Risk-Management

5:30 AM. may 11. she went to bed before me last night, which almost never happens. i stayed up reading market structure notes until around 2, realized sleep wasn’t coming, made coffee. opened the laptop.

2:30 AM. friday night. A. made chicken marsala — she does it maybe once a month and I forget every time how good it is. ate around 7, she went back to her desk, lights off in the bedroom by midnight. apartment’s quiet. been staring at P&L since 11.

2:30 AM wednesday. A. finished something around 1 and went to bed still holding her coffee mug. found it on the counter half-full when I went for water. she’s like that when she’s in flow — stops the world when she figures it out.

2:15 AM monday. system’s been clean since the websocket IV fix went live friday. heartbeat healthy, colo latency normal, no stale data flags. spent most of sunday going deep on something i’ve been meaning to do since the tariff postmortem.

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 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.

2:45am monday. first trading day of Q2. Q1 is officially in the rearview — closed at basically flat, full numbers are in friday’s post. the weekend was heavy. not going into it right now. but Q2 starts regardless, and the algos don’t wait for you to process.