Acuitas Crypto Trading Bot:Tastytrade binary options

2 months back at trading (update) and some new questions

Hi all, I posted a thread back a few months ago when I started getting seriously back into trading after 20 years away. I thought I'd post an update with some notes on how I'm progressing. I like to type, so settle in. Maybe it'll help new traders who are exactly where I was 2 months ago, I dunno. Or maybe you'll wonder why you spent 3 minutes reading this. Risk/reward, yo.
I'm trading 5k on TastyWorks. I'm a newcomer to theta positive strategies and have done about two thirds of my overall trades in this style. However, most of my experience in trading in the past has been intraday timeframe oriented chart reading and momentum stuff. I learned almost everything "new" that I'm doing from TastyTrade, /options, /thetagang, and Option Alpha. I've enjoyed the material coming from esinvests YouTube channel quite a bit as well. The theta gang type strategies I've done have been almost entirely around binary event IV contraction (mostly earnings, but not always) and in most cases, capped to about $250 in risk per position.
The raw numbers:
Net PnL : +247
Commissions paid: -155
Fees: -42
Right away what jumps out is something that was indicated by realdeal43 and PapaCharlie9 in my previous thread. This is a tough, grindy way to trade a small account. It reminds me a little bit of when I was rising through the stakes in online poker, playing $2/4 limit holdem. Even if you're a profitable player in that game, beating the rake over the long term is very, very hard. Here, over 3 months of trading a conservative style with mostly defined risk strategies, my commissions are roughly equal to my net PnL. That is just insane, and I don't even think I've been overtrading.
55 trades total, win rate of 60%
22 neutral / other trades
Biggest wins:
Biggest losses:
This is pretty much where I expected to be while learning a bunch of new trading techniques. And no, this is not a large sample size so I have no idea whether or not I can be profitable trading this way (yet). I am heartened by the fact that I seem to be hitting my earnings trades and selling quick spikes in IV (like weed cures Corona day). I'm disheartened that I've went against my principles several times, holding trades for longer than I originally intended, or letting losses mount, believing that I could roll or manage my way out of trouble.
I still feel like I am going against my nature to some degree. My trading in years past was scalping oriented and simple. I was taught that a good trade was right almost immediately. If it went against me, I'd cut it immediately and look for a better entry. This is absolutely nothing like that. A good trade may take weeks to develop. It's been really hard for me to sit through the troughs and it's been even harder to watch an okay profit get taken out by a big swing in delta. Part of me wonders if I am cut out for this style at all and if I shouldn't just take my 5k and start trading micro futures. But that's a different post...
I'll share a couple of my meager learnings:


My new questions :

That's enough of this wall of text for now. If you made it this far, I salute you, because this shit was even longer than my last post.
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[H] 150+ Humble Bundle Leftovers including Crash & Spyro [W] Monster Hunter: World, They Are Billions, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle & Offers from Wishlist

The games I am actively seeking are: Monster Hunter: World They Are Billions BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle Darksiders III Just Cause 4 Shadow of the Tomb Raider However, I will appreciate offers for any game in my Wishlist
Quite new to trading so not much rep, but here is my Rep Link. Also my Profile
All my games are from Humble Bundle, so a gift link option is available if preferred. As they are all from Bundles, I'm happy to trade my games 2-6 for 1 (depending on the game)
[H]
10000000 2064: Read Only Memories Aaero AI War: Fleet Command Alan Wake's American Nightmare Anomaly 2 Anomaly: Warzone Earth Aporia: Beyond the Valley Arma 2 x2 Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation Attractio Back to Bed Beholder Binary Domain BIT.TRIP Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien Black The Fall Broken Age Borderlands 2 + DLC Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (Fanatical Key) The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Butcher Chivalry: Medieval Warfare x 3 Chroma Squad Chronology Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy Crazy Taxi Crusader Kings II + The Old Gods DLC The Darkness II Darksiders II: Deathinitve Edition Deep Dungeons of Doom x 2 Deponia Doomsday Devil Daggers x 2 Distance Dungeon of the Endless x 2 ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West Premium Edition x 2 Epistory - Typing Chronicles The Escapists - Base Game Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered The Flame in the Flood FORCED Full Metal Furies Galactic Civilizations Ultimate Edition Goat Simulator GOD EATER 2 Rage Burst Gods Will Be Watching GoNNER GRAV Grey Goo Definitive Edition GRID 2 x 2 Grim Fandango Remastered Guacamelee! Complete Guacamelee! Gold Edition Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition Guacamelee! 