Jan 2 2021 Trade Portfolio Updates

Didn’t get as much as I wanted done because …Holidays and distractions… enough said 🙂 Despite that, I’ve hit the ground running and I am working on creating some meta portfolio management which I mentioned in my last post. The idea is to really take advantage of diversification across strategies that aren’t correlated to create a combined time series that provides increased geometric returns by way of lower drawdowns and better compounding. What Mark Spitznagel coined as a volatility tax. We reduce that and pay less “tax”. If you have a lower return each month but you have less draw down, you compound it better than a higher more volatile strategy and so on. To me, it’s all you can do, diversify (smartly) and not just for the sake of diversification but true meaningful diversification. I wouldn’t ever just put all my eggs in one single strategy in one single week with a planned capital the size of my portfolio. There’s just too much reliance on how those specific strikes and BSH will react. Plus, it’s sorta fun having previous entries mature and act as mid bear hedges, harvesting and knowing that a single entry with bad timing is only 1/10th (well really 1/30th) the portfolio is a nice thing. It takes time to build up sure but it’s like 2.5 months. Who cares.

There’s a series of OTM (out of the money) type strategies (3 of them that I use) combined with a bearish toned ATM (at the money) trade to pick up the middle bear (non crashy moves ie Aug 2019, Oct 2018, Dec 2018, Jan 2016). Each of the OTM income portion is diversified in mostly its strikes but also the type of BSH it uses to pick up during a crash. A 488 will react differently then a 484+BSH then a HS3EZ (not saying I use those well, maybe idiosyncratic versions of one or more of those) both in it’s income production and income engine as well as its black swan hedge that it utilises. There’s some diversification, it’s not perfect but we work to reduce that imperfection by time diversification across 10 week campaigns (1/10th at a time) along with 3 additional BSH/Vol hedge type campaigns. The 3 BSH vol hedge type campaigns are factory based (ie they build up over time) and they are meant as a triple redundancy insurance towards the 4 other income strategies. But in reality, they should produce lotto like returns in a crash. One of the BSH/Vol type hedges actually generates income and helps compensate the costs of the other two. We then have as much redundancy as we possibly can both in the income strategies by way of time, strike/skew diversification, and BSH diversification built within the income strategy plus we have 3 additional BSH like stand-alone factory type strategies that should provide full assurance during a a crash and most likely a lotto return. Not sure you can do much more than that.

It’s systematic and the fact that you’ve got 10 different things to manage reduce human factors at a cost of management complexity which is my job anyways.

Speaking of which, I feel lucky to have found something that I wake up looking forward to and what will likely occupy the rest of my working life. I doubt in my life that I’ll ever pursue entrepreneurial projects again. I went through my 20s and 30s setting up some successful businesses w/ my wife and two other partners that I still manage (mostly as a board member). I give over-arching direction and make sure things are running in line with the plans set forth but there’s no day-to-day which set me free. We started the business in 2004 and I finally got out of the day-to-day around 2017. I just never liked dealing with humans and human issues in the workplace. It gets complex quickly and is often irrational and I feel just out of control when dealing with human resources. I know that’s super odd to say but maybe I can expand on it. I started a software company and I am not a software developer. Maybe that helps 🙂 I have to rely on my team to correctly advise me while making business decisions and dealing with customers demands while having an expertise that was relevant but outside the central operation of the business. Make decisions, go back to team, they tell you impossible, you know it is possible but can’t be quite sure because your experts are advising you and you fight and they end up getting it done /// rinse repeat. I always wanted my “money making” life to be me and a screen and that’s it. Very few outside “human” variables, very little reliance on anything but myself, my decision and the game environment we call the market. When something went wrong, it was something that was on me. Something that I could perhaps think my way out of. Not something where I had to rely on someone else. That was my goal and though it took like 5 years to really work that out (trading is hard…mostly because you have to meet parts of yourself that you might be unfamiliar with…and protecting yourself from yourself takes practice and time..and really just a system and recognition).

