Red Lion

Ended up getting short put BX options assigned over the weekend at $85.

I started a new position in ARES right before the close at $62.47. I ended up deploying a lot of capital today at least for the size of my portfolio.

Big add to BAM, first add in a couple years on this position, but ended up increasing my total position size by ~30%. I ended up buying at $40.84. Also added APO call options at $42 expiring Jan 23. This pretty much doubles my notional exposure including some $47.50 call options I already have, depending on how the stock does over the next few months I may try to sell my APO shares for a short term loss but still be able to exercise the options at $42 before they expire and keep roughly the same exposure. Obviously I'm opening myself to losing even more money if the stock keeps going down hard with the market in the short term, so maybe this was a stupid idea, but I have a lot of short term gains from hedging, and I want to harvest some of these APO short term losses, but still remain bullish.

I added to BX at below $85. Been planning to hold off until the BAM spinoff to add to the asset manager, but thinking about adding a big slug near $40. Right now all the alts are looking good, even the ones that are usually too expensive to look at (e.g. BX, ARES, OWL)

Sold $95 strike GOOGL puts expiring next Friday for $0.97.

Sold an $85 BX put expiring next Friday for 0.85.

Approximately doubled my position in BX at 89.94.

Put on short term QQQ debit put spreads. I've been doing this with SPY to hedge, but QQQ might be more appropriate.

Is there a way to sell the treasuries that you buy at treasury direct without transferring them to a brokerage account? Liquidity would be my main reason to do this in a brokerage account, but I do have a treasury direct account and did buy some $100 increments of TIPS just to see that it could be done. For me this is a cash/money market substitute that I want to be readily liquid, so I really like being able to sell them right away commission free through Schwab.

With Schwab it lets you look at market depth, sometimes if you try to execute at the best price (by fractions of a penny) you will only get stacked up against a 100k bid size, but I've had no problem buying individual bonds in the $1,000 par range on Schwab. If you're on Schwab click on trade bonds, then click on cd and treasury ladder builder, then click one tab to the left Find Bonds and Fixed income, I select bond type "treasuries", maturity date through 2030, include only TIPS, min YTM 1%. This pops up a bunch of cusips, on the far right of any cusp that you want to look at you can click view market depth. Then a whole stack of bid and asks pop up usually with minimums transactions down to 1 ($1,000). So then for example I can buy TIPS that are maturing in 2025 with a 1.45% real yield, commission free, and then unload those at any time if I need liquidity. My corporation has a large cash position, and I've been thinking about splitting the money between short term T-bills in the 4% YTM range and short term TIPS like described above.

I like the ability to control duration and yield and prefer to buy the bonds individually. But I also don't like the 20 basis fee. Free trading and infinite liquidity make this pretty easy to manage.

I just search by Schwab for tips with a ytm > 1 % and focus on the shorter duration bonds. However there are some almost juicy yields around 1.5% on the longer term bonds. I’m tempted to get some of those too. Schwab does free trades for treasuries.

It also seems like there's an argument to be made right now for TIPS over the iBond. There are real yields of over 1-1.5% over the full set of durations. If you planned to hold until maturity, I think you would do better with the tips, and if you want to use the money short term, you can focus on shorter durations with no early redemption penalty, and most importantly, no $10,000 limit.

Added to my new GOOGL position.

You can find them on a few websites including redweek.com but I actually talked to a real estate agent in Kauai who had access to a lot more listings. I recommend the Cliffs or Bali Hai in princeville. The cliffs is the one I just got. Send me a direct message and I’ll give you the phone number.