2 GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN- GUILTY GEAR XX ACCENT CORE PLUS R Gunpoint x 2 Guns of Icarus Alliance Collector's Edition Guns of Icarus Online Hacknet HackyZack Hand of Fate x 2 Headlander x 2 Hidden Folks HIVESWAP: Act 1 Human Fall Flat HunieCam Studio The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut Infested Planet Jotun x 2 Kathy Rain Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth Kholat Killing Floor x 2 Kingdom: New Lands x 2 Lara Croft GO Magicka 2 x 2 Majesty 2 Collection Master Spy Mini Metro MINIT Mirage: Arcane Warfare Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight Monster Loves You Moon Hunters Mr. Shifty Mushroom 11 No Time to Explain No Time to Explain Remastered Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Okhlos OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You Overgrowth Owlboy PAC-MAN 256 PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ Pillars of Eternity Pinball FX2 The Walking Dead Please Don't Touch Anything Pony Island Project CARS Psychonauts x 3 Punch Club Purrfect Date - Visual Novel/Dating Simulator Q.U.B.E Director's Cut x 2 Quiplash Resident Evil Revelations Retro City Rampage DX Rising Storm 2: Vietnam + 2 DLCs Road Redemption Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball Saints Row 2 x 2 Sakura Fantasy Sakura Swim Club Scanner Sombre x 2 Scrap Garden Serial Cleaner The Sexy Brutale Shadow Warrior: Special Edition Shadwen Silence Skullgirls Slime-San Small Radios Big Televisions Snake Pass Sniper Elite Sniper Elite 3 Sniper Elite V2 Sonic Adventures 2 Space Pilgrim Episode 1: Alpha Centauri Spec Ops: The Line Spyro™ Reignited Trilogy Streamline STRIDER Stronghold Crusader 2 Styx: Master of Shadows Super Hexagon Super Meat Boy Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Surgeon Simulator + Anniversary Ed. Content The Swapper They Bleed Pixels This War of Mine TIS-100 Train Valley Tricky Towers Tumblestone x 2 The Turing Test Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide x 3 Wasted Westerado: Double Barreled x 3 World of Goo YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 1 XL YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 2 YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 3 YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 4: The Ride Zombie Night Terror
[W]
88 Heroes Abandon Ship Accel World VS. Sword Art Online Deluxe Edition Aegis Defenders Afterparty Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Age of Mythology: Extended Edition All Walls Must Fall AMID EVIL APE OUT Ashen Assassin's Creed Odyssey Assassin's Creed Syndicate Atomic Heart Automachef Axiom Verge Baba Is You Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series Beacon Beast Battle Simulator Beat Hazard 2 BIOMUTANT BlazBlue Centralfiction BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle Blood: Fresh Supply Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Bloody Trapland 2: Curiosity Bloons TD 6 Bomb Squad Academy Book of Travels Break the Game Call of Cthulhu Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Candleman: The Complete Journey Captain Forever Remix CARRION Catastronauts Chalo Chalo Clicker Heroes 2 Cobalt CODE VEIN Commandos 2 - HD Remaster Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Creature in the Well CrossCode Cyberpunk 2077 Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Darksiders Genesis Darksiders III DeathComing Death's Gambit DECEIVER DEEP SPACE WAIFU: WORLD DEMON'S TILT Descent: Underground Desperados III Destroy All Humans! Devil May Cry 5 Disco Elysium DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT Free Edition Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition DOA5LR Story Mode Donut County DOOM Eternal Drink More Glurp DUSK Dying Light 2 Dying Light - The Following DYNASTY WARRIORS 7: Xtreme Legends Definitive Edition DYNASTY WARRIORS 9 DYO ECHO ECHOPLEX ELEX Enigma Prison Escape the Loop EVERSPACE 2 Exo One Extinction Factorio Far Cry New Dawn FAR: Lone Sails FINAL FANTASY VIII - REMASTERED FINAL FANTASY X/X-2 HD Remaster Garbage Day Generation Zero Gloomhaven Gorogoa GreedFall Grim Dawn - Forgotten Gods Expansion GTFO Hades HALF DEAD 2 Halo: The Master Chief Collection Hand of Fate 2 - Outlands and Outsiders HellSign Hob Hollow Knight - Gods & Nightmares Hollow Knight: Silksong Hot Lava House Flipper HYPERGUN Indie Pogo Ion Fury Jettomero Junkyard Simulator Jurassic World Evolution Just Cause 4 Katamari Damacy REROLL Katana ZERO Keyboard Sports - Saving QWERTY Killer Instinct Kingdom Rush Frontiers Kingdom Rush Origins Last Man Sitting LEGO City Undercover LEGO DC Super-Villains LEGO MARVEL Super Heroes 2 Lethal League Blaze Life is Strange 2 Lightmatter Lingotopia Lonely Mountains: Downhill Lost Ember LUMINES REMASTERED Magic 2015 Manifold Garden Marble It Up! Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite Megaquarium Mekazoo Monster Crown MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD Monster League Morphies Law Mortal Kombat 11 Mount Your Friends 3D: A Hard Man is Good to Climb Mugsters My Friend Pedro Night in the Woods Nightmare Reaper Nimbatus - The Space Drone Constructor Nine Parchments No Man's Sky Noita Nother OCTOPATH TRAVELER Omensight Onechanbara Z2: Chaos OVERKILL's The Walking Dead Overload Oxygen Not Included Parkasaurus Parkitect Perception Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy / 逆転裁判123 成歩堂セレクション Photographs Pinball FX3 - Universal Classics Pinball Planet Zoo Pneuma: Breath of Life Positron Praey for the Gods Prey - Mooncrash Production Line Project Hospital Project Warlock Project Zomboid Pummel Party Puyo Puyo Tetris RAGE 2 ReCore: Definitive Edition Regular Human Basketball Re:Legend Resynth ReThink | Evolved 2 Retimed Rifter Risk of Rain 2 Rocksmith 2014 - Disturbed Song Pack II Sakura Gamer Salt and Sanctuary Sam & Max Hit the Road Samurai Gunn Secrets of Grindea Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Semblance SENRAN KAGURA Burst Re:Newal SENRAN KAGURA Peach Ball SENRAN KAGURA Peach Beach Splash Serious Sam 4 SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter Shadow of the Tomb Raider Shakedown: Hawaii Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth