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Yep:  website is dark (no surprise), but other links can be found.

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BTS (Born To Sell): James, tell us a bit about you and OptionSellers.com.

JC (James Cordier): I've been trading commodities for 30 years. In the beginning I was attracted to the high leverage of futures trading but the volatility was scary. So I switched to options on commodities instead. Once I realized that 80% of them expire worthless I started selling commodity options instead of buying them. After having success with that strategy I founded OptionSellers.com in 1999.

OptionSellers.com is a licensed CTA (Commodity Trading Advisor) that offers high net worth clients SMAs (separately managed accounts) where the strategy is selling options on commodities to generate income.

BTS: What kind of options are you selling?

JC: We sell far out-of-the-money naked puts and calls, as well as strangles and condors on about 10 different commodities.

Just a grotesquely amateurish approach to "managing" a fund.  Welcome to bankruptcy, dude.

Edited by jimmyjazz
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On ‎11‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 6:32 PM, jimmyjazz said:

Yep:  website is dark (no surprise), but other links can be found.

Just a grotesquely amateurish approach to "managing" a fund.  Welcome to bankruptcy, dude.

 

On ‎11‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 7:18 PM, Bozo_Casanova said:

I used to sell option premium on the regular and it’s a great way to make money as long as you manage it like you are selling insurance and don’t do anything stupid like expose yourself to existential levels of risk via speculation. They appear to have speculated on outcomes. That’s just dumb.

Not all that different than Long Term Capital Management, who earned great returns for their investors (and management) right up until they didn't and not only did they damned near go bankrupt but they almost took the financial markets with them. It was 1998, and the Fed bailout of LTCM became part of the blueprint for saving the banking system in 2008.
Many of these strategies work really well, until the underlying economy changes and the people running the fund think that they've figured out a system that can't fail.

Reference: https://www.thebalance.com/long-term-capital-crisis-3306240
A decent read, about some really smart people who almost brought down the global banking system

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Taleb supposedly makes money on black swan events.  I don't even know if a spike in natural gas prices would qualify, but Taleb is no doubt a whole lot smarter than these idiots and wouldn't have that kind of exposure.

The only reason I made money when VIX shot through the roof in February is because I decided to hedge long calls in SVXY with long puts as opposed to just selling the SVXY position.  My exposure was low in the first place -- maybe 10% of that trading account, I don't really recall -- but things were looking really bad that day and in my mind it made more sense to hedge than liquidate.  I can't really defend that strategy, but I'm glad nonetheless, because those puts might as well have been gold bars once trading resumed with SVXY down to almost zero.

In the eyes of VIX traders, THAT was a "black swan".

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3 hours ago, NowThis said:

AMZN hit a bloody low 1420 but bounced back +100 to about 1523, up for the day!  I think Tech is just about at the bottom now, tomorrow should be a slow down day but IMO up starting in December. 

I hope you're right, I've been waiting for that rally. FB hit 127, that's under 17 PE. Fuck that's cheap for a company that's going to grow 30% YOY in revenues.

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I got into GE way to early. Thinking about doubling down just to get my average purchase price lower.

Appears I am going to own some AAPL at 190. I had previously sold puts at that level thinking it would hold above that line.

In my day job I am long lots of natural gas calls for this winter. So yeah doing great at work in commodities, but equity personal account is sucking shit through a straw.

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7 hours ago, and said:

I hope you're right, I've been waiting for that rally. FB hit 127, that's under 17 PE. Fuck that's cheap for a company that's going to grow 30% YOY in revenues.

What makes you think they're going to grow?  Users are way down even when including Instagram.  No one trusts Facebook anymore and more of their users are the olds, who are undesirable when it comes to advertisers, who are starting to realize that social media advertising doesn't do anything.

Facebook might not exist in five years and I'm being dead serious.

Edited by Aqua Buddha
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11 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

What makes you think they're going to grow?  Users are way down even when including Instagram.  No one trusts Facebook anymore and more of their users are the olds, who are undesirable when it comes to advertisers, who are starting to realize that social media advertising doesn't do anything.

Facebook might not exist in five years and I'm being dead serious.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/20090916_fingers_crossed_2743.jpg

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11 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

What makes you think they're going to grow?  Users are way down even when including Instagram.  No one trusts Facebook anymore and more of their users are the olds, who are undesirable when it comes to advertisers, who are starting to realize that social media advertising doesn't do anything.

Facebook might not exist in five years and I'm being dead serious.

Yeah 30%  growth seems ridiculously optimistic. FB is starting to develop quite a stench. Yahoo, Myspace, AOL all looked great....until they didnt. 

