Travels – Travels and Trades

Planes, Gains, and Automobiles – Part 2

We made it to Austin sometime around 8pm and as we entered the city, three homeless guys came over with metal buckets and shit in their hands dancing around the car, I hadn’t been so nervous in a long time. They just danced and said some stuff and left, thankfully. The nightlife was insane, definitely pre-covid levels. We bar-hopped and had some Indian food and called it a night. We ended up waking up at like 11am which was nuts. We obviously needed the sleep from the flying and driving up to that point I guess. Flying 9 hrs in a prop makes you really tired because of the vibrations and lack of pressurisation. Speaking of which, Chris had got his second vaccine the day before the flight and was reading 76% O2 levels…he wasn’t feeling to good so we reduced altitude. There’s not much you can really do when flying from California towards Texas, Santa Fe is 7500 feet above sea level. Is what it is.

Anyways, we didn’t take many pictures there and left pretty early in the AM towards Oklahoma City. It was pouring rain most of the way which made for slower driving. When we arrived, the valet met us and was super excited, he hadn’t been in a Lamborghini but had it tattooed on his face! We had to ask him for a picture!

The hotel was actually pretty damn cool, it was an art hotel. We admired the art and then made our way into town. At every bar we were asked if we had guns on us. That’s new for me. Seemed like a clean cool small city. But like most of the stops, we didn’t spend much time exploring, more or less, driving during the day and hitting the night life since it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just go out and have some beers in a bar with-out restrictions. The next stop is Santa Fe, New Mexico at a 5-star resort where we had hoped for a more low-key relaxing night.

Here’s some pics of the art:

During this week, the skew changed and I noticed a lot of profits incoming, might have been the most I’ve seen to date actually in $. I think it was about 7-8% total gain on the week period. So yeah, it was a big week for gains which was strange…usually when I go on a trip, I am dealing with chaos, it’s just how it goes for me usually 🙂 Made the trip all that much better. We had gone through a period of about 1 month where the balance did not move at all. I notice that a lot but the piper has to be paid eventually so I knew it was coming in eventually.

On to Santa Fe, I hadn’t realised it was so high up (7,500 feet) but I noticed similar physiological things as I do when flying up high so googled it. I was right. We were high up. I probably should have known that but it was neat that I could tell something was up (no pun intended).

We got there, had some dinner and walked all around for hours, eventually we ended up at a real, and I mean real, local bar. The patrons were literally a cast from the movie clue. It was ridiculous but super fun. We had a biker gang in there, we had a random dude with a peeked hat acting super sketchy, some random old guy rolling cigarettes and then us in bright designer hoodies…The pours at this place, omg, half glasses of Tequila for $6.

Santa Fe is also an art capital of the US. I almost wanted to buy some but it’s gotta wait.

Next stop Under Canvas Lake Powell….to be continued.

Cross Country – Planes, Gains, and Automobiles. Part 1

Ordered a new car in Houston (got it for a steal) and had an instructor pilot fly with me and a friend to drop us off and take the plane back then made a 2000 mile road trip back with a friend to LA. We went Houston –> Austin –> Oklahoma City –> Santa Fe –> Utah –>Las Vegas –> LA. Wild trip in a wild car. It involved planes, some significant gains and a car.

The trip started with some eventful memories. We had planned the first leg to be KVNY to E98 (Benson Municipal), a small airport with some cheap fuel. We landed and the guy that was supposed to be there to fill the plane up was AWOL. We had did some quick calculations and looked for an alternative airport, luckily there was one just 9 min away (we were in the middle of the desert). So there was a chance we weren’t getting off the ground with the reserves we had available unless there was a close by airport.

Beautiful day but the thermals caused some issues with winds, so the landing was one of the trickier ones that I’ve done. We landed with about 45 min reserve which is the Cirrus specified and suggested minimum. We didn’t have much room to the FAA 30 min reserve (we had like 15 min radius to find another airport). Luckily, there was one just 9 min away and after calling to confirm they’d be there, we took off!