SOULCALIBUR VI - DLC2: 2B Space Pirates and Zombies 2 Spinnortality SpyParty SteamWorld Dig 2 Subverse Sunless Sea - Zubmariner Sunless Skies Super Bomberman R Super Meat Boy Forever SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE SWORDY System Shock: Adventure Alpha Tech Support: Error Unknown TEKKEN 7 - Season Pass 2 Telling Lies Temtem The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ The Council The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan The Document of Midnight Animal The Elder Scrolls Online - Morrowind The Hex The Impossible Game The Messenger The Outer Worlds The Room Three The Spectrum Retreat The Universim They Are Billions Tick Tock: A Tale for Two Titan Quest: Atlantis Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Blacklist Totally Accurate Battle Simulator Trackmania² Lagoon TrackMania² Valley Trials Rising Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Unheard Untitled Goose Game VALKYRIE DRIVE -BHIKKHUNI- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Vampyr WARRIORS OROCHI 4 - 無双OROCHI3 We Happy Few We Were Here Together What the Dark Keeps Wolfenstein: Youngblood Wreckfest Yakuza Kiwami Yakuza Kiwami 2 Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist Zoo Tycoon
submitted by TTTBradshaw to SteamGameSwap [link] [comments]

[H] 150+ Humble Bundle Leftovers [W] They Are Billions, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, The Night in the Woods & Offers from Wishlist

I'm mostly looking for They Are Billions, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle & The Night in the Woods, however, I will appreciate offers for any game in my Wishlist
Quite new to trading so not much rep, but here is my Rep Link. Also my Profile
All my games are from Humble Bundle, so a gift link option is available if preferred. As they are all from Bundles, I'm happy to trade my games 2-6 for 1 (depending on the game)
10000000 2064: Read Only Memories Aaero AI War: Fleet Command Alan Wake's American Nightmare Anomaly 2 Anomaly: Warzone Earth Aporia: Beyond the Valley Arma 2 x2 Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation Attractio Back to Bed Beholder Binary Domain BIT.TRIP Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien Black The Fall Borderlands 2 + DLC Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (Fanatical Key) The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Butcher Chivalry: Medieval Warfare x 4 Chroma Squad Chronology Crazy Taxi Crusader Kings II + The Old Gods DLC The Darkness II Darksiders II: Deathinitve Edition Day of the Tentacle Deep Dungeons of Doom x 2 Deponia Doomsday Devil Daggers x 2 Distance Drawful 2 Dungeon of the Endless x 2 ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West Premium Edition x 2 Epistory - Typing Chronicles The Escapists - Base Game Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered The Flame in the Flood FORCED Full Metal Furies Galactic Civilizations Ultimate Edition Goat Simulator GOD EATER 2 Rage Burst x 2 Gods Will Be Watching GoNNER GRAV Grey Goo Definitive Edition GRID 2 x 2 Grim Fandango Remastered Guacamelee! Complete Guacamelee! Gold Edition Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition Guacamelee! 2 GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN- GUILTY GEAR XX ACCENT CORE PLUS R Gunpoint x 2 Guns of Icarus Alliance Collector's Edition Guns of Icarus Online Hacknet HackyZack Hand of Fate x 2 Headlander x 2 Hidden Folks HIVESWAP: Act 1 Human Fall Flat HunieCam Studio The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut Infested Planet Jotun x 2 Kathy Rain Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth Kholat Killing Floor x 2 Killing Floor 2 Kingdom: New Lands x 2 Lara Croft GO Layers of Fear: Masterpiece Edition Life is Strange Complete Season (Episodes 1-5) Magicka 2 x 2 Majesty 2 Collection Master Spy Mini Metro MINIT Mirage: Arcane Warfare Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight Monster Loves You Moon Hunters Mr. Shifty Mushroom 11 No Time to Explain No Time to Explain Remastered Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Okhlos OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You Outlast Overcooked Overgrowth Owlboy PAC-MAN 256 PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ Pillars of Eternity Pinball FX2 The Walking Dead Please Don't Touch Anything Pony Island Project CARS Psychonauts x 3 Punch Club Q.U.B.E Director's Cut x 2 Quiplash Resident Evil Revelations Retro City Rampage DX Rising Storm 2: Vietnam + 2 DLCs Road Redemption Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball Saints Row 2 x 2 Sakura Fantasy Sakura Swim Club Scanner Sombre x 2 Scrap Garden Serial Cleaner The Sexy Brutale Shadow Warrior: Special Edition Shadwen Silence Skullgirls Slime-San Small Radios Big Televisions Snake Pass Sniper Elite Sniper Elite 3 Sniper Elite V2 Sonic Adventures 2 Space Pilgrim Episode 1: Alpha Centauri Spec Ops: The Line SPINTIRES Streamline STRIDER Stronghold Crusader 2 Styx: Master of Shadows Super Hexagon Super Meat Boy Super Time Force Ultra Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Surgeon Simulator + Anniversary Ed. Content The Swapper They Bleed Pixels This War of Mine TIS-100 Train Valley Tumblestone x 2 The Turing Test Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide x 3 Wasted Westerado: Double Barreled x 3 World of Goo Wuppo Yooka-Laylee YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 1 XL YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 2 YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 3 YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 4: The Ride Zombie Night Terror
submitted by TTTBradshaw to SteamGameSwap [link] [comments]

TALLAHASSEE EVENTS 6/23 – 7/2

Good list this week.
