About
I started trading at university in 1998, and joined a prop desk in 2005 running interest rate futures spreads. Equities came later, and for some years now it has been primarily options — mainly selling puts, combined with calls or spreads.
Market junkie, fundamentally. I have traded through plenty of difficult stretches and plenty of good ones, and I am still standing — which in this business counts for rather more than any single year’s return.
Which is why the record here is complete rather than curated. Every trade, winners and losers, and the reasoning behind the ones worth writing up.
Trading timeline
- 1998
I started out spread betting, mostly on FX.
- 2005
I joined a prop shop trading interest rate futures. The main trade then was the TED spread, Treasury bills against eurodollars, and from there it widened into interest rate calendar spreads, then energy, agriculture and equity spreads.
- 2011
MF Global's collapse cut off my access to my funds, and getting some of them back took a while. It forced a reset. From then on it wasn't only spreads: I added trading news releases, the opening and closing imbalances, and technical and tape reading.
- 2016
Spread trading wound down. Euro rates were at zero, and below it on deposits, and the curve was very flat. So I moved into squawking, which was funny at the time: after more than a decade of listening to RANsquawk, FirstSquawk and Trade The News, I was the one doing it.
- Now
I don't squawk any more, but I'm still in financial news. Options, which I've traded on and off throughout, are now the main thing. It started with very short-term trades and has moved to swing trades that don't need me at the screen all day. Every trade since 2022 is on this site.
What’s here
- The portfolio →Every options trade since 2022, 424 of them so far, closed and open, winners and losers, with the P&L on each.
- The research →Notes on earnings and the events that move a stock: what was reported, what the market missed, and where I come out, with a Buy, Hold or Sell.
- The daily recap →One short read per session: what moved, and why.
- The stats board →Market levels that matter for how I trade: indices, volatility, rates and the themes currently in focus.
How the record is kept
One master record
Every trade is logged in a single spreadsheet. The site rebuilds the portfolio from it trade by trade, and won’t publish unless its total matches the spreadsheet’s own realised P&L to the dollar.
Nothing left out
Losing trades stay in, and so do open ones. No screenshots, no cherry-picking. When a research note comes with a trade, you can follow that position in the portfolio and see how it went.
Figures you can check
Numbers in the research and the daily recaps come from companies’ own releases and official data, linked on the page. If a figure can’t be checked, it doesn’t go in.
Everything here is a personal trading record and commentary. It is not investment advice, and past performance does not indicate future results.
Newsletter
Research notes, by email
Each note covers an earnings report or a market event and ends in a Buy, Hold or Sell, with the trades behind it published in full here. When one goes up, the summary comes to your inbox with a link to the whole thing. Every week or two.