weekend notes

Hope all goes well… “Things had been too easy for too long,” said Roadrunner, the equity market’s biggest volatility trader. “Yet vol has found a bid on each dip for weeks,” he said. “The market saw this coming.” The S&P 500 rallied +7.5% in the first 18 trading days of 2018. Yet implied volatility levels rose. Then stocks fell -3.9% in 5 days. “When stocks dump on a Friday, closing at the low

Hope all goes well… Weekend notes started in 2010, almost by accident. I jotted down things each week that made me think. As it evolved, I pushed harder to discover unique perspectives, interesting questions, occasional answers. From exceptional people. And that led to a series of discoveries. The first of which is that exceptional people are rather similar, in that they have a deep, insatiable, c

Hope all goes well… “Under the political ecology which is built by the factional rivalries, factional interests are prioritized, and it is hard for the gov’t to focus on the management of the national economy and social development,” wrote China’s credit rating agency, downgrading US gov’t debt from A- to BBB+. “The perennial negative impact of the superstructure on the economic base has continued

Hope all goes well… Our Santa Barbara team is safe and sound. Thanks for asking. Chase’s parents survived the mud slides, they were ground zero. Somehow their house didn’t collapse. Everything around it did. Their next-door neighbor and close family friend died. He woke his son in the middle of the night to escape but the house collapsed and they were swept away. Holding on to one another. The son

Hope all goes well… “You know the best thing about Jackson jamming Charlie head-first into a snow pile?” asked Teddy, attempting to lighten conversation. The family dinner table shrugged, Charlie’s Chernobyl-red cheeks evaporated his dwindling tears. They’d been shoveling the driveway in the dark. Which is what happens when I come home to discover our kids spent the snow-day doing every conceivabl

Hope all goes well… “Wow, I got real coal – what did I do wrong this year?” whispered one of my many younger brothers, looking around, laughing, kind of. Our four kiddies noticed but barely cared. A nephew giggled, the room chaotic. Mara and I had hosted yet another family holiday, our home bursting at the seams. And late Christmas Eve with fifteen empty stockings lined up on the hearth, San

Hope all goes well… Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. To you and your families. Resurrected one of my favorite little memories, an opening note from Christmas past… Christmas Day 2013: “Santa slipped down the chimney. Left big boot prints in the ash that spilled across our hearth. And the jolly fella stuffed stockings. Built a train set too. Sprinkled magic everywhere. Moments before the kiddies em

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote about oxymorons, from September 2014, at the dawn of a volatility burst. See you again in January with full weekend notes. Week-in-Review (expressed in YoY terms): Mon: Bitcoin futures begin trading on CBOE, Saudi Arabia to allow cinemas for 1st time in 35yrs, Russia signs $21bln deal to supply Egypt with 5 gigawatt nuclear reactors, Putin announces Syria

Hope all goes well… 11 tons of gold bullion. 173 Bugatti Chiron’s. 1,785 four-year Harvard degrees. 9,384 years of paper pushing for an average Saudi civil servant. 79,250 years of Egyptian labor. 90,000 years of Iraqi labor. 203,340 years of Yemeni labor. 281,250 years of slavish Pakistani labor. 450,000,000 US dollars. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud considered these monetary equivalents, each ident