Tally’s Independent Cinema and Theater Offerings:
ALSO:
SATURDAY 6/23
SUNDAY 6/24
  • Fat Cat Café: Yoga with Kitties. “Only 15 spots available per class. Please bring a $10 donation to Black Cats, Old Dogs and a yoga mat. Includes a 50-minute yoga class with 20 minutes of cuddle time following. Book online to reserve your spot.” 10am/$10
  • Local 501: LOCAL - The Day Party Edition - NOW WITH ADDED Manley. “This month's LOCAL at Local 501 is a special edition - Sunday day party featuring the one and only Manley aka Christopher Paul Manley aka the brains behind Menace Beach. Fall through and welcome the main man back to Tallahassee. Have a beer (or six) with him. Vibe out to the house vibes provided by DJ A to the L before Manley takes over on the ones and twos. We're rocking from 1pm to 6pm at Local 501 - Barbershop by day, lounge by night... once the day's business is done, the couches come out, the pool table is set, and the bar is open with some of the finest craft beers on tap.” 1pm
  • Hurricane Grill: Sunday Fun Day with Brad Foutch! 3pm
  • Jan’s Gallery: Jan, Mike & Rachel Get Ready for Ireland! 6:45pm/$5
MONDAY 6/25
  • Junction @ Monroe: Monday Night Bingo. “Good food, good drinks, good friends, and a chance to win some big cashola! It doesn't get any better than [email protected]. Every Monday from 7pm-9pm we've got cash payouts up to $250 per game with multiple games each night PLUS a 50/50 drawing each week benefitting the Tallahassee Area Musicians Guild.” 7pm-9pm
  • Lofty Pursuits: Game Night. 7pm
  • Hobbit American Grill West: Quiz Night from Bar Trivia With Hank. “They got wings, they got beer, and now they have great trivia. Come on out to a new night!” 7pm
  • Blue Tavern (N Monroe St): Lost Mondays hosted by Belmont & Jones. “Antique blues played acoustical.” 8pm/$2
  • Waterworks: Napoleon Dynamite Patio Theater. 7:35pm/21+/free
  • Finnegan’s Irish Pub: Karaoke with DJ Paul Cornish and Hospitality Night. “If you're a hospitality worker, don't forget to bring your most recent paystub or work schedule to receive that sweet 25% discount!” 10pm
  • LeRoy Collins Library: African Caribbean Dance Theatre. “All ages welcomed! Special performance from the ACDT! Expect a history, music, & dance lesson and lots of fun!” 6:30pm
TUESDAY 6/26
  • Corner of Georgia & Macomb: Frenchtown Farmers’ Market. “Find your favorite local goodies now on Tuesdays! Join us at Frenchtown Farmers Market for all-local produce, eggs, gourmet jelly, and more. The market opens at 3pm and we're here until 7pm, so come after you pick the kids up from school or on your way home from work. We can double SNAP benefits through the Fresh Access Bucks program. Our farmers accept WIC and Senior farmers market nutrition program coupons.” 3pm-7pm.
  • Junction @ Monroe: Live Rehearsal Tuesdays. “Tuesdays are Live Rehearsals at [email protected]. Sponsored by the Tallahassee Area Musicians Guild. Utilize our complete backline and PA for rehearsals, jams, or hold auditions. Up to one hour slots (or more depending on number of signups) per artist/group.” 4pm
  • Madison Social: Trivia Social. They do half and half theme and miscellaneous, so check their FB every week for an event page. 7pm
  • Brass Tap in Midtown: Trivia. Check their FB page for the theme. 7pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: Trivia. 7pm
  • Bird’s Oyster Shack: Trivia With John Carpenter. Lively and fun. 7:30pm
  • GrassLands Brewing Company: Trivia Factory. 7:30pm
  • Midtown Pies: Bar Trivia With Hank. 50 questions of sweet, sweet trivia. Food! Beer! Something random in a bag! 8pm/free
  • Fourth Quarter: Trivia With Professor Jim. AUCE wings. Truly a trivia favorite. 8pm
  • Krewe de Gras: Karaoke With Pete. 8:30pm
  • Brass Tap on Gaines: Karaoke with DJRah. 9pm
  • 926 Bar & Grill: Trivia Tuesday! 9:30pm
  • Applebee’s on the Parkway: Karaoke with Amanda Goram. 10pm
  • Pockets Pool: Karaoke with Dwight. 10pm/21+
  • The Sharing Tree: Recycled Robot Build & Play. “Sharing Tree hosts an awesome day camp filled with robot and monster everything! Build your recycled Robot from reuse materials... make a monster book and play it out! Bring a lunch!” 10am/$40
  • Cap City Video Lounge: Killer Workout & Deathspa: Beach Body Bloodbath Double Feature! 7:30pm
  • The Bark: Felipe Pupo (philly), Channel Pyro, Artisan P. 10pm/$5/all ages
WEDNESDAY 6/27
  • Bird's Oyster Shack: Summer Vacation Jam with Jim and the Lab Rats. “The Wednesday Night Lab Session is approaching the end of another fabulous season and we will celebrate with a big jam session before I take a vacation and leave you in the most excellent care of my dear friends: Mike & Jan, Carrie Hamby, Lee C Payton, and Bruce Graybeal. For the Summer Vacation Jam on June 27 we will start a little early and run a little late just to get in all the fun. Helping me in the backing band for the first part of the show will be Kevin Robertson and Holly Riley. Mike & Jan and Eddie McFarland will join us for a couple numbers and I expect some other Lab Session alumni will come by as well. The backing band for the second part of the show will include: Ben Banks, Don Austin, Chris Skene, and Mike Stone. Stopping by to do a tune or two with the band will be TD & Kathi Giddings, Lee C Payton, Jimi McKenzie, Bruce Graybeal, and Katie Crozier-Theis AKA Sally B Dash.” 6pm
  • Fermentation Lounge: Trivia. 7pm
  • Brass Tap on Gaines: Trivia. Check their FB page for the theme. 7pm
  • Dave’s Pizza Garage: Trivia. 7pm