In my opinion, the attributes (besides the obvious skills) necessary for successfully trading is self reflection/humility, ability to take risks and tenacity. If you lack one of those, it ain’t going to happen. The risk taking portion has to be smart, unemotional and well thought out..with outs and with a system. One thing I’ve learned in life and I’ve seen it time and time again is that you can’t talk many people out of taking risks when they’ve become emotional about it. I can list like 10 situations which made me cringe and are very poignant lessons, some are horrible. It’s a specific type of person too. If someone decides that they are going to gamble, take a business risk, buy a stock, or whatever it is that has a possibility of changing their life trajectory, I found that it’s often very hard to talk someone out of that risk even if you give them good reasons. .Once they make an emotional decision, that’s it. But, if someone is humble and self reflective you can often advise them against and they back off and reflect. If you do take that risk, you need outs and you need to become tenacious (that’s where tenacity comes in). I took loads of risks in my 20s that I should never have, and now I have a process that protects me from making emotional decisions…I did have that tenacity though and the risks weren’t emotional though they were probably way to high a risk of ruin. Unfortunately, for success, you often really need the ability to take risk, you just can’t do it with emotional baggage. When I took those risks, I’d be like fuck ok…I’m in it now, then I’d create outs and I would literally not stop (sacrifice sleep (80 hr weeks) to make these risks work out. Stupid but tenacity got me out of jams and I learned that we often take risks for excitement, for that dopamine rush and to be very mindful of that. This is why you often can’t talk someone out of an emotional risk, they have already decided they need this rush this thing that can change their life (or destroy it) because they need to feel. When you do take a big risk, make sure you have control, several “outs” and be ready to commit your entire being to making sure you don’t fail. Tenacity, Risk-taking and Humility are the key ingredients. Look at the logo on my plane tail. Badger (Tenacious little fucks).

On to personal stuff, I got up in the air twice so far since being back (quarantine affected that). What a wild experience though, we flew to Muskoka (took 24 min from Brampton), then over to Toronto to do a fly over of the city. We asked the tower to do a direct fly over of YYZ (the busiest airspace in Canada) and was approved. This is a once in a lifetime thing to do…it was EERIE cool. Not a single flight (landing or take-off) and completely empty. Here’s some pics. I’d write a whole lot more on the blog re what it’s like to do a PPL in a Cirrus SR22 if anyone had interest. I just don’t want to bore.

Back in the plane. No better place!

Downtown core (CN Tower and Sky Dome) Direct fly over

YYZ EMPTY! Busiest airspace in Canada. Pandemic effects..

My Baby. 3-4-5 Papa Kilo.

Update – Nov 25 2020

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.

Jul 30 2020 BWB+Fly Aug Trade Update

A nice pop in the p/l given the US is contemplating giving up on those pesky elections. Who needs them 🙂 Delta sitting comfortably at -800 and given the DTE, any moves towards -200 delta and I’ll just start peeling off the trade piece by piece removing risk as I go.

Sep BWBs are currently going for about 95c credit and Oct BWBs are going for about 2.25c. I’ve got loads of flies up in Sep so I can purchase BWBs against those but I didn’t get any in Oct yet so I’d have some exposure to downside if I get some of the Octs on. Not terrible given the deltas I’ve got built up in Sep so I’ll probably put some on today. Usually I like to start with the flies. It’s no different than just entering a rhino/bwb though which loads of people do without the fly hedge/combo.

It’d be a huge milestone to close the Aug at 500k P/L. It’ll call for some real nice champagne. But I won’t fixate on it, I’ll just manage that risk. Huge month so far and I think July is sitting at just over 7% P/L and Aug will likely be similar. Cannot complain and thankful the market keeps on giving.

Had a 30% year last year and I gather I’ll get towards 50-60% this year solely from the opportunities. The last few months, I’ve just been concentrating solely on building that long vol BSH up and trading these Rhino/BWB combos but it rarely takes much more than 30min a day, things are boring when they are producing. Many traders say you’ve made it and are barking up the right tree when you’re trading a system thus eliminating human factors and bias and subsequently the actual act of trading becomes boring. The latter part is true right now, the former isn’t based on a system per say but it will be once this environment ends.

