SPX

2:30 AM. may 15. today is standard monthly options expiration. third friday of the month. the SPX condors i’ve been running since late april close today, or they already closed this week because the system flagged them as targets before i ever had to think about it.

2:15 AM wednesday. A. made pasta around 7, crashed by 10 - she had a brutal deadline at work today. i cleaned the kitchen, sat down to “just check something,” and have been staring at this roll management code for four hours.

2:15 AM. saturday. april closed today. before I get into what I actually built this week I’ll do the quick numbers. april final: +$15,800. minor revision down from the +$16,500 estimate I had wednesday — a few iron condor legs settled a tick or two against on friday’s close, plus a small NQ position gave back $430 into the bell. nothing significant. still a clean month.

2:30 AM. wednesday. april is basically wrapped. last weekly expiration cleared friday. monday was flat, tuesday had one small SPX position that ticked through on delta and I let it ride — closed today for +$1,100. running estimate: april MTD somewhere around +$16,500 when everything settles. YTD is going to land around +1.5%.

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 friday. been at this since 9 PM. promised myself two weeks ago, right in the middle of the tariff chaos, that i’d actually fix the IV rank staleness issue. the signal quality scoring work was the band-aid — a composite gate that tells the system “this signal isn’t reliable right now.” it worked. it’s in production. but the underlying problem was unchanged: during the spike, my IV rank was being computed from options data that was 10-14 minutes old. the signal wasn’t wrong, technically. it was just answering a question about a market that no longer existed.

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.