  • Hurricane Grill & Wings: Trivia With Greg. 7pm
  • Burrito Boarder: Dungeons & Dragons. “Different adventures every week. Beginners welcome.” 7pm
  • GrassLands Brewing Company: BYOBG! Bring Your Own Board Game. “Our gracious host, Trevor Bond, will be featuring one game each week. Feel free to bring your own games to play & share.” 7pm/21+
  • Junction @ Monroe: Bike Night, Bingo, and Karaoke. 7pm
  • Black Dog on the Square: Settlers of Catan Game Night. 7pm
  • Proof: Bar Trivia With Hank. “Drink delicious brews and show off all those random factoids you thought you’d never use. Local beer, local trivia in the heart of Tally’s Art District. They now have the MoBi food truck every week! Bar tab for 1st and 2nd place teams.” 7:30pm/21+/no cover
  • Cancuns: Singo (like Bingo but with music). 8pm
  • Island Wings: Wine Down Wednesday featuring Steve Johnson. 8pm
  • All Saints Club: The Warehouse Open Mic Lives! 8pm
  • Finnegan’s Wake: Waxy Wednesdays. “Feelin' waxy, Tallahassee? That's probably just because it's Wednesday. At Finnegan's Wake, Waxy Wednesday means DJ Ryze will be hitting our floor again to spin some vinyl and get your feet moving tonight. Feeling a bit sour, girls? Not to worry- we'll also have some fantastic $5 drink specials going for all those Tallahassee ladies looking for a bit of fun. Come out and help us get the party started!” 8pm
  • The Skybox (Crawfordville): Karaoke with Mark. 9pm
  • Krewe de Gras: DÉJÀ VU Latin Wednesdays. “FREE Salsa/Mambo classes by Barry C. Williams. The duration of the class is 9-10 and having a partner is not necessary. If you've never danced Salsa/Mambo before then don't worry about it. The classes are made to be easy and fun so you can come learn some moves and then stay and dance until 2am to the sounds of DJ Jimmy Suave.” 9pm
  • Just One More: Karaoke with Roger. 9pm
  • Corner Pocket: Karaoke. 9pm
  • Bird’s: Comedy Night. I’m pretty sure this is both a performance and an open mic. 9:30pm/free
  • The Bark on All Saints: Karaoke with Nathan. “Nathan has all the songs you could ever want, The Bark is a great space, and there’s a very friendly crowd. If you’re not really into the fratty or country karaoke scene, this may be your spot. They have mixed drinks, bountiful beer options, and amazing vegan/vegetarian food until 2 am – and I say that as a staunch omnivore.” 9:30pm
  • Fire Betty’s: Karaoke with DJ Paul Cornish. 10pm
  • 926: Dragged Out Wednesday. “We have Twice the Show! Twice the the DJ and Twice the Fun! Start the night with Cole during The Hours Of Happy and then finish the evening with Rebecca as they sling the magic behind the Bar. Hungry? Well Chris NoChill has you covered! He'll be rocking the kitchen all night! Then join the KingzKru for Showtime at 10:30 and Midnight while our DJ and She-J's Garion Djgg Grant and Izzy B (Isabella Berrios) keep the Dance Deck moving and you enjoying the party!” 10pm
  • Happy Motoring: Drag Bingo. “Happy Motoring is honored to host our first Drag Bingo. We’ve got some incredible queens hosting, delicious drinks, multiple performances and lots of Bingo fun.” 5pm
  • Fat Cat Café: Yoga with Kitties. “Only 15 spots available per class. Please bring a $10 donation to Black Cats, Old Dogs and a yoga mat. Includes a 50-minute yoga class with 20 minutes of cuddle time following. Book online to reserve your spot.” 6pm/$10
  • Cap City Video Lounge: Night Of The Lepus & Snakes On A Plane: Dr. Orloxian Presents! 7:30 pm
  • Waterworks: SpongeBob Trivia! “Our monthly trivia night for June heads to Bikini Bottom! Three rounds of trivia relating to the greatest cartoon to come from under the sea! First, second, and third place prizes will be given to those teams or individuals that know more about SpongeBob than the others.” 7:35pm/21+/free
THURSDAY 6/28
  • Lake Ella Area: Food Truck Thursday. 5:30pm
  • Kleman Plaza: Free Downtown YOGA! 6pm
  • Hurricane Wings: Double Take. 6pm
  • Beef O’Brady’s: AJ Johnson Trivia. 6:30pm
  • Hurricane: Ballistic Bingo. 7pm
  • 926 Bar & Grill: RuPaul Drag Race Viewing Party. 7pm-10pm
  • Skybox: $10 Cornhole Tourney. 7:30pm
  • La Fiesta: Trivia. 7:30pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: Karaoke and Dance Party. 8pm
  • Warhorse: Quiz Night from Bar trivia With Hank. “Sometimes dirty, always nerdy. Come on down and do 5 rounds of awesome, hand crafted trivia. Plus pizza and whiskey!” 8pm
  • Dux (Crawfordville): Karaoke with Big Bob. $25 bar tab given away every week. 8:30pm-12:30pm
  • Fermentation Lounge: Open Mic Night. “Sign-ups will begin at 7:30pm and be on a first come, first serve basis. Each getting around 12-15 minutes to perform. The first artist will begin at 8:30pm. Each artist will receive a FREE beer for their performance.” 8:30pm
  • Midtown Caboose: Trivia Factory. “General Knowledge, 20 questions + Wager Final. $35/$25/$15, and Best Team Name gets a round of shots.” 8pm
  • Island Wings: Bike Night. “A night dedicated just to you! We have a special menu just for those who ride their motorcycles to the restaurant, there is designated up front parking for your bikes, and live music on the patio from 8pm-11pm. There's no better place to eat, hang out with your friends, and show off your ride.” 8pm
  • Unique Wonders: Live Comedy with Big Hou! 8:30pm/$5
  • Junction @ Monroe: Comedy Zone: Frank Del Pizzo & Mark Evans. 9pm
  • Pockets: Karaoke Dance Party with Keith Welch. 9pm/21+
  • Brass Tap Midtown: Karaoke with DJ Rah. 9pm-Midnight
