Month: February 2018

It had been a full 14 months, give or take a few days, since I had published an article on Seeking Alpha.

Seeking Alpha was the vehicle that helped me get the old “Option to Profit” to go beyond just a handful of paying subscribers when it first got off the ground and I was looking for something to do with myself that wouldn’t result in the growth of hair on the palmar surface of my hands.

I had never really wanted to have a volume of subscribers, especially since I was sending real time text message and email alerts at the time and the model included lots of real time text message communication and hand holding with subscribers.

Pricing the service at $200/month was a good way to keep subscriber numbers down, as was the poor quality of the offering and amateurish website.

I don’t even recall who had told me about Seeking Alpha, as I never really prowled around looking to write anywhere other than on my own space and I certainly wasn’t interested in reading anything, especially if they were being written by “posers” like me. Continue reading “Welcomed Back”

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I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of “volatility.”

When I say “always,” I don’t really mean “always,” but for at least the past decade or maybe a bit more.

Volatility is one of these things that is really hard to comprehend, even though it really shouldn’t be, even as it is applied to stocks and stock markets.

Volatility is nothing more than what is defined by an equation.

Even if that equation may be a complicated one, there is something that should be comforting about the certainty of it and its calculation. There is no art to it.

It is all about science.

Subjectivity versus objectivity.

Emotion versus cold, hard facts.

Volatility is simply the result of an equation that measures “variance,” which as everyone who has taken an elementary course in statistics or bio-statistics knows as being itself related to the more commonly recognized expression: Standard Deviation.

Who am I kidding? No one recognizes that expression, or if they do, it’s been misinterpreted when I’ve used it sitting at an out of town bar, trying to strike up casual conversation with someone far younger and far more attractive than me.

Anyway, there is lots of confusion over what volatility represents and I’m confused by it, as well, even as I think that I understand it.

The confusion really enters once a marketplace for volatility had come into being.

The equation, which should be primary, is now more of a junior consultant.

Continue reading at Seeking Alpha

 

 

 

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Whew.

What a week.

There are lots of statistics and factoids being tossed around this week.

Every one of them is pretty fascinating and each one lasts in the apses of my mind for about a second.

None of them are very important and none of them are worth remembering, because there is very little in life that isn’t transient.

Just when you think yu’ve seen the depths comes something lower and just when you think you have found paradise, somes a realization that it can then never get better.

But it does,

So the very old phrase “This too, shall pass,” has lots of meaning. Continue reading “A New Someday Began Today”

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Perspective means so much.

On days like today things could have been much worse.

For me, as an option seller, it is always a case of balancing the fear of missing out (“FOMO”) with the need to have protection.

Sort of like balancing out missing the joys of fatherhood with fatherhood.

As long as we’re talking about me, my decisions are usually predicated on what I perceive as a simple mathematical truism.

I’d rather miss out on a 10% gain than have to gain 11% to make up for a 10% loss.

That may not really answer the question, but in the longer term, even as my perspective on what constitutes “long term” changes, I would rather miss out on some gains than have a deeper hole than a care to dig out from.

But also knowing that in the longer term the market goes higher, it typically is a question of just keeping your capital and your wits. Continue reading “It Could Have Been Worse”

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