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16 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

What makes you think they're going to grow?  Users are way down even when including Instagram.  No one trusts Facebook anymore and more of their users are the olds, who are undesirable when it comes to advertisers, who are starting to realize that social media advertising doesn't do anything.

Facebook might not exist in five years and I'm being dead serious.

Users are flat to minimal growth in NA and Europe. They are growing tremendously in Asia and rest of the world in terms of MAU and DAUs. Their revenues are on track to grow 30% YOY thats a drop from 40% YOY this year.

Advertisers aren't backing off because they are still the only choice other than google that can geolock their target market. FB has older people but the ONLY social media that matters which is Instagram has 500 million+ users that are young. 

And I'm not sure why you say that social media advertising doesn't do anything because there is enough data out there that says exactly the opposite. 

They haven't even fully monetized Instagram, FB messenger and Whatsapp. 

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5 hours ago, Blotto said:

Yeah 30%  growth seems ridiculously optimistic. FB is starting to develop quite a stench. Yahoo, Myspace, AOL all looked great....until they didnt. 

Because you could combine Yahoo, Myspace, AOL and multiply them by ten and they still did not have the monthly average users that FB currently enjoys. Neither did they have the average time spent that was close to what we spend on FB these days. Also the quality of crowd sourced and updated data that FB has about their users is way more useful to advertisers than what we had on Myspace or any other apps you mentioned. 

FB(FB, Instagram and Whatsapp) is so entrenched into our lives that we are more worried about it being addictive like cigarettes than it fading away at this point. 

 

As a sidenote, I'm not on FB or Instagram. 

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1 hour ago, and said:

Users are flat to minimal growth in NA and Europe. They are growing tremendously in Asia and rest of the world in terms of MAU and DAUs. Their revenues are on track to grow 30% YOY thats a drop from 40% YOY this year.

Advertisers aren't backing off because they are still the only choice other than google that can geolock their target market. FB has older people but the ONLY social media that matters which is Instagram has 500 million+ users that are young. 

And I'm not sure why you say that social media advertising doesn't do anything because there is enough data out there that says exactly the opposite. 

They haven't even fully monetized Instagram, FB messenger and Whatsapp. 

P&G cut their online ad spending by $200M and it didn't impact sales at all.  Unilever did something similar.

 

After publicly pressuring major technology platforms to help clean up the online ad market and fork over more information about the effectiveness of digital ads, Procter & Gamble Co. slashed its spending on digital advertising by more than $200 million last year.

The consumer products giant says that its push for more transparency over the past year revealed such spending had been largely wasteful and that eliminating it helped the company reach more consumers in more effective ways.

 

P&G , whose brands include Crest, Tide and Pampers, says it cut its digital ad budget by more than $100 million from July through December. Those reductions were on top of the more than $100 million in digital marketing spending the company had already cut in the June quarter, which P&G said had little impact on the business.

The ad dollars were pulled back from a long list of digital channels but also included reducing spending with “several big digital players” by 20% to 50% last year, according to Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer. He has been leading the charge among marketers as a vocal critic of digital advertising clutter, ad fraud and brand safety issues on platforms like YouTube.

Once armed with more measurement data, P&G discovered that the average view time for a mobile ad appearing in a news feed, on platforms such as Facebook , was only 1.7 seconds. The Cincinnati-based company also realized some people were seeing P&G ads far too many times.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-slashed-digital-ad-spending-by-another-100-million-1519915621

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Procter & Gamble Co. PG -0.75% said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective. 

Almost all of the consumer product giant’s advertising cuts in the period came from digital, finance chief Jon Moeller said on its earnings call Thursday. The company targeted ads that could wind up on sites with fake traffic from software known as “bots,” or those with objectionable content.

 

“What it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective, where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands,” he said. 

Chief Executive David Taylor said in an interview that the digital spending cuts are part of a bigger push by the company to more quickly halt spending on items -- from ad campaigns to product development programs -- that aren’t working.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-cuts-more-than-100-million-in-largely-ineffective-digital-ads-1501191104?mod=article_inline

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3 hours ago, and said:

Because you could combine Yahoo, Myspace, AOL and multiply them by ten and they still did not have the monthly average users that FB currently enjoys. Neither did they have the average time spent that was close to what we spend on FB these days. Also the quality of crowd sourced and updated data that FB has about their users is way more useful to advertisers than what we had on Myspace or any other apps you mentioned. 

FB(FB, Instagram and Whatsapp) is so entrenched into our lives that we are more worried about it being addictive like cigarettes than it fading away at this point. 