  • 926 Bar and Grill: Bass Parade: Ladies of Bass. 9pm
  • Applebees on Cap Cir: Karaoke with Amanda Goram. 10pm
  • Birds: Karaoke with Nathan. All the songs. $1 Pabst drafts. 10pm
  • The Sharing Tree: Music is Magic Day. “Day camp! Make, listen, build, play! Special guests musicians and make a fun instrument! Bring a lunch and have a blast!” 10am
  • Fire Betty’s: Brandon and Carli’s Throw Back Thursday: 90’s Cartoon Mixer. 5pm
  • Hurricane Grill and Wings: Kevin Ogden. 6pm
  • LeRoy Collins Library: Trivia Night. “Teens and Tweens! Come with your friends and test your trivia knowledge! Teams of 6 can enjoy snacks and compete for a 1st place prize! Sponsored by the Friends of the Library.” 6pm
  • Planned Parenthood: Sex Trivia at the New Tallahassee PP Health Center. “Show off your sexpertise with a night full of fun trivia, raffles, prizes and a chance to check out our brand new state-of-the-art health center. Our Planned Parenthood educators will test your knowledge of all things sex including surprising sex facts, the history of sexuality, sex myths and more! We will be providing complimentary food, desserts and non-alcoholic beverages. Beer, wine and a signature cocktail will be available for purchase (for those 21 and over). The first drink is on us! Spots are limited and filling up fast so please register if you plan to attend.” 7pm
  • Fifth & Thomas: Leon County Democrats Primary Primer. “Join the Leon County Democratic Party and community leaders and hosts for the Primary Primer, a fundraising event featuring a cash bar, heavy hors d'oeuvres and live music by local jazz legend Avis Berry!” 7pm
  • Cap City Video Lounge: The Beatniks & The Violent Years: MST3K Thursday! 7:30pm
  • Tallahassee Junior Museum: Soaring Cypress Full Moon Night Flight. “Tree To Tree Adventures’ Night Flights are a very exciting way to experience the Soaring Cypress zip line course in the dark. Grab your headlamps and zip through the tree-tops while conquering aerial obstacles and soaring over the cypress swamp.” 7:30pm/$49 nonmembers/$45 members
  • Blue Tavern: Paul Harvey and Katherine Easterling. 8pm
  • Finnegan’s Wake: Midnight Caravan. 8pm
  • The Bark: Logan Greene, Nude Tayne, Jacob FM. 8:30pm/$5/all ages
FRIDAY 6/29
  • Fifth & Thomas: RP Allen in the Backstage Garden. 6pm-8pm
  • Hobbit South: Karaoke with Paul. 8pm-Midnight/all ages
  • Leggetts: Karaoke presented by Galen Goram. 9pm
  • Just One More: Karaoke with Roger. 9pm
  • Island Wing Company: Friday Night Unwind. “End your work week on the island with live music on the patio at 9pm. Come enjoy some great food, drinks with your friends, and unwind.” 9pm
  • Stetsons @ The Moon: Karaoke with Devin Cywinski. 10pm/$5/18+
  • Hobbit West: Friday Night Comedy. “Friday night at the Hobbit we will be having a variety of comedy! From stand Up to Improv where the whole crowd can participate. 2 fro 1 drink specials all night with some of the best food in the city. All hosted by Big Hou!!” 10pm
  • Privé: Havana Nights. “Latin-Caribbean Vibes All Night Long.” 10pm
  • 926 Lounge: The Hot Friday Night Party - May the Fourth Edition. “Tallahassee's premier LGBTQA Hot Friday Night Party returns to kick off your weekend with another fabulous Friday night! This Friday is May The Fourth (insert Star Wars reference here) - so feel free to bring out your nerdy best. If that's not enough, after midnight, it becomes Cinco de Mayo as well - it's an amazing party weekend!” 10pm
  • Geo's Pub & Pool (both locations): Karaoke. 10pm-1am
  • Waterworks: June Paella Party! “Juan returns from Real Paella to cook up the best tasting Paella in the Big Bend! Paired with Waterworks' Sangria, it will be a wonderful and tasty early evening event. Cooking demonstration starts at 6:00pm with Paella serving at 7:00pm. Purchase a ticket inside Waterworks for each plate of Paella and redeem at the Paella station. Paella plates served with side salad $14.00 (tax included). Three types of Paella available: Paella mixta with seafood, chicken and lots of veggies. Valencia Paella with chicken, rabbit and duck. Vegan Paella.” 6:00pm
  • Hurricane Grill and Wings: John Sutton Band. 6pm
  • Fifth & Thomas: Shooter Jennings/Lisa Bouchelle/Luke Langford. 7pm/$35/21+
  • Palmer Monroe Teen Center: Splash & Jam 2018. “All area youth are invited to hang out every Friday night this summer, as another season of Splash & Jam takes over area community centers. Hosted by the City’s Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Affairs (PRNA) Department and the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD), Splash & Jam, which originally began in 2011, offers local families and teens free, safe alternatives for late night summer fun. Splash & Jam will feature a family-style pool party – “the splash” – from 7-9 p.m. As there is not a pool at the Palmer Munroe Teen Center, there will be water activities from 7-9 p.m. After the splash, teens will be invited to “jam” inside the community centers at themed events featuring food, games and music. The teen parties will take place from 9-11 p.m. and are designed for middle and high school youth. Each event will be monitored by adult chaperones, City staff and police officers.” 7pm
  • American Legion Hall: NightShift. 8pm/$5
  • Proof: Southern Latitude Band. 8pm
  • The Wilbury: The Lessers/Cool Now/Stewie James/McCall & Katareen. 8pm/free
  • Cap City Video Lounge: Summer Camp Nightmare Fright Flicks Friday featuring Madman, The Burning, and Sleepaway Camp. 8pm
