Inner Eye

Note: A few weeks after my brain handed me this notion I heard about a presentation at a conference of some Android contact lenses. Funny how things work. Of course, it still took me a few more weeks to put any of this into draft (and then a few more weeks to decide 'fuck it' and hit publish in its present form rather than obsessively cleaning and polishing it...). It's also important to note that this is inspired directly from The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clark and Stephen Baxter which uses a more existing science to build the fiction on.
I'm just splashing stuff out here. This is rough first draft and doesn't really amount to much of a story. It's just prose containing some mashed up ideas and some consequences of those ideas.


I woke to the sound of another's breathing. Opening my eyes I did not see my wife, as I expected to, but instead I saw my self. My brain struggled to make understanding out of my senses for a few vertiginous minutes before the faction of rationality finally quashed the faction of 'OMG out of body experience, squee!' and I noticed that my irises were glowing faintly.




The bits behind the 4th wall...
bluetooth cameras at eye corners, auto paired in sleep
sleepers lenses project soothing light onto retina
possible further plot device: cameras detect motion without corresponding signals in sleepers brain, trigger wakefulness

You can't regret what you don't decide - Sick Puppies, "There's No Going Back"
Can't regret my past life because in large part I made no decisions. By my own doing I did not have an active role in where my life went and so I cannot regret where I have arrived at. I can regret being numb and largely sleeping or reacting my way through life but what occurred and where it placed me is simply what it is.

Brokerage swap

I don't like how I had to do it but I've finally gotten off that old school, outdated brokerage. I've lost a month or so. Two or three weeks because I stopped adding on due to a very exciting job opportunity. Sadly that fell through but it's a mixed sadness since it would have put a major damper on my trading. Lost a week trying to get permissions on the broker I wanted... damn it. It made sense to go ahead with the move since I had nothing open in ETrade due to the aforementioned and it made so much sense (and I hate ETrade so much) that I finally 'forced' the issue (sort of >.> ). Then I lost another week to get the money transferred ffs. Damn slow ACH. IT CAN BE DONE FASTER YOU LITTLE SHITS, ASK THE EUROPEANS.

So I've lost a month or so. But now I'm where I feel I need to be and it's time to start laying on the trades again. Huzzah!


In the interest of complete reporting at the end of Feb I was down about $750. Which is bad, but it can be traced back to 2-3 serious losers where I had more risk on than I should have had in any one trade. If I eliminate those outliers then I'd be net positive. And those are clear outliers losing me $300-$550 each when my other losers (and I had several more besides the outliers) all lost me <$100.

One one of my outliers... oh hell, just call them what they are. One of my mistakes was to put on 3 lots of a $100 spread. I had to put on 3 lots to make profits outweigh my commissions, but unfortunately the position was a loser. So a loser with, obviously, marginal premium taken in on $300 risk was a serious mistake in an account my size. Doh. Another was a $500 spread. What was I thinking? Clearly whatever was in my head it wasn't sufficiently focused on the level of risked capital. The other major loser is similar, just too wide a spread.

But I topped up the account and I've moved to it TDA, where I can operate with a lot less friction, and now I'm in the game again. Let the fun begin.

Today I've put on a 7->15 calendar (that's 7 DTE by 15 DTE, very short term calendat) in GLD, and two 7 day iron condors one in PCLN and one in SPX. Waiting for the morrow.

Trading liquidation

So the first round I fired at the market has been largely a dud. Several wins with unacceptable losses.

The remaining positions will all finalize over Fri/Sat and I don't expect to have enough left in the account to maintain margin capability after that. So it looks like it's back to saving up my pennies. I call it educational expenses.

Note from Flight# WN5627 from AUS -> ATL (2 hours and 15 mins.) Layover of 1 hour and 1 mins. Flight# 5535 from ATL -> TPA (1 hour and 25 mins.)

It always amazes me to look out over the wing and watch as the only thing between me and the ground becomes a bunch of physics and engineering. Oh, and air. That the air seems less substantial than the physics (simply knowledge) and the engineering (put into practice) is somehow deeply mystic.

Post- The title is copied directly from the Evernote entry that I used to record the thought in the moment. I have no idea how Evernote 'knew' that much about my location and itinerary. I guess it's been snooping in my gmail and put a lot of bits and pieces together before I turned off the wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, and cell signal?

Creeping me out here guys. >.>

On Brokerages

ETrade is crap. I'm sitting with a threatened credit spread that I want to butterfly further OTM. There's no way to do that in ETrade's interface. What a crock. Because I have a small account I don't have the capital available to do it in two trades and there's literally no way to put the trade in as a butterfly because their interface can't understand that I'm selling 2 of the same option to close and open position at the same time.

I hate this brokerage.

Live trading strategy

So far my trades have been exclusively iron condors on underlyings with high(ish) IV rank at 65+% probability OTM on both sides. I've done a couple of re-wingings (re-opening a closed vertical on the untested side of an existing IC).

The procedure is roughly as follows:
Look at Dough for interesting products (could be replaced with a stock scan if  my TDA account were funded, but Dough's curated list is faster at the moment).
Load up the option chain in TOS and look at the proper OTM strikes. If the credit is >50% of the width then proceed. Otherwise go back to Dough.
Put the credit and BPE (which is the strike width - credit received on a symmetrical IC) into my spreadsheet and let it calculate my exits. If I like the exits (which are calculated based on a %age of max profit) then I'll put the trade on.

The formulas in the spreadsheet are built around getting a high return on the risked money which I use the BPE for. Since it's all melted together (and assuming my formulas are correct; which I've checked a bajillion times) I just select a target % of max profit from the automatically calculated 25, 30, 50 and 75% and nearly always come out at least 20% return on BPE with all commissions calculated for. So I can just plug in the strikes (or manually copy BPE into the spreadsheet from TOS) and the price I'm contemplating selling the IC for and look at where my exits would be.  Often they're negative which just means there's not enough premium to sell to overcome my commission cost. Sometimes the exit price will be a couple of pennies and I'll usually skip those because I expect I'd have to wait on the trade for too long.