I haven’t made many moves in the last Month or so, I’ll provide a quick update, but wanted to share that with WTI below $40 I finally got my window to get long again.

OK, quick summary.

I had a short on the market that I closed yesterday with the big sell off.  Took a 50% loss, but it was a small bet.  I’ve been a little surprised that the market rallied so hard with no big pull backs over the past 60 days.  I do wonder where we go from here, seems to me a little toppy so I don’t think we will have a huge 2nd leg to the rally, but I don’t sense we are way overbought either.   As long as the Fed does a “one and done” message with a really slow ramp on rates I think we will grind up and down overall, and we will move into a longer period where individual stocks will move more independently than they have in the past where everything goes up or down in unison with the market.

I had a long VIX play that is coming up on expiration, we had a spike in volatility a couple weeks back and I took 1/2 off the table when my position over doubled, so I still have some left that I’m looking to close out over the next week or two.  Its the houses money now.  I will continue to look for entries into a 2-month window of long VIX if we fall below 13 or 12.

I still have QCOM, which I had more than a double on, but got greedy and didn’t sell, now I’m sitting on a down 25% position.  Dumb move.  Its way out in Jan 2017 so I have lots of time and they are crawling back up to almost even now based on some recent deals.

I still have 1/2 my Yahoo, I sold 1/2 of my position with a 150% return, lesson learned from QCOM.  I’m actually looking at almost a Triple on the position right now but I want to see what shakes out with this recent board statement that they are exploring options to maybe sell the core and keep the BABA stake.  A little risky perhaps but I could really use a nice 10X return to get back some funds from my eternal refusal to stop betting on VMEM.

VMEM, all positions going to Zero.  Ug.  The stock is now trade at .85cents.  What a joke they are.  The lowest option call is $2.50 so there is no way to play this long or short without just buying the stock.

TWTR, still have a small position of 2017 calls, lots of time on this one, down a bit right now but nothing major, there is a huge spread on the bid and ask so it hard to know what its really worth right now.  I will keep an eye on this and maybe will cost base down one time.

Other than that I just have OIL.

I’m long the USO jan 2017 $15 call.  Its probably going to be a tough 6 months with WTI but I think we will stablize into next year and then start to creep back up to 50-60 range.  If by next fall we are back to 55 or 60 on WTI, this OIL bet will likely 5x return.  Also still have the XLE 2017 calls, same bet, just tracking big oil companies rather than the commodity itself.

My finally note is to highlight that I am going WAY out on expiration dates now.  Outside of VIX and VMEM everything is 2017 dated.  VIX will close this week or next and VMEM is worthless.  If we get a big pullback on OIL in the next couple months I will continue to find money to cost base down.  I’m all in with this bet.  I really believe that $40 is the ‘natural’ bottom for WTI.  Yes it can go way below but I don’t think that it would spend more than a few months below $40, so with 2017 as my window this feel like a solid play.