Mid-year recap

Friends,

I was in Portugal last week on family vacation. For readers who also follow my wife’s Instagram you know the story.

It was a saga as the kids and eventually our intestines were roman candles that burned from both ends. Life tip: keep multiple changes of clothes handy when flying with children. Yinh was in London for work and met us in the Duoro Valley. It was like stepping into an infirmary for the first half of the trip and then she got sick for the second half.

It was an unlucky break, but what we saw of their wine country as well as Porto, Evora, Lagos, Lisbon and Sintra were beautiful (and yes we did a lot of driving — also less than ideal considering even when healthy we need to Dramamine our kids for road trips).

This week we are in NJ spending a lot of time with family before heading back to the Bay Area. I’ll resume regular posting next Wednesday.

I started writing a lot more in January so I put together the below list for newer readers or anyone who just wants to catch up before new posts resume.

Key Posts By Category from 1H2024

Investing and Personal Finance

• When It's Normal to Have No Idea What Your Returns Are (5 min read) ($)
• Index Investing: The Nature of the Beast (6 min read) ($)
• Inflation Replicator (4 min read) ($)
• Nah…You Just Ain’t Seein’ the Ball (5 min read) ($)
• Is Index Investing a Trap? (7 min read) ($)
• When Car Leases Offer Options For Less Than Zero (6 min read)
• Know-Nothing Sizing (5 min read)
• Growth Rate: 70 Doublings/Years (6 min read)
• Everything Is Going Up Because A Lot Of Money’s Being Made (7 min read)
• Getting Comfortable with Log Charts (5 min read)
• Getting Paid to Flip Million Dollar Coins (8 min read)
• Lessons from Ed Thorp's Interview (6 min read)
• Risk Depends on the Resolution (5 min read)
• Life Settlement Arbitrage (6 min read) [Guest Post]

Options and Trading

• Ratio’d (5 min read) ($)
• Breakpoints (6 min read) ($)
• GME Trade (7 min read) ($)
• Options Trading as a Widget Factory (8 min read) ($)
• What Equity Option Traders Can Learn (6 min read) ($)
• A Birdie Asked How to Model a 1-Day Option (5 min read)
• Weighting an Options Pair Trade (6 min read)
• Using Options Better (7 min read)
• Mermaids, Fireflies, and the Bid-Ask Spread (5 min read)
• If you annualize volatility with 252 days can you use that number in a 365-day option model? (6 min read)
• 21-Year-Olds Making 7 Figures on a W2 (7 min read)
• Flippers vs. Wholesalers (8 min read)
• Meritocracy: Apple Pie on a Window Sill (6 min read)
• Riffing on Paywalls, Trading, and Options (5 min read)
• Scatterplot Gallery (6 min read)
• “Renting a Straddle” (7 min read)
• Kelly Math Weirdness (5 min read)
• My Grandma Is $24.05 Bid: Stop Embarrassing Yourself (6 min read)
• Crossing Over Zero (5 min read)
• A Visual Appreciation for Black-Scholes Delta (7 min read)
• Thinking in N, Not T (6 min read)
• A Visual Primer For Understanding Options (9 min read) [Guest Post]

Growth & Self-improvement

• Late Bloomer (5 min read)
• Status Symbols (6 min read)
• Impedance Mismatch (7 min read)
• Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Fear (8 min read)
• Achievement Is a Fickle Mistress (5 min read) ($)
• “I’ve Spent My Whole Life Competing With People Like You” (6 min read) ($)
• How to Order Off Menu (7 min read)
• The Hopeless and the Magic Blanket (5 min read)
• The College Monopoly Is a Tiger Trap (8 min read)
• Moneyballing College Admissions (7 min read) ($) [Guest Post]

Math/Investing Education for Kids

• NCAAs, Binary Trees, & More (6 min read)
• Cool Story, Dad (5 min read)
• Financial Literacy 1: Savings & Compounding (6 min read)
• Financial Literacy 2: Entrepreneurship (7 min read)

moontower.ai

Besides substack, much of my time is devoted to building moontower.ai

That has also included a heavy dose of writing in the form of guides:

• The Moontower Primer (7 min read)
• The Moontower Mission Plan (6 min read)
• Introducing Free Moontower Calculators (5 min read)

We are also very excited about the recent update and the roadmap for the next few months. A few highlights we shared with free and paid users:

New tickers ??

• We have added 38 new ETFs to the Moontower ticker universe. You can check them all out on the Dashboard page.

• We have finalized all the data pipeline work to add single stocks, which we hope to roll out by the end of this month (still have a bit of frontend work to do).

New features ??

• We rolled out the Mission Plan, explaining how to use Moontower for certain use-cases (hedging, VRP, directional trades). It’s free and you can find it here.

• We have launched a brand new Community page, with a twitter-like interface to make it easier to use. You can check it out here.

• We shipped the first calculators of a growing suite of free analytics.

• We introduced an Enterprise plan, targeted at professional pods or options trading teams. It includes everything in the Pro plan, as well as data API access, custom charts, custom vol models, and onboarding call with Kris. It’s priced at $249 / mo billed yearly. If you’re interested in this plan, please drop us an email.

• We have launched a brand new website.

You can sign up for moontower.ai here.

If you’d like to be an affiliate and earn $$ when people sign up via your link, we have automated the process. Sign up here.

Enjoy your 4th of July and I’ll catch you in a week!

Stay Groovy

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