 

As a sidenote, I'm not on FB or Instagram. 

Sure. But at the time, those companies I named were the success stories of their time. Cocaine->crack->meth->etc... people need a distraction, they don't always gravitate to the same distraction. Facebook being the dominant social media platform in 5-10 years is not a wager I would make.

Edited by Blotto
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1 hour ago, Blotto said:

Sure. But at the time, those companies I named were the success stories of their time. Cocaine->crack->meth->etc... people need a distraction, they don't always gravitate to the same distraction. Facebook being the dominant social media platform in 5-10 years is not a wager I would make.

But none of those had revenues of even 10 billion even at their height of success. FB does more than that every quarter, on track to do 55 billion in 2018. Cash warchest of $41 billion with ZERO debt. They keep crushing any new competition that pops up. Just ask Snapchat, their valuation went from $25 billion to 8 in less than a year. FB tried to buy them, they declined so Zuck just copied what they have on Insta and now Snap is losing users(down to 180 million) while Insta is gaining them(500 million). So you can wager whatever you want, its your money but I'd advise waging it against FB. They will buy the new competition, if they decline, he'll just copy it. And given the new regulations that are to descend upon them via congress its going to make it even more difficult for any new competition. FB will just track along and make them even more entrenched given their ridiculous revenues and margins.

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4 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

P&G cut their online ad spending by $200M and it didn't impact sales at all.  Unilever did something similar.

 

After publicly pressuring major technology platforms to help clean up the online ad market and fork over more information about the effectiveness of digital ads, Procter & Gamble Co. slashed its spending on digital advertising by more than $200 million last year.

The consumer products giant says that its push for more transparency over the past year revealed such spending had been largely wasteful and that eliminating it helped the company reach more consumers in more effective ways.

 

P&G , whose brands include Crest, Tide and Pampers, says it cut its digital ad budget by more than $100 million from July through December. Those reductions were on top of the more than $100 million in digital marketing spending the company had already cut in the June quarter, which P&G said had little impact on the business.

The ad dollars were pulled back from a long list of digital channels but also included reducing spending with “several big digital players” by 20% to 50% last year, according to Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer. He has been leading the charge among marketers as a vocal critic of digital advertising clutter, ad fraud and brand safety issues on platforms like YouTube.

Once armed with more measurement data, P&G discovered that the average view time for a mobile ad appearing in a news feed, on platforms such as Facebook , was only 1.7 seconds. The Cincinnati-based company also realized some people were seeing P&G ads far too many times.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-slashed-digital-ad-spending-by-another-100-million-1519915621

P&G did this in 2017, FB revenues in 2017: 40 billion

FB revenues in 2018: 55 billion. 

Tell me again how this impacted them?

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12 minutes ago, NowThis said:

Recession is being discussed based on 10 year and 2 year yield interplay. Forecast 6-12 months from now, stock market as a harbinger. Financial stocks way down today. 

btw , TSLA holding strong while the market tanks. Why is TSLA so strong right now?

because it is a cult stock and its performance is irrelevant to overall economic indicators.

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If you want to make a quick pop this weekend, my strategy would be the following: Buy high quality consumer staple stocks on Thursday afternoon... KO, PG, PEP, etc.. Then sell at the close on Friday. 

Look at how they did last Friday.. They shot up like rockets because money managers were scared of what Mr. Scott Free Tariff Man was going to do over the weekend. They then traded mildly down on Monday... I expect similar at the end of this week. That said, these stocks are probably decent buy and holds too at this point in the economic cycle. Stay away from the crappy ones like CPB, KHZ, etc though.

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I sold out of some risk on items this morning and promptly put that into VXX.  I could see a wild Thurs/Fri to be honest.  I’m getting a weird flash crash like feeling about it, almost like something wild will happen during the market closure tomorrow and the market will react appropriately 

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On 12/4/2018 at 7:26 PM, Trey3216 said:

I sold out of some risk on items this morning and promptly put that into VXX.  I could see a wild Thurs/Fri to be honest.  I’m getting a weird flash crash like feeling about it, almost like something wild will happen during the market closure tomorrow and the market will react appropriately 

good one. A Chinese executive was arrested a few days ago and announced yesterday. That panicked the markets today regarding US-China relations. 

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6 minutes ago, Superhero said:

Liquidated my 401k rollover on Tuesday morning before the slaughter got worse.

I’ve sold about $700k in the past month. Still holding out hope on Apple, Amazon and Google. Though deep down Apple is gonna continue getting their ass kicked in the near term. 

Pay attention folks. This is the proper way to humblebrag 

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