This Has Been Quite The Journey.....

I will have a recap of Amazon’s earnings down at the bottom and I will go over what I’m doing with my my positioning, but first I want to share some things with you all. First I want to share a lengthy post about my time on here.

First off before that you’re probably wondering how much someone long all those Amazon leaps that I was made yesterday? Well it appears I am currently up 27.7% this year and yesterday was a gain of $781,231.50. Easily the biggest single day of my personal trading life but I told you this trade would be life changing for me when it was all said and done and yesterday was a big step in that direction…..

I don’t even know where to begin with what I want to say so this might be quite long and if you want to skip it and get to the Amazon recap, just scroll to the bottom.

I’m now approaching 20 month of writing this substack. It has been a journey of a lifetime. When I began writing this on June 8th, 2022 I was just a guy who had been on Twitter simply out of boredom during the covid lockdowns. I made my first account sometime in 2021 because I had heard that Twitter was the place to get realtime finance related news. I was searching around and getting a feel for things and I saw how people wrote threads back then and I said ok let’s give this a try and I wrote a thread on Amazon because that was the topic I knew best from my career and within 3 days it had gotten shared so many times that I had gone from a negligible amount of followers to 6500+. I told my wife at the time that I had built a little fanbase and she wouldn’t admit it at the time, she told me they were probably bots.

One thing led to another and a few months after sharing my musings on options and how markets worked, someone asked me to write a substack and share more in depth on what I was seeing and doing. I had honestly never heard of substack, but I looked at it and saw it was a blogging platform and said sure why not. When you start something like that your biggest fear is always, will people care what I have to say? I’m just some random guy on the internet using a pseudonym who the hell cares what I have to say? Nonetheless, I gave it a shot. My first post was here below

Link

This screenshot below makes me smile looking back, now you all have access to this nice database through the app everyday, you see trends, etc. Back then I’d note a couple trades using numbers on MacBook and share them. It was nothing like I the in depth recaps I share today. Also note my balance that day was $1,473,032.33 a whole lot less than it is today. Anyhow, I shared it with the oddest trade I saw that session, a risk reversal on Sierra Wireless.

Why was the SWIR trade so big that day? Although my old Twitter account was banned(don’t crack jokes tagging Elon) I found a screenshot in one of old recaps and although the images are gone, the words never rang truer. SWIR was a stock where the open interest was almost 0 across all strikes and here came a player selling 20,000 puts and at 17.50 and using the proceeds to buy a call spread at 25/30 in December. Well that’s pretty damn odd.

It took less than 2 months to play out but sure enough someone bought SWIR for $31/share and that risk reversal player made millions of dollars timing their trade absolutely perfectly with the most perfect call positioning you could utilize, a free trade out of the money with a max gain at $30.

My substack exploded the next day when I shared this post on my Twitter. I had never seen so many people sign up and at the time I was charging $19. Those people who signed up early on are still paying only $19 because substack never raises your prices even if I do raise my prices. 2022 was a brutal year if you all remember, the market was horrible, large cap and small cap tech were destroyed. Names like Meta were down 80% and most people were getting crushed, that was probably not the time to be writing a substack and having people pay for your musings, but I was very green that year so my audience continued to grow.

From the time I began writing on June 8th till year end, I returned 38.5% while the Nasdaq was down 14% and the S&P was down 7%. I had managed to evade the destruction through my positioning utilizing option flows to guide me and I caught a big move late in the year when Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter as I had taken a huge position and stated my case on why he couldn’t wiggle out.

In my trading career I’d say 2022 was my biggest accomplishment, and having it documented with every trade I made back in my library just makes it that much more special. You always get those people that say things like “what will you do in a bear market” and you can’t really reply if you can’t show them proof of what you’ve done. I’m personally in the camp that there is always a bull market somewhere, a bear market simply refers to the overall market being down, but the overall market is weighted to tech so really, tech was done but defensive names, oil names, etc were up and if you just followed the charts and followed the option flow, there was still a change to make money on the long side. Again, what do I always say, a chart is simply a visual representation of buying and selling, I still can’t believe so many think charts are unimportant. They are after all what the algos that run the market are programmed to trade off of, why would you not want to learn what is in them?

Anyways long story short, 2023 was maybe the easiest year of any traders life, everything just went straight up as markets normalized. Sitting around thinking about life in the middle of the year I said to myself that I was going to millions when Amazon normalized operations. Here was this company I felt I knew better than almost any analyst. I had made Amazon the focus of my career from my first entry on it in 2012 or 2013 I believe, it was $175/share, split adjusted today it was be less than $9? I knew this company inside out, I knew there was a major dislocation in value and I told myself I was going to swing for the fences, that is when I wrote this in May 2023.

Why Amazon Is A Generational Opportunity

I took my whole trading book, no it wasn’t all my holdings. I have lots of other investments, but my trading book went from countless put sales, covered calls, etc and while I knew I could make great returns trading the data I saw everyday, I said I want to make a life changing amount of money and I went all in on 2 year out calls.

Since then, I am now up 96.6% vs a Nasdaq that has been a complete tear being up 22.89%. If your goal is to outperform the market like me, I’d saw returning over 4x what a market going straight up everyday for a year is a pretty damn good job. It was the leverage I employed on those Amazon leaps.

So now here we are, yesterday was the biggest single session of my life. More than that, alot of you had some life changing days from the comments you all posted in the Amazon channel on the discord and the emails I got. I’m not going lie that was a great feeling. When I started this substack I wanted to be honest with everyone. I shared real screenshots from my book, when I mentioned taking a trade you could always verify it looking at the volume the day I said I took it, and I always shared my returns straight out of my brokerage. These were all things I wanted to employ because when I was on Twitter you’d always see someone say I made 85% and then blur out their dollar figure because it was like 1 contract or someone would do my favorite and post an excel spreadsheet of their positions. If you have the positions, can you not just screenshot your book? I always did, it wasn’t that hard.

Anyways, this has been such an amazing journey, as of this morning I am up in total 224.8% from the day I started this substack, you’ve seen every trade I’ve taken and the Nasdaq is only up 26% in that timeframe.

I don’t really know if anyone else out there has documented a 224% return through a market crash and market euphoria, but I now have, there’s nearly 1000 posts in my library to prove it. Along the way the community that the discord has become is just amazing. I know one of my day 1 believers, Rob, mentioned making a Discord back in 2022 and honestly, I had never heard of Discord, but here we are today with a community that is full of so many people who know so many things in various spaces. It’s really just awesome to see what can happen when you throw hundreds of smart people in a room and let them bounce ideas. You all are doing things I can’t even comprehend like yesterday I saw someone in the current trades channel say they were using the data I share to build out something giving him trade opportunities where he found 20 trades that returned 10% on common within 3 weeks of me posting them.

You guys are smarter than I am, I’m just a simpleton who filters for unusual options, and note them. The things some of you have told you’ve done with the data and how it’s changed your approach to the markets and in many cases your lives I can’t even put into words what that means to me because none of that was ever on my mind when this all began. I’ve said it many times but if you’re not in the community chat you’re really missing out because yes I share these recaps, but these guys are taking that information and executing unbelievable trades around it. Take EW, I wrote that up 2 months back as a best idea, but I’m conservative, I don’t buy calls, I write puts, I buy shares, some of these guys were posting 900% gains on calls yesterday. I would have never suggested that, but that’s what happens when you throw all these intelligent people in a chat, give them a dataset, and let them run wild with it.

Anyways, that’s my substack journey, it’s been a fun one, I still can’t believe what it’s become and I’m excited to see what the future holds here.

Now to Amazon……