Middle of nowhere (Benson Municipal airport)

No Fuel here……

So after doing the calculations, we took off to the nearby Chochise airport where we had another incident, the lady there wasn’t wearing her hearing aid and we told her fill it to tabs (airport slang for filling it up to a specific marker that allocates 60 gallons of 92 total). We were over weight at full and we couldn’t take off if it was above 60. Well, she filled it to full and we had to milk the plane… There was no way for us to take off. Luckily the instructor knew how to milk the plane. She ended up giving us a refund on the unused fuel and we took off towards Houston shortly after. All told the trip took about 6.5 hours of flying.

Milking 345PK

Was tempted to watch some sweet flicks on the VHS but we had to make up time!

Enroute to Houston..the final leg!

The pick up. Beautiful! Such a ridiculous car, almost embarrassing but whatever, it’s a childhood dream so why the fuck not. We got it for under value due to a guy not being able to close on it and I took that opportunity to acquire the car. I can literally sell it for a profit in a year.

We left Houston for Austin during a literal rainstorm. Along the way, we stopped at a small Texas town and had some Mexican food. I don’t think I fit in there, got stared at hard by five pretty burly guys. After checking the market, it was time to leave…

On our way to Austin…listening to some Heaven Shall Burn for the boys..

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.

On our way to LA!

Summer Travels

An update on the travels portion of this blog :

This should be a different summer than usual as I usually do a 3 month road trip in Europe. We won’t be doing that this year rather we’ll be back and forth from Cayman in mini trips from April till August.

April:

We’ll be kicking things off by starting a 22 day road trip up the west coast starting in San Diego and reaching Seattle. We got an Au Pair meeting us in San Diego so there will be plenty of adult time. The plan is to stay in San Diego for 4-5 days, before making our way to LA for another 4-5 days. We booked a brunch at Crossroads which should be cool. We’ll hit up Universal and maybe the LA comedy club and of course every stop we will frequent every famous vegan restaurant that we can find. After that we’ll hit up San Fran and make our way to Portland then Seattle to finalize the trip. Looking most forward to Portland.

May:

We’ll then head back to Cayman for a few weeks. Then we’ll do a 3 week trip to Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and finally Denver as well as the Moab Desert. We’ll see a band called The Architects play (a great metal core band). I am not a huge fan of their latest album but it’s OK. I would much rather see Heaven Shall burn or Hopesfall but alas, they will do.

The day after that concert I will play the Millions North America (Party Poker tournament), good timing. We will then make our way to Ottawa and see Iliza (comedian) and end the Canada portion of the trip in Toronto. That will be followed up by a week in Denver and the Moab Desert for a wedding

June:

From the Moab, I’ll depart solo to play a handfull of WSOP tournaments (Millionaire maker, Marathon and a few others) before returning to Cayman for another 2 weeks.

Jul/Aug:

On Jul 1 I then will return to Vegas for the WSOP main event. At the end of July we’ll take off for Europe but just for a 3.5 week mini trip before returning for the kids new school year. Busy busy.

Busy but fun summer. I’ve got a poker coach now so I’ll be studying hard for those run of tournaments. Hoping to cash a few this time around. I want another deep run 🙂

Oct 1 – BSH Factory, CC (BWB-STT) campaign and poker

On Wednesday I just finished up a mastermind presentation in the PMTT group that talked about how to deal with your trade portfolio in a crash, the BSH factory campaign and how to harvest the STT-BWB. It went well, lasted about 1.5 hours and had 155 slides. It’s hard to talk about all this stuff on the blog as the info is protected in the group. It’s kinda what probably makes this blog stagnate at times. I have to get creative while not divulging our IP. If it was up to me, I’d share a lot more but it’s unfair to the group.

I did have some back of mind reservations presenting this campaign as I thought it was the “nuts” and I worried about having tons of people selling the same strikes on the same opportunistic days, but I dunno, I don’t ever want to be that guy, I don’t need to resort to that in life and my integrity is worth more than whatever perceived value there is. My belief is the group works because we all generally share our good ideas and in return we get tons of smart “eyes” looking at it and making it better. It works and this is what makes it tick and I’m going to continue on this path. Besides, the value back has been incredible and I am glad that we’re all exploring furthering the campaign in both its theory and its practical implementation. Returns in spades.