  • The Blue Tavern: The Flathead String Band. 8pm
  • The Bark: EtheAge Of Misery/HeatseekeLA-A. 8:30pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: RoadHouse 25th Anniversary Party. 9pm
  • The Warrior on the River: Otherworld with Johnny Zostant, Grimwär, and Aleutian Fire. 9pm
SATURDAY 6/30
  • Market Square: Tallahassee Farmer's Market. 8am-3pm
  • Downtown: Tallahassee Downtown Market. “Fresh from the garden local produce for fixing up that cool melon bowl. Fresh baked bread with jams and jellies just like granny made. Unique arts and craft gifts for you and yours all hand made by the artist in the booth. Come relax under the majestic oak on Park Ave at Monroe street as you listen to our own singer song writer Paul Harbin across the street from the Doubletree by Hilton. Want to be a vendor please join us! Information is available at www.downtownmarket.com or call the office at 850-224-3252. Thanks.” 10am-2pm
  • Corner of Georgia & Macomb: Frenchtown Farmers’ Market. “Find your favorite local goodies! Join us at Frenchtown Farmers Market for all-local produce, eggs, gourmet jelly, and more. We can double SNAP benefits through the Fresh Access Bucks program. Our farmers accept WIC and Senior farmers market nutrition program coupons.” 10am – 2pm.
  • Gamescape: Game Tally Saturday Board Gaming. “Meeting weekly in Tallahassee, Florida, we seek to promote and offer public opportunities to learn new games and make new friends in a relaxed, fun environment.” Noon
  • The Plant: Open Mike Jam Session. “Come to the plant and jam! Singing, music, spoken word, dance, all are welcome at this weekly open mic jam session.” 4pm
  • Salty Dawg: Karaoke with Paul. Family friendly! 8pm
  • Leggetts: Karaoke presented by Galen Goram. 9pm
  • The Skybox (Crawfordville): Karaoke with Mark. 9pm
  • El Patron: Pasion Latina. Bachata, Merengue, Salsa, Reggaeton. 9pm
  • 926 Lounge: Sanctuary: Tallahassee’s Longest Running Goth Night. 10pm/$5/18+
  • UU Church of Tallahassee: Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Cultural Competency. “UUCT is hosting a Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Cultural Competency and Inclusion Workshop, put on by Equality Florida’s TransAction Team. We would love to welcome any members, friends, and guests to participate in this free training.” 8:45am
  • Bookshelf 2: Wedding of Batman and Catwoman. “You are invited to witness the "Wedding of the Year". Batman and Catwoman will be joined in Holy Matrimony at the Bookshelf 2 on June 30th. Come dressed in your favorite cosplay/costumes and watch the ceremony, get pictures with the wedding party, have some cake at the reception. We'll also have some Bat-tastic sales afterwards.” 10am
  • Crawfordville: #FamilesBelongTogether Protest at ICE Detention Center. “Donald Trump and his administration are cruelly separating children from their families. But we won't allow it to continue. On June 30, we're rallying around the country and in Washington, D.C., to tell Donald Trump and his administration to stop separating kids from their parents! Trump and his administration have been systematically criminalizing immigration and immigrants, from revoking Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to ramping up intimidating ICE tactics. Pledge to take action on June 30! Rally at the Wakulla ICE Detention Center! Let's send a clear message to Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress: Families Belong Together.” Noon
  • Cap City Video Lounge: Summer Of '98 Movie Marathon featuring Mulan, Truman Show, There's Something About Mary, Bulworth, The X-Files: Fight the Future, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Pi. Noon-1am
  • Capitol Building: Family Separation Protest at Florida Capitol. “On June 30th, in conjunction with the national protest at the White House we will host a protest to tell Donald Trump and his administration to stop separating kids from their parents! Families belong together. The attack on immigrant families needs to end now.” 5pm
  • Hurricane Grill and Wings: Six String South. 6pm
  • Blue Tavern: Happy Hour with The Folkies: Brooke & Michael. 6pm
  • Tiger Rock Martial Arts: Nerf Blaster Wars. “For the first time ever, Tiger Rock Martial Arts is hosting a black light, Nerf party and it is going to be EPIC! Darts will glow, your kids will glow, and even the court will glow.” 6pm
  • American Legion Hall: Wakulla Rising CD Release Party. 7pm
  • Tallahassee Junior Museum: Night Prowl. “Enjoy a guided tour at the Tallahassee Museum and learn about the night life along the Florida Wildlife Trail. Your guide will provide an enjoyable experience as you spot the many nocturnal animals which call the Museum home. You will also have an opportunity to get close to one special night creature.” 7pm
  • Fat Cat Café: Movie Night featuring KiKi's Delivery Service. 7pm
  • The Saloon at the Pavilion: Nashville Nights with musical guest Houston Deese and Eric and Ben from the Tobacco Rd Band! (Line dancing.) 7pm
  • Blue Tavern: They Came From The Same! “Kelly Goddard and Brian Durham, two thirds of the local Americana band The New 76ers, will trade songs and stories for an evening of incredible music – enjoy the sibling harmony singing that makes 76ers' sound so special!” 8pm/$5
  • Warrior on the River: Girls Night Out, The Show. (Male strippers.) 8pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: South Munroe with Bill Pandolfi and Avis Berry. 8pm