Jul 27, 2020 – August BWB/FLY Trade Update

We ended Friday at a delta of -900 after adjustments and now sit around -1700. That shows you just how quickly negative delta you get with time even just the weekend. The position is hovering around 285k P/L so it’s seen an increase of 35k over the weekend. I’ll have to adjust the upside today and by Thursday this will be done with removals from the structure rather than additions to it. There is 25 days to expiration and I’ll aim to remove risks as we go from here until it’s a benign structure that can be expired.

Jul 24 2020 – The Big ATM trade update

Here’s an update on my big August trade that has about two weeks left in it. It’s starting to actually look like an old school ATM trade given the reduction in VIX and the lack of credits in 30 DTE or earlier trades. From March till June, credits were huge and upside risk NIL. Now as opposed to then, I actually have to use some upside adjustments aggressively.

I started adjusting for upside exposure during this little fall towards 3200. My overall deltas are sitting at -900 and I’ll close out the day at that.

Delta: -939

Theta: 21,956

Vega: -10,567

The position represents 5MM in planned capital and is sitting at 251k profit. I’ll dance this thing into Aug 7/8th and continuously remove risk and adjust. There’s a small chance for an extremely large payoff (the biggest I’ve ever seen) @ 1MM in 1 month. Reminds me of that show 2months 2million. Ridiculous but it is the environment and the opportunities. These types of trades won’t last. For now, I’ll happily let it beef up the account. I’ve got BS protection in case we have some sort of massive gap down.

Here’s the trade looking forward 7 days

Here it is where I expect to close it. It won’t look like this later as I’ll be constantly adjusting back and forth between now and then and the negative deltas will continue to build up as time passes

For a bit there, the VIX hit around 24 and it looked like the ebb and flow trade was about to get a lot harder but today we can now get a Sep BWB for $1.00 credit. So we’re still going for now 🙂 I got some on to offset the Sep position which I started with symmetric flies back at 3260-3270. I’ll be very happy if we can keep getting these conditions for the next 6 months.

In a large fall, and if we approach -400 delta, I’ll start to adjust for the downside and I’ll offset with some way OTM calendars in case of a bounce. I have two trading weeks left for Aug position which will get more and more negative delta and have more and more protection to the downside. If I am forced to adjust for downside next week, it means we went through 3150 area and to offset the nuance of continuously increasing negative deltas, I’ll use some way OTM calendars for upside protection while adjusting for the asymmetric risks on the downside.

I gotta say, I feel kinda lucky that I was also able to start the September position, I wasn’t sure I’d be getting the same opportunities with BWB pricing. Perhaps this continues on for the rest of the year re elections in Nov. Eventually I will move on to a 488 campaign, BSH factory, TAA and ATM at lower PC.

Jul 15 – Update

Given the events of February/March 2020, I had to re-evaluate risk and its presentation in each of the components of my portfolio. Though it was beneficial to add what I consider a god level data point for backtesting purposes, it was not fun to go through. It was the fastest decline and recovery in history. There is no tougher environment to trade through with complex non-directional options strategies. I ended up positive through the event despite the fact that things were broken in the market structure. Things happened that should not have happened. I saw things that I am sure I’ll never see again. This allows me to reconsider risk through what was one of the most market destabilizing events in history. This breaking of various markets and market components has given me a peek into what was naked when the tide left and allowed me to dig deep into my compositions and fine tune with risk management as the main motive. It motivated me to create a systematic approach to my base trades for entries, exits and adjustments. It took 4 months of hard work, but I’ve designed a system that accomplishes all of the risk management goals while maintaining returns that will compound better than before due to the reduced drawdowns. The key to this is maintaining global convexity despite being locally concave in risk profile. This means that risk where it is defined and quantifiable (local risk) while maintaining/financing the ownership of global convex risk on the tails. Short locally and long globally.

