Special circumstance investing – august update

As mentioned here I need to deleverage. So option writing is out for the time being. The put option on ADM at strike 40 USD expired out of the money so that is some leverage gone.

What did  I do

Since I still want to be finished with the renovation as soon as possible and options were out of the question I doubled down on day trading. Total day trading income for August was 800 USD. The highest since I am back at work! I’ll be on holiday for part of September and October so I do not expect to repeat this any time soon.

For the remaining puts I have: AB Inbev is doing fine but Ahold Delhaize will need to be rolled to a further date. The market decided to behave like an idiot and send the stock a lot lower because Amazon completed the takeover of  Whole Foods and reduced some prices (actually brought them in line with the competition as Whole foods had the reputation of being expensive). This will work itself out over the next couple of months and I expect Ahold Delhaize to regain most of this drop. It is one of the reasons I chose companies with predictable cash flows to write puts on. Even if the market is stupid, a few quarters of the same predictable cash flow gushing in usually fixes that ..

The only reason why it annoys me is because I now want to get rid of all options and even build up my cash further. The reason for this is UVXY but since I did the trade in the girlfriends portfolio I’ll explain it there. It’s going to be a long read so let’s put on some tunes shall we?

The girlfriends portfolio

So, I had mentioned I would probably move to the girlfriends portfolio to play with puts on UVXY. True to my word on 9 August I bought 3 puts on UVXY at strike 20 USD and paid 10,25 USD for it.

I wanted to do the same trade in my portfolio but I didn’t get assigned on the 9th. After that the price of UVXY started going up. Logic would dictate the price of the put to go down. But it didn’t. It actually went up! The reason for this is that UVXY is a play on volatility and most people use the puts to do short term gambles on sharp rise (or drops) in volatility. So a lot of people flooded into this product. Which drove up the price of the puts even if they should have dropped! We had an interesting ‘talk’ about it in the comment section of this and this post.

I do recognize stupidity when I see it. I also like to profit from said stupidity so I myself did not buy any puts. I did sell the girlfriends puts on 15 august at 11,30 USD maxing almost 10% profit (300 USD) in less than a week.

Bottom line for UVXY is that it is an absolutely crap product, designed with short term gamblers in mind (read that explication people, so cool!). It is constructed in such a way that over time the house always wins (it will lose value over time, so Proshares who created it wins). The thing is, there is one way you can make a consistent profit on it it! And Velociraptor discovered that way. By buying long term puts (as I have done now two times) you put yourself more or less in the same position as the house. And over time you should profit of it. It can take several months, in rare cases even more than a year. Or it can take less than a week. But I am now convinced that a 10% annual profit, at the least, should be possible with this puts on this product.

Liquidity remains an issue since to play it correctly you buy the puts when the gambling masses are not interested in the product. But Velociraptor is able to put more than 20.000 USD in it. So I am now freeing up as much cash as I can and see if I can do this too!

Finally a good reason to talk to the parents and transfer some of their non working cash parked on savings accounts to their Lynx account!

Made it all the way to the end? Great! If it all seems a bit much

just remember, that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.