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Any business is a gamble. How is trading different from an internet start-up or a corner grocery store? All of these are speculations/bets where capital is committed and the outcome is uncertain.

Please contribute something of substance or go away. Trolls and idiots are not welcome here. Thank you for your kind consideration. :mad:

If TV got it right, you live in the right state for it :)

Well, it's important to remember about great tits even as you are reading this thread :) Westley: There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world.

Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR...

Not sure. Even for models, it's not the shining smile that gets them paid, it's the great tits.

Planned by whom? PS. I've got plenty of achievements, but I am a realist enough to know that a lot of it was luck.

All of this helps, but at the end, it's more about luck and ability to kiss ass then anything else.

My returns on capital for a single book are pretty much meaningless since we allocate risk per strategy, not capital. In dollar terms, worst dd has been about 1/5 of the annualized standard deviation, you can figure out the rest on your own and plug in whatever capital you want. Problem is, that...

No. I want a consensus because I have a limited amount of time I can spend on this - right now at a meeting so can bs about it, but not do actual work. CM is better for analysis, but it comes from an SPX vol surface plus variance offsets which was used for market making so it's not a perfect...

Yup, you appear to be right, for whatever reason yahoo mobile gives me adjusted price of around 19-20 all across time. Bloomberg mobile gives me 25.19 as the starting price. Go figure.

OTC variance swap levels - I would hope that people can calculate historical variance on their own using data from yahoo :) All I am asking is since I have them stored and parametrized, i can output CM form or just dump the original quotes. Original quotes are a bit harder to deal with but on...

I think something is off in these calculations - a cursory look shows that the stock itself is flattish today from Jan 2008 at about $20/share and that the total div paid out was approximately $5 which makes net return over that time about 25%. Could you check, I am in a useless meeting with a...

Would you rather get constant maturity or fixed maturity data? That is, for each date either something like 1m, 2m, etc or Jan12, Dec12?

My CC book posted a dollar Sharpe of 4.2 last year, with no down months but it had some seriously bad days. On the other hand, my tail hedging book was up about 10% of risk capital and the Sharpe was only 1.4. Guess which one attracted investors?

Yeah, that's a lot. I have the historical variance data for you, gents, don't know if I should post it or I should send it via email upon request.

Yeah, and for simply holding BXM you just need to buy an ETF

Well, last year people made similar risk/returns just being short vol and nobody was particularly impressed. I actually suspect that I know what you do, unfortunately this space is too capacity constrained for me to get involved. What's interesting to me, do you understand what risk premium are...

As an alternative, think of the following strategy. Lets say you take SPY or whatever is your favoured ETF and write a 1 month call on it. If nothing happens, you keep rolling these calls. If you get assigned, you take the cash (which now includes the proceeds of the sale) and sell 1 month puts...

Time to expiry is pretty damn hard to properly calculate especially if you are dealing with really short dated options. Would you only care about the business (trading time)? Would you care about the night hours? Anyway, in 99% of cases, it's not the time to expiry that's gonna f*ck you up...