On Friday, I had 12 units of Rhino waiting to fill and it did right at the end of day at a good price @ 2.75 for the Dec 1710/1670/1620 BWB. Nice. I just closed off my other 10 units that I put on in July for 21k in profit. I still dabble in the ATM trades for diversification. Though, I hate taking this shit off sometimes. I had a host of Call calendars, Call BWBs and put BWBs and taking one part off leaves the other side exposed and sometimes fills just suck. It took me 2 hours to close it and I was cursing the entire time.

On the opposite spectrum, the STT CC campaign is much easier to manage and I usually just convert the structure to a hedge structure late in the trade. Saves commissions and adds some insurance. The STT CC is my bulk trade right now coupled with the BSH factory which will be for both income and hedging. Pretty much all I do now is some Rhinos (super low % of account), CC campaign, BSH factory and opportunistic HS3. I also dabble in some mechanical equity investing but its just for utilizing some of my balance (for further info check out the motley fool mechanical investing forum (search TMF mechanical investing) or check out imarketsignals.com. It’s cool stuff. The community in mechanical investing have been doing it for 20+ years.

Poker

I’ve been studying every day ramping up for the Oct WPT in Montreal. This is going to be practice run at the PSPC in January. I have about 40 hours of study left I suppose just to get me on par level in knowledge with the average competition. Not an easy game as I’ve been at this since 1999 ;). When I was in my twenties, I mean, I felt like my generation was easy competition, I’d put in reasonable efforts and excel in whatever it may have been..ie. Poker at the time was jokes, first person shooters on PC was jokes or whatever. Now, I put in probably 800 hours into PubG and still suck, back in the day my wife and I played Rainbow 6 lockdown/vegas and were top 100. Now, I doubt I break top 100k 🙂 I don’t know, it feels like everything is taken next level (or ten) by this new generation. The kids in poker now have just perfected everything. They literally eat, breathe, shit poker. It’s all they do and they do it right. They’ve broken down the game to levels that are so far beyond. If they put that effort into anything else (trading, business start ups etc) they’d probably have easier success though. I’d gather that to be earning reasonable money in tournament poker would take the same effort it takes to be be a professional trader but with less variance.

All that said, After Oct, I might hire the best tournament coach in the world to get me prepped. The prob is he’s like 375 EUR an hour 🙂 Steep, but thats what you get for the best. I might start with a more reasonable one and get ramped up towards him. BencB is the coachs name. Epic track record.

Aug 8 Trade and Travel Update

I am on my very last 2 day leg with my family in Milan. On Aug 10, I’ll drive up to Munich to meet some friends and do a beer tour around Germany and probably Pilsen (Czech) and maybe Krakow, Poland. On the 19th, I’ll be in Barcelona to play a big poker tournament and then I’ll be heading home to resume normal life. I think this will be the last EU tour for a little while. We’re building a house in Canada next year and I think we’ll use that as our summer base and slow down the EU tours as I think I’ve seen most of it now. It’s not as exciting as it first was and it’s been more of a drain than a rejuvenation. As my account grows, I need to fully concentrate on trading and take only brief breaks on weekends etc.

As for the trades, well, the market is in a historic area right now. The DOW has made 9 all time highs in a row and the VIX (and thus option premium) is at all time lows. It’s a bad time (the worst) to be an option premium seller. It’s the worst time for strategies I used and the plan I had 🙂

I saw this graph of VIX futures and it really sings a song.

