Rothbury Music Festival

As previously mentioned, I went to Rothbury music festival for July 4th last weekend and it was incredible. Never could I of have dreamed of such an amazing experience. The music was phenomenal on so many levels and the style of the festival and the people, just wow. I'm going to be uploading a ton of videos and pictures over the next few weeks from the festival and I'll post some here. Let me start with something that stopped me dead in my tracks every night I was there. This apparatus was on the road back to our campsite and involved a gang of chimpanzees swinging around on a jungle gym in the latest hours of the evening. This was filmed at around 3 am:



This was something I have been waiting for, for a long, long time. The Disco Biscuits played Run Like Hell, probably my favorite or at least top three Pink Floyd songs. Not only did they play it, they destroyed it and the crowd went ape shit. Notice the epic glowstick war going on:




Much more later...

Intro to the Safety Dance

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

This video looks like some sort of satanic ritual. Its actually just the friendly Disco Biscuits singing "Killing in the Name of," one of the most badass Rage Against the Machine songs ever. The clip is from the last part of the song, the lyrics are the title of this post.

Olympiad Week Two

Week two was a hard lesson for the program as volatility continued to expand in the downward direction. The S&P 500 fell a whopping 5.71% last week as the VIX exploded from a low of 18.28 to at high at 29.30, a staggering 60.3% increase! As you may recall my program had written a ton of puts on solar stocks ahead of last week since these stocks have extremely expensive options and made big declines. Well the solar stocks fell pretty much the hardest of all sectors, causing these puts I was short to dramatically increase. I also realized there was a glitch with large market orders on options that take a long time to fill, as occurred with SOLF. As a result I didn't run the program much except for the beginning and end of the week. As a result, written options (puts) that were in the money expired and I got put shares on DSL, CSIQ and LDK.

Liquidation Value: $806,548.01 -$173,520 on the week

Positions:

Longs:
ABT
CSIQ (I was put 25,000 shares)
DSL (I was put 25,000 shares)
LDK (I was put 25,000 shares)
MCK
SDS

Shorts:
IWM
MRX

Naked option positions (options sold short):
LULU Feb 25p

Options that expired worthless:
CAL Jan 25c
CROX Jan 25p
UAUA Jan 25p

Of course I am not happy with the account's 17.7% decline but this week represented an extreme worst case scenario for the program. I have some good ideas about how to fix the problem, certainly the SOLF catastrophe cost me about $160k (16%). This doesn't seem so bad when you consider that my program was aggressively writing naked SOLF puts and the stock dropped more than 50% in two weeks. On the bright side, the program has the potential to swing very rapidly and averaged over long periods of time it should be market neutral. If the market had bottomed and rallied early last week then I'd be sitting over +20% on the week. I'll add more here later, check back.

For those of you who will be doing some coding this weekend try jamming out to this while you write. And if any readers are into the disco biscuits be sure to comment, I can recommend some good shows.