Greetings again from the Stanford Dive Center. My devotion to this blog knows no borders.
I'll mention as an aside that, as we approach August, it still hasn't been hot enough for me to open up our swimming pool at home. It seems the SF Bay Area is the only part of the country that has avoided heat this year. I don't miss it. If God deemed the temperature never go above 72, I'd be fine with that.
Anyway. I'll make my final post of the day about two topics: (1) my put positions; (2) SocialTrade ideas.
Readers who have been around a while know that I only dusted off my options account early in April. I had quick success with it, putting together a 70% profit in the span of something like six weeks. It's been languishing since then, slopping between about a 40% and 50% gain (e.g. I gave back some of my profits).
The nature of the account is very, very different from my normal (vastly bigger) regular portfolio. Principally, I have much more of a "let it ride" attitude on this account. None of the positions has a stop. This is the polar opposite of my big account, whose stops I obsess over daily on a penny-by-penny basis (wet-nursing these multitudinous positions gobbles up a big chunk of my day). I don't mind being reckless with my options account, since it's pretty small, it's only my money (not my clients'), and it's worth it to me to see how this experiment goes.
Having said all that, I've got eight positions – all of them puts, most of them with September expirations. Here are the charts of all those positions:
The other thing I wanted to cover was about my rapidly-growing web site called SocialTrade. For those of you who use it, I'd love to hear your ideas about features you'd like to see.
Now let me take a moment here to simultaneously insult you and splash water on my request: I have, in my many years of developing products, often asked users for their ideas. In all that time, I don't think I've ever received a good one. I believe in Steve Jobs' credo that users don't know what they want until you show it to them. So if anyone thinks my job simply consists of raking through dozens of sensational breakthroughs and developing them, that simply isn't the case. The well is always dry.
But one can always hope, and I am here to please you; after all, if I make you happy, you will use my web site, and that makes me happy. It's symbiotic. So if you do have a feature in mind you'd love to see, please say so in the comments section below (or email me). There is one particular feature I'm really excited about that I'll be announcing soon, but I'm happy to keep sexing up the product with your own (outstanding) suggestions.
Thanks. And remember, no matter how bad your day is ever going, at least you don't run the Shareholder Relations department at Zynga.