We just got back from a 15 day trip to Hawaii and Kauai, and had a great time. Like some previous posters had mentioned, it's getting a LOT more expensive than it was before. There are a lot of travel hack opportunities to Hawaii which I think are becoming more important than ever as the prices are going up. Examples are to: 1) get a condo with a kitchen and full size refrigerator 2) travel with other people 3) shop at Costco and cook at home except for nice meals out 4) use airline mileage points 5) Use timeshare presentations for discounted stays, or buy a resale timeshare Big huge pains in the ass: 1) rental cars, expect to wait in line 2-4 hours, not have enough cars available. I have booked on Turo in the past. This time I booked on Turo 4 months in advance, and then the Turo host cancelled this 3 weeks before the trip leaving me back in line at the rental car agency. My takeaway, if you have to do this, consider spending longer stays on one individual island. Between airport/rental cars, an inter island travel day kills the whole day, whereas pre-covid this was a really nice way to see multiple different islands for a relatively low cost. 2) Getting gouged on everything, almost everything has gone WAY up. This makes it even more important than before to shop at Costco/Walmart and prepare more meals at home. Timeshares I did the timeshare presentation again which was part of the deal to get a discounted 5 nights on Kauai. I declined the timeshare. Said I was interested though, and might get one in the future. And then booked a followup trip at a discounted price where we do the same thing again in the next 1-2 years. Then I put an offer on a resale timeshare unit at a property we have stayed at other times that was accepted right after I got back. I'm paying about $3,800 after closing costs to get 1 week per year in a 2/2 condo in Kauai with annual maintenance fees of $1,450. This is actually one of our favorite properties, and if you rent a second hand timeshare week they go for around $400 a night. Everyone talks shit about timeshares, but the RESALE timeshares can be a really good deal especially if you like to go to the same location every year or every other year. I've always wanted to buy a vacation condo in Hawaii and vacation rent it out and then use it about a month a year for myself. This same condo would be $1.2 million with $1,000 a month HOA fees, and STR property managers/the condo vacation pool is going to take 25-35%. Alternatively, if I could just accumulate 4 resale timeshare units for about $15k purchase price with annual maintenance fee of about $6,000, and if condo prices tank maybe I'll buy one of those, and if they stay crazy then I'll just enjoy my 4 weeks a year at a huge discount to the market.

Yes for the last few years. Was in Sacramento before that.

We must be neighbors. I live an hour north off 99.

I've been selling some profitable hedge positions on the SPY. Sold several puts at several strike prices and also exited a 420/410 debit spread on the SPY that was quite profitable. I'm rolling some of those proceeds into lower strike price debit spreads spaced through late September into mid October with strike prices starting at $390 and short puts down to $365. Overall I reduced my options exposure by greater than 50%, but if the market drops another 5-10% over the next month to month and a half this should generate as much or more profit than the long ITM puts I just exited.

Added a SPY put debit spread expiring September 14 for 375/370 at a cost of $0.75. Just closed out my $420/$410 debit spread for $9.95 which I put on for $1.80.

Most of these points do NOT apply to higher income two income families. For example there’s a significant marriage penalty for us federal income taxes when combined AGI is above $250k. There is also a huge penalty for the 3.9% investment tax. The only subsidies I’m aware of like earned income credit, child tax credit, etc. are phased out at such a low level that they certainly don’t help anyone in a HCOLA other than deadbeats. In my case our combined taxes would be at least $10-15k a year higher if we actually got married since we are both business owners.

Sold short a small position in QQQ at 417.67. This is mainly to test out my new IB account, but it also adds just a little bit of a portfolio hedge. This position is equal to about 150 basis points of my invested equity capital and a much smaller % of my overall since I'm heavy in cash right at the moment.

APO: Rolled the $ 59 APO put expiring today down to a $57 strike expiring September 9 for a $0.17 net credit. Net realized gain so far ($85.25) Unrealized gain $66.90 So far this position was in the black until today. I think it's going to take a couple months until we can really tell if this strategy is working as I collect more time decay on the short term options sales. SPY: rolled my expiring SPY $429 call down to $423 expiring on 8/22 for a $1.65 net credit Net realized gain (29.25) Net unrealized (120.8) So both sitting on losses at this point, I do think that most likely these should dissipate over time as I collect more premiums on the short weekly options. But we will see.

I'm no economist, but I think a significant market crash would clear the way for healthy productive growth going forward. We have Zombie corporations all over the world that will never be able to pay off their debt. We also have companies that are only viable because their cost of capital is incredibly low due to low to zero interest rates all over the world. Many millions of employees are stuck in dead end jobs around the world working for businesses that are surviving solely due to central bank market manipulation of interest rates. I think a major worldwide crash without manipulated interest rates would put most of those businesses into bankruptcy/receivership. Their best assets/employees will end up with stronger businesses. Lots of layoffs and a reset would probably ensue, but this would hopefully sow the seeds of new business startups, consolidation among more efficient businesses which produce higher ROIC, and bring down asset prices. All of these factors would likely set the stage for higher forward returns. These would all be positive things for productive young workers around the developed world, and probably negative for retired people, the developing world, and the less productive members of the workforce. I think central banks will be back to nominal 0 interest rates long before we have a complete reset, so all of this seems fairly unlikely.

Bought some September 2 $420 SPY PUTS and sold September 2 $410 SPY PUTS. If the SPY drops by about 5% by the end of the month this should go 7X, and obviously it's likely to end worthless. I don't know where the market is going, but I do feel like with Jackson Hole coming up, Powell is probably going to try to scare the markets.