The more variant a portfolio is the more it impacts your geometric return. I have an edge, but if I am in extended drawdown, there’s less capital exposed to that edge. The less you draw down the higher your geometric return. It’s the power of compounding and is what Mark Spitznagel calls the volatility tax.  The big losses are all that matters to your rate of compounding. Makes sense right? Manage your risks, maintain an edge and let compounding do its magic.

My primary interest lies in the long volatility tail space and coupling that with localized complex option income production. Globally convex locally concave. The long volatility tail portion of the my portfolio closely corresponds to what Universa, Nasim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel research, it’s a convex payout on extreme market events. When you tie in global convexity (extreme payoffs in extreme events) think of the convex shape (shown below) with local concavity (necessary for regular income production), you end up with the best of both worlds. Absolute protection and income production on the tails (which are rare) coupled with regular income production locally.

The composition of both elements in the options space has benefits that are astounding as it not only gives you capital during turmoil but it protects both a traditional portfolio as well as one composed of options. You prevent event draw downs and have made significant returns that can be actioned at market bottoms. That effect is exceptional. The combination of long vol with a traditional income strategy is what allows for the highest geometric return profiles.

Coupled with the long vol tail hedge, I’ve worked on systematizing the income strategies that are completely mechanical in nature. There is no room for human bias. I worked out a mechanical system that has no decision bias in both the long vol component as well as the income production component.  It prevents the human factors issues that can cause mistakes and under performance. 

We’ve got so many great data sets now, we’ve got the vol events of Aug 2019, the bear shocks of Oct and Dec 2018, the volmageddon of 2018, the time skew issues of Aug 2017, Aug 2015, Jan 2016 and so on. We’ve got a plethora of data. The period from February to June of 2020 used this data to do a deep dive into restructuring the portfolio and analyzing its risk factors. It was long, arduous and sometimes frustrating when you realize that everything has risk and the only true way to eliminate or minimize is by true diversification. 

The lock down forced me to work long hours daily to re-evaluate my systems and to fine tune a new system setup. This was a period of heavy backtesting, reading, daily hour long phone call discussions with a trade buddy, trials, and analytics.  I left no stone unturned even exploring things I would normally say was trade style heresy. The main discovery is the need for systematized approach in all base core strategies. The management is systematically rules based. My entire portfolio will follow this tenant. It’s a minimization of human factors. As Jerry Parker puts it :

“We are not really interested in people who are experts at the french stock market or german bond markets due to technical nature of trading…it does not take a huge monster infrastructure: neither Harvard MBAs nor people from Goldman Sachs…I would hate if it the success of Chesapeake was based on my being some great genius. It’s the system that wins., Fundamental economics are nice but useless in trading. True Fundamentals are always unknown. Our system allows for no intellectual capability.”  Jerry Parker

Related to the above statement, I’ve had a realization to systematically use quantitative analysis and trend indicators to manage trades with respect to risk, entries and exits. QA gives me a way to manage the trade risks systematically while keeping me on the right side of the market trend, it’s what the university endowments use and it’s what Jerry Parker helped systematize in the 80s and 90s. I am using it to err the trades in the direction where the sum of the quantitative analysis points us.  The delta adjustment range is -3 to +3 per unit. If it’s a bearish trend, we’ll keep it in the -3 range and if it’s a bullish trend we’ll keep it in the +3 range. Lastly, it lets us know when to exit trades. If we use Vix/Vix3M ratios, force index, OBV, ATR expansion etc we can avoid every major event in the last 10 years. I have now incorporated mandatory exit signals. If the signals do not show and we have a black swan, that is protected as well because of our long vol component.

It’s important to have a system that removes emotions and biased decisions. It removes human factors and that gives you something that’s concrete and sustainable. Decisions cause fatigue especially when tied to large money. Through the lock down, I tried investigating several things with an open mind, including taking advantage of zero day premium trades (PR hedgies)  and cycle indications trades. This led me to making polarized decisions on an hourly basis. That’s not sustainable, it’ll exhaust and it’ll burn out. It solidified my requirement for a systematic rules based core portfolio. You can adjust/fine tune the rules but you cannot disobey them once they are live.

