mm (or 20 peoples starting stack).

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.

2022 – End of Year Update

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?

Q3 and YTD Update

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.

Lake Tahoe trip in the Cirrus

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.

From sun to snow

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.

Q2 Update

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.

Some relaxation before the big flight the next day

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

Updates for the Quarter

Finished the quarter at 8.5% which was a good look given the S&P was down about 5% but I felt like things could have been managed better especially the initial response and the adjustment to the huge bearish rallies we had. I have two accounts (EDF w/ a seat in Chicago to trade futures) and IB. The EDF account I purposely left on as totally systematic and had traded the IB account more discretionary. The systematic account did beat the discretionary account. Now some caveats there, when we have a large market event like this quarter, we often pause new entries of OTM trades, allow convexity to play out in our tail structures and move to more defined risk structures like ATM trades but only until we get an all clear, this is usually days to weeks max. 99% of the time we’re in our systems. Some learning nuggets in there but mostly nothing we didn’t already know. Interestingly, the account would have published >20% result if the market closed anywhere near 4350 or below but alas, we had a bullish run into EOQ. A little lotto almost. The good news is that this quarter (Q2) is almost up the same as Q1 and it’s only 18 days in. The expectation based on models is that Peak will end up around 25% for H1 2022.

We officially Just finished the first two years for the fund which did awesome. An average of 40% a year which matches the arithmetic backtests we’ve done. I had about 2 years before that with personal trading, so I now have 4 years out of sample matching the available back-testing. All in all, couldn’t ask for anything more. What a successful start. The fund setup was as legit as you could setup and was pretty interesting, it requires 2 independent directors as oversight, a 3rd party fund administration company, that has access to the platform back-end and reviews all trade logs daily, an auditor (Grant Thornton) and loads of administrative tasks by the government. Literally have 10+ people reviewing our trade logs for accounting/oversight. I don’t even have access to the bank account. How neat. Who would have thought. At first, I thought it was a lot of pressure especially given short term swings/dynamics, but I am quite used to it now. As it grows, so does the need for very robust systems, checklists and daily verifications of models/trades. It’s been an interesting experience and I’m loving that our results are published and audited. It’s opening up a lot of pathways and keeping me to task. I am not living my semi-retired life I was on the path to living a few years back but I love what I do so it’s not work.

As I always harp on about my focus being on risk reduction as a way to increase geometric returns, it’s really taking in the point of ergodicity vs non-ergodicity and an example I really liked that Spitznagel used in his book (safe haven) was that of a merchant company who had ships going back and forth in Europe which were prone to pirate attacks. They determined that 1/20 ships would sink and they’d lose 10k (just an example) but had been offered insurance at the price of $600 per ship. Seems like a bad bet right? $12k is more than the 10k they’d lose every 20x on average. But it isn’t when looked at geometrically. The stable cost of $600 per sailing and not having that 10k draw down actually generates more $ over time. It’s a win win for both the merchant and the insurance company. A paradox! But it has one assumption, that the merchant is actioning his money to increase business. If so, then having less cash draw down allows for better compounding in the number of ships he can send. Having that 10k drawdown and having to recover from that drawdown is more of a cost than paying 12k to insure the 20 ships. Go figure. On paper, it’s -2k worse but geometrically it’s better. Here’s another example, if you flip a coin and heads you gain 50% of your worth and tails you lose 40% of your worth, most professional gamblers would all agree that you’ve got POSEV of 5% and it’s a great bet. But geometrically it is a terrible bet. Given enough trials, all participants will go bust. Having been a professional gambler in my university days (only with edges!) I’ve witnessed people through out the years, taking insane $ bets for small edges, I guess if their bankroll is enough, it’s fine but else, it’s eventually a bust. It’s not just about POSEV situations but also bankroll management and risk mitigation via volatility reduction. Most bets aren’t an ergodic process. There’s mathematical equations you can use to figure out how to size bets like these, but rarely do professionals or gamblers alike do that. It’s like Russian roulette (where the 1/6 will end the game forever). Sure, if you had 1000 of you spinning that revolver (picture a multi-verse), you’ll obtain the arithmetic average, but as an independent single trial, it’s an assured total loss. We don’t care that we on average beat the game but what happens if we KEEP playing the game! It’s the life pathway in investing/trading that we care about most not the EV of a specific trade. Large draw-downs along the way are inhibitive to growth more so than the EV itself (for the most part and being reasonable). Everyone says (I stole this) that “Man I wish I invested in Amazon in 1999, I’d be Rich” But that’s pretty stupid, because during that time amazon had 90% draw downs. Imagine following the trajectory of that persons investments.

Volatility tax is such an important concept in finance and one that many ignore. It’s my focus and it’s why I have such positive exposure to tail events and work to have mid-way hedges to reduce drawdown in a campaign setting. I went from being a professional risk taker (I’d define myself this before up until a few years ago) to becoming a professional risk reducer. The entire premise of my trading style is risk reduction (volatility reduction) by way of diversification (as best as I can within the framework I work in) to provide better geometric returns. Just having a risk focused mindset is a win. I don’t focus on returns so much anymore, but rather, smart defined ways to reduce risk via diversification so that my edges are better compounded.