Options

2:15 AM wednesday. apartment quiet. A. went to bed around midnight — she had a client deadline today so it was a long one. checked the colo heartbeat before sitting down to write this. normal. algos running clean for the first time since last monday.

2:30 AM monday. week one of what i’m calling “the post-tariff-chaos era” starts in a few hours. last week was one of those that splits into a clear before and after. monday and tuesday felt like freefall — VIX went from 20 to 32 in about 36 hours, SPX dropped hard, options spreads blew out 3-4x, and my event risk throttle (which I built the week prior and wrote about here) was earning every line of code it took to build. then wednesday happened. whoever made the tariff pause call did it at 1:07 PM eastern and watching the S&P rip 8% in ninety minutes while running algorithms was… a lot.

2:15 AM friday. couldn’t sleep after the week we just had. VIX ripped to 28 monday, calmed down midweek, then did that whipsaw thing thursday afternoon where you think it’s done but it’s absolutely not done.

2:30 AM wednesday. A. left the kitchen light on when she went to bed, which means she had a late session too. checked on her around midnight — still at her desk, headphones on, coding something for a client. now she’s asleep and I’m at mine.

2:30 AM monday. Q2 week 2 starts in a few hours. Been sitting with something since Thursday when I posted the Q2 week 1 numbers. Said we were running at 60% position size - waiting for the health scoring system to validate before going full deployment.

2:15am friday. Q2 week 1 is done. walked in from the kitchen, A. fell asleep at her desk again — laptop open, ambient music still running. grabbed a blanket from the couch and put it over her. then came back and pulled up the weekly numbers.

friday night. Q1 officially in the books. did the math earlier while A. was cooking. she noticed i went quiet and just left me to it. that’s one of the things i didn’t expect about being married — how well she reads when to give space. anyway.

2:15am wednesday. still processing this week. the q1 factor attribution post from sunday was cathartic but it also made me confront something i’d been papering over: i was flying blind on real-time greeks for most of march. not completely blind — i had position-level greeks from IB’s TWS feed. but aggregating them into a coherent portfolio view? that was a manual spreadsheet thing i’d run every few hours.

q1 is in the books. three months, roughly flat performance, and a clear pattern in the trade data that tells me exactly what needs to change for q2. jan: +2.1%. feb: -1.3%. march: -0.9% (locked at friday close). quarter: -0.13% net. account moved from $1.196M to about $1.194M. call it flat with a slight downside tilt.

2:30am friday. rough week in the books. march has been a whole thing. tariff headlines dropping every 48 hours, VIX spiking then partially recovering, nobody knows what SPX does next. january was decent (+2.1%), february went against me (-1.3%). march hasn’t been great either. week ending today, i’m down about $2.3k for the five sessions. month’s probably closing around -1%.