Trade Update (STT+BSH+Bearish STT)

At the start of today, I was so close to forming the 30 BSH but I just missed my price and the VIX/Skew changed again and those way OTM puts rose in value and now I don’t wanna pay the extra 30c as I am fixed on the previous price because thats just how trading psychology works. Price fixation, it’s a weakness lol. I got some time though. That would have been cool, formed in 10 min market time 🙂

I didn’t trade the futures open and it just went where it went. I was tempted to use a breakout trading plan to further hedge but I just never ended up leaving it and I think I am pretty much as hedged as I can be. Today at market open (while I was flying from Milan to London–>I love internet on planes!) around 2855-2865 I ended up closing some of the ES shorts I had on, I have 7 left of 14. On the run up to 2875, I purchased more Bearish STT and I closed off 20 more STT. This adjustment puts me at exactly 0 delta. My UEL is now like -300k so I def will have to massage this as time goes by slowly converting the bearish STT into an STT. As time goes on, my deltas will get more and more negative as my tent builds up. This will be when I start converting on dips. If I don’t get the fear dips, then I’ll just let time play out and start converting and aim to get as much as I can out of the hodge podge structure.

Here’s my Dec structure (includes original STT and my entire bearish hedge structure)

Dec w/ the bearish STT portfolio adjustments

Here’s my Jan structure after adjustments today

Jan only (this position is down but was hedged by ES shorts not shown

Here’s my combined positions as ONE displays and with it set to Jan expiration line. It’s my loss on the structure but I had 14 or so ES shorts from 2915-2922 area that gained a lot of value and aren’t included in this. As well at the fear bottoms I sold puts in some equities that I follow (GooG) etc that are all up. Also doesn’t include the gains on the BS hedges and the shorts I sold on Friday. I was about +50k, now down -150k but the structure is good and my theta is 14k a day and my vega is -107k so time and vol relief are on my side. Combine this with my BSH positions and it’s pretty safe. I’d love to end September at ~250k (end of Sept risk profile at very end shows 300k). Sounds nuts but that would be pretty much the entire summer profits on a large portfolio. As quickly as I went from -8% to -4% then to +60k on Wednesday is as quick as I went from from +60k to -150k (vega mostly). It’s also how quickly (with reduction in vol or time passes) I will get back to profit..its a game of patience and risk management.

Current as is in ONE
Current – Showing Jan expiration Line
T+35

Here’s the entire structure in 14 days with a small decrease in volatility

I will wait for a spike in vix/fear and replace/roll the 30 STT I closed at a loss in the January expiration. I got the pricing during Friday and it was at about 2.50-2.95 credit and right now it’s at about 2.00 so I’ll put on an order at about 2.40 area. I’d be happy with that given I paid 2-3 dollars less to close off the STT today as opposed to Friday towards close.

My last 2 days of travel are in London and I’ll be heading back to Cayman Aug 29th (I’ll have internet the entire flight, so I’ll be active). Then I just keep massaging this structure as time goes and as we enter Sept. Towards end of Sept, it’d love to be in the 2650 area so that’s a lot more room to manoeuvre.

Current portfolio Risk Graph

This is my current positioning of my entire SPX STT options portfolio sans the BSH of course. This is Dec/Jan mixed together. It’s profitable now since inception and I’ll be working this trade through Sept and closing before my 40th birthday/20th Anniversary trip to Necker (ridiculous I know) but YOLO?

Will be managing it diligently and removing risk and locking in profit. When I get back it’ll just be opportunistic STTs from there on in.

