I write this piece having brushed up on my formal derivatives training from 20 years ago. What are options, leaps, and time value? These are fancy terms associated with an alternative form of investing. One discovers new terminology while venturing out into a potential land mine without due diligence. I went to a weekend seminar last summer to reacquaint myself with options and found the weekend valuable. It’s a year later, and I put some capital to work. I had successfully recovered my weekend training fees by fulfilling “the required” in the market and submitting proof of my trades.
Margin accounts have authorization levels. You’ll start out
by going long on calls and puts only. The closer your “strike price” is to
being “in the money”, the more you’ll pay in premium. Obviously less risk
entails purchasing calls or puts closer to the market price at inception.
Then there is time value. The more time until option expiry,
the lesser the risk. You start to see the moving parts involved with options.
This is why no investment advisor wants you in them. They think you lack the
capacity to absorb the variables in placing option trades. So, what are LEAPS?
These are options which have a time value of one year plus. You’ve all seen
stock charts right. The line graphs move up and down and oftentimes in a
pattern. What if you projected that pattern outward while giving yourself lots
of “time value” for forgiveness? You are not in options because you’ve been
taught that risk is bad. I’m here to say that when you eliminate all risk, you
can only expect a meagre return. There is actually an opportunity cost in not
at least keeping up to “actual inflation”. Your investment advisor does not
want to be proclaimed as a conduit of your options losses. Therefore, you need
to direct these investments yourself. However; this would take some time in
learning, researching, and acting on your own behalf on your own account.
Interested?
I enjoy story lines that develop at the WSOP. What’s that
you ask? It’s the World Series of Poker. From late May to early July every
year, sixty or so tournaments “unfold” culminating in the “Main Event” which
has a $10,000 buy in. Who can afford
that right? Well not many…so “staking” has become a thing. You can put your
money on a player and ride his coat tails. This has been done for decades but
not formally through a website until recently.
Then about five years ago, the “poker vlogging” phenomenon emerged.
Players started video taping their results from their poker sessions and then
posting the footage on Youtube. It became a way to get some hand histories
while learning and also take in the Vegas nightlife over the net.
Fast forward to 2019 with thousands of vlog subscribers now
interested in staking their Vegas friend in the main event through access to a
web portal in order to execute the deal. You guessed it. The volume of traffic
was so overwhelming today that the technology could not cope.
What if your business experienced the same kind of
phenomenon because of the following you develop through personal affiliation
arising from social media content? Could you “break the internet” too?
What I like about Browns Social House: It’s friendly and has high padded bar stools with foot rests. It has properly controlled climate. Décor not overly imposed by big screens. Happy hour. Four dollar draught. Quick service. Reasonable prices. Did I say that? Square bar accommodating for socializing. You’re not there just for the booze, right?
While much focus has been on the driver of the Humboldt bus
crash, it’s become evident that an insidious behavioural pattern of distraction
while at the wheel is underlying the cause. Although it was a flapping tarp and
not a cell phone, every single driver who owns a smart phone and is compelled
to jump to its chime indicating the latest facebook notification should take
heed. Speaking to passengers is distracting, changing CDs is distracting, and
soothing crying babies is distracting. Some minds may be better equipped to
deal with distractions than others but should you really be assigning yourself
the confidence to multi-task while at the wheel when one misstep can lead to a
life-long occupation of guilt.
It’s certainly easy to judge this man responsible for the
deaths of these Humboldt teens but hypocrisy given one’s own behaviour is
peculiar.
In addition to the driver, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, law
enforcement and the regulatory framework of the transportation industry must
also answer to this event. We put doctors in this country through seven years
of training and a driver of a transport truck through three weeks, if that. Mr.
Sidhu may have lacked training in how to
properly secure a load. Our justice system is structured in such a way that
police tend not to put resources where they believe that the probability of
conviction is low. I postulate that in the minds of law enforcement, the
process of obtaining the necessary evidence to charge a suspected distracted
driver is not worth the application of resources and hence this matter is at
large with you and I witnessing distracted drivers in metropolitan centres
daily.
If the financial penalties were materially strong and the
justice system had the practical powers to enforce, we could actually make
headway toward significantly reducing this problem.
