Vix

late night. A. went to bed around 10:30, told me not to stay up too late. i said “just finishing something.” she gave me that look. it’s now 2 AM.

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.

2:30 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.

2:30am 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%.

the market doesn’t care what strategy you’re running. it runs whatever regime it wants. your job is to detect the regime and adapt. why regime matters # every strategy has conditions where it crushes and conditions where it bleeds.

been researching VIX term structure trades. contango vs backwardation. predictable patterns. finally got an algo working. the concept # contango: front month VIX < back month VIX

march taught expensive lesson. VIX spike = full stop. cost $9,582 to learn. what i knew before march # old rule:

need to stop trading when volatility spikes. building detection system. the problem # this week VIX spiked 18% in 2 days. my strategies got stopped out twice.