Jun 6 Trade and Travels update

My account is at 24% as of yesterday. A big increase and I removed all of my August trades throughout this week. I have September expiration which I’ll remove next week grossly above profit target but neutralized. October is also just above profit target so I may have to remove that next week as well. Normally, they’d be removed right away but the downside room is incredible and it’s got a profit tent built and my theta ratio to margin is still good. I am going to remove soon but I’ll give it another 7 days. Not much exposure now and locked in loads of profit. I have significant ability to take advantage of more vol if it does happen. Else, things can slow down again like it did in April. Profit comes in bunches during higher vol times. The majority of my potential profit came in the last 4-7 days so I doubt I’ll have the same trajectory through the remainder of this month. I’ll be happy to end around 25-26% for H1 2019. We had some vol but it came out on this gigantic move up from 2725 and that is the majority of my P/L increase. That 25% is on actual capital I have in total in my account. That’s pretty damn good. The thing that I am noticing is that since I put on STTs in every expiration on higher vol days, is that I end up with 4-5 expirations that the older ones act as medium hedges to the newer ones. In all of the vol we’ve had in the last 6 weeks, I’ve just been going up and up and up in P/L. If we had significant moves, they’d be fine because of the BSHs. All in all, I am loving how multiple expiration and maturity of STTs interact with each other.

I’ve been in a whirlwind of traveling since May 29th. I started off in Montreal which got a bit messy. I had some friends visit me and we brought our nanny so for a few nights things got a bit out of control especially given the fact one of our favourite bands was in town 🙂 Suffice to say it was a bit indulgent. A few days after that, I got to play a few poker tournaments there which went well in terms of applying the recent coaching etc but just didn’t have the luck deeper in. Next up is WSOP Millionaire maker tomorrow.

After MTL, I headed to Ottawa to do a whole slew of meetings for my software licensing business. Those ran long but we hashed out our future pathways. It was very productive and everyone got on the same page after hours of board room meetings. I have the best partners you can ask for and given we’ve been in business since 2004, we’ve never in all that time not ended up on the same page after a face to face nor have we ever had emotional disputes. I guess we’re all lucky, as I have heard other companies can have nightmare situations. I am fortunate to have good partners.

I ended up quite tired after the week of partying and heavy meetings. We stayed at this awesome airbnb house on the Gatineau river where I tried to recoup for the next leg.

After Ottawa, we met with a private educator in Toronto to see if we get along. We’re using next year as a year to get our kids top notch and ready for the real world and ready to apply for competitive private schools. They’re currently in Montessori and its just not cutting it. My daughter doesn’t thrive in a Montessori environment. Long story short. Lemons making lemonade, use the year to travel w/ a private educator and use the year as an opportunity. Soon come, the kids will be older and it won’t be possible to travel.

Then my wife and I departed Toronto sans kids while the kids left w/ her sister to Cayman. We upgraded our flights and flew to Denver and spent two days there. Awesome town but def some sketchy areas. We had to call the police because a guy was dying in the middle of the road (this would be the second death we seen on this trip face to face……) Horrible to see. We had some pre-wedding parties to attend and ended up having a pretty good time. We rented a car and drove 5 hours to Moab for a glamping wedding. Was awesome but again my liver is suffering a bit. We ended up sky diving which was the highlight of the trip.

After that we drove to Las Vegas for a night and unfortunately saw ANOTHER dead person on the side of the road….we checked the news after and they’re still investigating it as a potential homicide. Horrible thing to see, still see it in my head. Was very close to where we were (right on side) saw it clear as day. Death is apparently following us….

We spent a night in LV and had an awesome dinner and got an epic suite. It took about 6 hours to get there from Moab. We left at 8 and arrived around 2pm. We were just stopping through on our way to LA for our final leg together (which ends today).

In LA, the first night we went to the Laugh Factory and were so luck to have stumbled upon one of those surprise unlisted guests (George Wallace) who free styled and actually crushed it. Was one of the best experiences I’ve had re comedy. Super lucky. We were right up front too. The following night we decided to go and spend time in the room where comedy goes to die (The Belly Room) and again had an awesome time. We’re staying near Santa Monica Blvd in the gay district and it’s coming up on the 50th anniversary parade so it’s high action. I get loads of compliments while walking with my wife. Love it lol. The wife leaves tomorrow early for Cayman and I stay for 4 days to play a few WSOP events (I’ll drive to Vegas from LA tomorrow). I miss the kids way to much though now as it’s been 7 days so I’ll be looking to book an earlier flight on any bust out. But I’ll be back with the family Jul 1 for the main event.

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.