Anyways, I know a lot of people are being challenged right now. It’s been a rough 20 months for trading these types of strategies. Slow. I started trading the Rhino (which really likes any market other than a 5% up market in a 45 day period) and as soon as I initiated that trade at full volume, the market had like 15 months where 9 of them (RUT) went up 5% or more 🙂 I have terrible timing. I think the RUT moved up 50%+ in the last 15-20 months. The SPX went from 1828 to 2475 in what 16 months? Incredible move. So I had low’ish returns for that trade over the course of 2016 (I was positive just meh, I think 20%-25% overall). Then 2017 came along, and I had started the STT full on but still had Rhinos on from previous. The rhinos got decimated in the environment and is still affecting my overall return for 2017. This environment for the STT can still be done well I just wasn’t able to kill it this summer. As to do well, you really had to be perfect in timing for paying off the BSHs and for initiating the STT. It took a certain plan and without knowing how the market would have gone, it would be hard to do well in that environment sans Combo trades (the combos would have crushed). The vol has been so so so low that I’ve been dragging heels on initiating new STTs. I mean, you’re a net seller of vol and vol is at historic lows, you haven’t gotten a worse price on this ever. So I wasn’t excited about initiating new trades. I know it can be done if you arrange a + UEL and if you are very prudent at paying off those BSHs but that’s not easy. On big up moves, I’d initiate BSH and RC (RC pays off about half of the BSH) and I’d wait for some vol to enter in STTs. That vol never came (ever!, it’s so damn crazy how low the vol is..we haven’t had 0.3% daily moves in record times) and I was stuck putting on STTs in low vol(Crappy prices) and when my BSH/RC combo was down. Still it profited but just nothing much at all. Typically, the plan was this: Put on RC/BSH as the market has a big up day, wait for down day and enter an STT. In ANY normal market, or any market that’s not this market, you’d have that opportunity. Down days are fairly common…just not this year. That all said, poor (slightly profitable) results because of the management/plan I chose for the year. That’s got me a bit bummed out but at the same time I haven’t been more excited for what is coming in my trading career.

The combos that we are working in the group and the testing that we’ve done suggest very very consistent results. I’m showing a result of 8.75% on margin in 45 DIT. Thats 5.833% per month on margin used. We use only about 65% of balance, so total balance return would be 3.8%. Not that exciting when looked at as a single component. However, If we combine this with a T5 (TTT555) trade the margin reduces significantly. My goal is to get it to 5% a month on whole account for the STT combo alone. The T5 trade has gone from 1200 to 20k in 2.5 years in backtesting. That thing returns 100% 70% of the time within 10 days and loses equivalent 30% of time. You obviously can’t do too much of these as you’d wipe yourself out psychologically (and 30% of your balance) if you had 3 losing months in a row but the boost and the margin reduction makes it very attractive. My goal is to have the combo, the BSH factory and the T5 trade working together to provide a total account return of 100%. That’s exciting but it’ll be a lot of work, a lot of organisation and diligence in process. Further to that, we’ve got a T5 timer that helps immensely with entries and exits. Unfortunately, I went about 40 units in for the T5 before the timer exists and I entered at a shitty time, it’s down at them moment but the risk profile looks great. Like I said, I have the worst timing for everything and I have to create a life and trading plan that negates my awful cursed timing 🙂

I was asked to do a presentation on the PC2 trade but I am on my last two days with the family and I just can’t sacrifice the time w/ them without having a very angry wife so I am hoping I can just do it early September instead.

House Progress (4 years in the making)

Our house is nearly nearly there. We started building about 20 months ago and it’s just about finished. I was lucky to have gone to school with one of the best Canadian architects (in my opinion) and he agreed to design this one for me.

The design is amazing. We just told him we wanted three pods (separate living spaces) that integrated with the outdoors but also were connected by a top floor. This is what he came up with

Thanks Joe (fellow Trading Dominion user) for taking the pics in my absence!

Hopefully will be in by October/November.

Jul 13 – Where have I been?

I started traveling May 30 and have been on the road since.

