July 18th
Today provided interesting action. Half of my grain spreads won, half lost. I made a ton of money from the options on the grains that I sold last week. I lost money in the gold market, made money in oil, and on the S&P. I lost money scalping GOOG, finally capitulating after six losses in a row. Although I haven’t added up my P&L as of yet, I estimate that I made about $600 today, which, as far as I’m concerned is flat. At least there is no red ink.
Tonight is going to be spent riding a few waves, which mysteriously decided to pop up late this afternoon from nowhere. The waves aren’t big, about thigh high, but should be good for a longboard.
Jeff
Your P&L sounds like one of those days when a market whips all over the place before settling near where it settled the day before. We used to refer to that as “sharply unchanged.”
We Are...Penn State email list
July 19, 2008 at 2:26 am
Sharply unchanged? I like it. Violently flat might work too.
Hi Jeff, it’s good to see you’re bouncing back and in your trading groove despite your difficult “life drawdown”. I can imagine Denise smiling down on you approvingly.
Too bad about the forgery. I suppose smashing it to pieces felt gratifying, but I must say I have a certain (artistic, not ethical) respect for forgers. You have to be REALLY good to so accurately reproduce a masterpiece that it gets through verification screens. I probably would have mounted it anyway separately with a caption something like. “OK, you got me.”, or “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
It’s not quite the same thing, but it makes me think of the cameraman who goes along to scale a mountain or have an in-your-face experience with a killer shark. He does what the hero does, PLUS has to carry a crap-load of camera equipment to boot, getting none of the glory.
I did a piece over at DS about the systematic methodology the Wright brothers used to get to powered flight, which Victor or Laurel posted as a main article. When I listened to the talk yesterday on how they did it all, I could relate a little in that THEIR insight was that if birds can fly, the underlying principles are extensible to us; I believe mine to be that asset allocation is much more effective at the individual securities level than at the aggregate asset-class level. They/I created a theoretical model, and then tested/validated with real data. I know its a big stretch to compare myself with the genius Wright’s, but it felt a little gratifying nonetheless to know that our approaches were actually quite similar. They took on pitch, rool, yaw, and lift. I took on rate of return, risk, money management, operational/cost efficiency, scalability (to large commercial portfolios), and taxes. And like them, built my own tools.
I have to cut my vacation a few days short because I have two contracts to deal with back home, so I’m flying from DC back to Ottawa tonight. It’s been a great week in the Outer Banks.
Cheers,
George
allocator
July 19, 2008 at 1:34 pm
George, that was an awesome piece over at DS. One of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. Who knows, maybe you’ll be a regular contributor over there…..the world would be a better place if you were.
Pen State: Those sharply unchanged days sometimes get under my skin, especially when I made so many stupid mistakes. Oh well, there’s always another day.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 19, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Thanks Jeff,
Say, this night surfing thing – don’t you worry about sharks, or injuries from things you might not see? e.g. rocks, coral, jellyfish etc …
Cheers,
George
allocator
July 20, 2008 at 9:45 pm
George,
I would worry about surfing at night at a break away from home, but I have our break wired. I am intimately familiar with every nuance of our jetty, and know every rock on the bottom, having hit my head on every rock at one time or another. I don’t worry about sharks, and jellyfish stings are a part of the cost of doing business. You’re most likely to get bitten by a shark at dusk or dawn….so they say. My son used to wish that I would get bitten by a shark, so he could bask in the fame. To my knowledge, nobody has been bitten at our break in about 30 years. However, I see a lot of pretty big sharks.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 22, 2008 at 12:23 am
Jeff- I agree with the comments on board sports & music. I know it is great while snowboarding too (I live in Michigan). My favorite is evening wakeboarding in the summer. I still want to go try kiteboarding. I have been lazy about signing up for lessons as its been a busy summer and I have heard its very difficult to learn, even though I have snowboarded & wakeboarded for a while now. There is a company run by a couple of hippie guys in Traverse City, MI that is supposed to be really good for kiteboarding so that seems like a good starting point. I have a feeling that a weekend trip up there with some time spent kiteboarding & wine tasting is just the thing to get away from the marekets for a few days.
Regards,
Eric
Eric Detterman
July 22, 2008 at 3:12 am
Eric,
I tried kiteboarding and wasn’t really impressed. It was more like water skiiing on steroids.
You ought to try surfing Lake Michigan. When I lived in Chicago, I used to regularly surf Lake Michigan….usually during winter. My surfing the lake usually brought on a large crowd of onlookers. Lake Michigan gets good waves.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 24, 2008 at 1:38 am