We started off in Lisbon Portugal and spent 9 days there. It’s a top 3 place for me for sure. It was very hilly which was a bit tough with a newborn in a stroller but we made due. We stayed right near an awesome little park that had a small confectionary like restaurant that served coffees in the AM and beers in the PM. Loved it. Spent a lot of time there. Everything was so cheap, like 1.30 EUR for a beer 🙂

After that we rented a car and drove down to Faro for 5 days. It was OK, too touristy for me, felt like one of those british tourist destinations that you see (Malta Paceville, Ibiza, etc) but we had to go there to catch a bus from Faro to make it to Seville. I just couldn’t get a rental car that would allow us to drop it off in Spain, so we had to bus it. After Seville we made our way down to Marbella by rental car. Marbella was pretty cool, like the Monaco of Spain Lots of expensive cars and wealth. I ended up playing the Marbella Pokerstars tournament. That didn’t go well, I busted K8 on a 6788 board to a 9T. Normally I could get away from the hand but it went down like this:

Everyone folded to me on the button, I raised first in, small blind and big blind both called. IT was checked to me on the flop 678 and I bet 1/3rd pot. Call call. The turn brought the 8 which gave me set with K kicker. It was check/check and I bet 1/4 pot. The BB check raised me and I pushed. The ranges here are pretty big for all of us. So I got attached to the hand and busted. Ah well.

After Marbella, we made our way to Madrid, spent 8 days there. I wasn’t expecting much from Madrid but ended up liking it a lot. The airbnb was decent but the lady was super OCD and really annoying, writing us every few hours with instructions for the most mundane things. 2MM LBGT folks came in for world pride day and I think Madrid is considered the capital for the community. Was interesting and neat to see. After Madrid, we trained down to Barcelona and spent 8 days there, not much of interest happened there.

I am currently in Stockholm now. We rented a house in the outskirts (country) for two weeks to chill out a bit. It’s only 20 min by train to Gamla stan. As always, I am constantly in catch-up mode. Either w/ trading or my business.

Next on the list is Gdansk, Poland and we’ll probably drive down towards Arona, Italy. I am going to play in the Barcelona pokerstars championship event end of Aug and that will conclude my European trip this year!

Preparing for the summer road trip…

Starting to do some small time planning of our yearly European road trip. We depart May 28th and will return late Aug to our hopefully completed new house. We will start the trip from Portugal which is exciting since we’ve never been to mainland portugal, just the island, Madiera. We’ll probably spend 2 weeks total there and make our way into Bilbao, Spain. Either by Train or rental car. We’ve got two kids, a new born and an Au-Pair so it’ll be a bit of a caravan 🙂 We always make it work and we always make it fun. Spain and Portugal will probably take up 3-4 weeks of the trip. The rest will be spent in Poland, Germany and Italy. I was thinking of checking out Estonia for a week too which would at least add a country to my list.

In Portugal, we’ll stay in Lisbon, Porto and maybe see Faro? If anyone has any suggestions, they’d be awesomely appreciated.

After Bilbao, Spain, we’ll probably do Wroclaw, Poland and some more Southern Germany and of course our constant staple–> our fav B&B in Arona, Italy. (Cascina Incocco)

My favourite country is Germany but I’ve literally seen every city in that country and it’s hard to justify spending too much more time there but perhaps we may add Constance to the list this trip on top of Munich. I might go solo in Germany around Aug 10 until my poker tournament in Barcelona on the 20th.

I am digging the new trades for this trip. I can plan and initiate instead of stress and react 🙂 Looking forward to that. Though, I find I need big screen real estate these days for analyzing things. I will only have a laptop :<

Stop #2 – Krakow, Poland

We flew into Vienna, spent 7 days and rented a car and made our way to Krakow, Poland. The rental car place told us we couldn’t go through Czech and possibly Poland (but they had to confirm). I told them don’t worry about it, we weren’t going there anyways lol. We did. Those types of small things give me pleasure.

The drive took I think about 4-5 hours. Krakow was one of my favourite stops this trip. Not what I expected. Everything was super cheap, people were friendly and it felt less touristy then other stops. I’ll be going back. We checked out the salt mines but not Auschwitz (next time). The vodka was like $1euro a shot for premium stuff. Delicious. of course we got Perogies several times. I am half Polish so on Christmas Eve, we eat Perogies and Cabbage rolls as a tradition.

The Salt Mines

Enjoying a big beer on a patio. Good times

The kids hanging out next to some sites

Kingstons face as I tell him about Ron Bertino’s Space Trip Trade

Looking Cool as Fuck