  • The Wilbury: Anna Griffith, Group Dating (note: pretty sure that is the name of a band). 8pm/free
  • Fifth & Thomas: Top Shelf Band. 9:30pm
SUNDAY 7/1
  • Athena’s Garden: Herb Class. 2pm
  • The Junction @ Monroe: Sunday Afternoon Bingo. “This isn't your grandma's bingo! We have a blast with some very cool folks. Cash prizes.” 5pm
  • Salty Dawg Pub & Deli: The Famous Acoustic Jam w/ Wayne, Glenn, and Bo. Open mic, free beer for performers. 6pm
  • Cancuns: Reggae Sunday. 6pm
  • Finnegan’s Wake: Irish Music Session. 7pm
  • 926: Sunday Rewind. “Your favorite songs and videos are back again this Sunday at 926 with no cover before midnight!!! 926 is proud to present another addition of the Sunday Rewind - join us as we revisit some of the best music and videos from the last 40 years. Start your night with happy hour featuring Trivia Rewind with Erik from 7 to 9 in the pub. The club side opens up at 10 when DJ Matthew East and VJ Carben will be spinning all your favorite hits and videos from the 80s, 90s and 2000s even throwing in a few from the 70s as well. Rebecca and Branden will be serving up all your favorite drinks along with our amazing 926 food.” 7pm/No cover if you are in line before 12. After 12, cover is just $5 for 18+
  • Birds: Sunday Funnies Free Comedy Show. 7:30pm
  • Finnegan’s Wake: 1st Sunday - Bluegrass Jam. 7pm
MONDAY 7/2
  • Junction @ Monroe: Monday Night Bingo. “Good food, good drinks, good friends, and a chance to win some big cashola! It doesn't get any better than [email protected]. Every Monday from 7pm-9pm we've got cash payouts up to $250 per game with multiple games each night PLUS a 50/50 drawing each week benefitting the Tallahassee Area Musicians Guild.” 7pm-9pm
  • Lofty Pursuits: Game Night. 7pm
  • Hobbit American Grill West: Quiz Night from Bar Trivia With Hank. “They got wings, they got beer, and now they have great trivia. Come on out to a new night!” 7pm
  • Blue Tavern (N Monroe St): Lost Mondays hosted by Belmont & Jones. “Antique blues played acoustical.” 8pm/$2
  • Waterworks: Patio Theater. 7:35pm/21+
  • Finnegan’s Irish Pub: Karaoke with DJ Paul Cornish and Hospitality Night. “If you're a hospitality worker, don't forget to bring your most recent paystub or work schedule to receive that sweet 25% discount!” 10pm
submitted by clearliquidclearjar to Tallahassee [link] [comments]

discussion regarding POP (probability of profit)

Ok, there seems to be some confusion about POP, making it way more mystical or even "proprietary" than it needs to be, but option PRICING and positioning is crucial in understanding the fundamentals.
First, the actual POP formulas (you can skip this, I'll show you the quick math below in lieu of these, but it's simple formulas for Pete's sake):
Credit Spread: 100 - [(the credit received / strike price width) x 100]
Debit Spread: 100 - [(the max profit / strike price width) x 100]
Iron Condors: 100-((credit received/width of spread)*100)
Naked Options: Strike Price - Premium = breakeven. 100 - (probability of breakeven ITM)= POP
So what is POP? It's the risk/reward weighed over a probability (bell) curve at the time you place your trade. This is reflected in the premium price received weighed against the likely risk or capped max loss.
What is delta? Amount of directional risk.
"Back of the envelope" POP calculation: 100 - delta = POP% (e.g., short 0.30 delta put has 70% POP, an iron condor with 0.16 delta put and 0.16 call is 68% POP) If you do the math, this gets you darn close to the formulas above)
1) The price doesn't set the market, the market sets the price. Just like the Cowboys are 9-1 odds to go to the superbowl, or paying $750 a month for insurance because you smoke cigarettes, it's marketplace, it's statistical. It's definitely not blind magic.
2) Let there be range! Distribution, standard deviations, distribution curves and yes, even variance! It's how the world of options are PRICED and modeled. Price is derived from supply and demand driven by speculation, leverage, binary events (earnings) and fear (hedging)! Implied Volatility (IV) expands and contracts affecting both delta (directional risk) and premium pricing, which in turn affects POP calculation. (Think of the distribution curve expanding and contracting in width and what that means to premium prices and POP) Keep in mind, as the underlyings change, so does delta, so does the risk profile, so does POP. It's dynamic after all. But at the time I place a trade there is a statistical range and liklihood, risk/reward, expressed as POP. That's all. Nothing more. Doesn't mean I'm guaranteed a 70% success rate over 45days, ship it!! All it's saying is what the current marketplace is willing to pay at a given likelihood at that moment vs the accepted risk. (odds)
3) The markets are priced to perfection, fear is overstated. When markets tumble, firms buy up puts for protection and the IV shoots up (demand driven). Another example, when earnings comes around the buying demand goes up, the uncertainty rises, the IV expands, the delta curve widens. IV can be overstated in its rise, and even exploited during binary events in it's collapse, given that IV ALWAYS reverts back to the mean. This edge is not huge, but is figured to be 2-3% in favor (outside of binary). IV influences price, which affects POP.
4) The art of adjustment. If delta moves too high (risk), adjustments can be made by rolling (up or out) or with offsetting positions (i.e.,opposing spreads or pair trades) to reduce the position's overall delta... while often collecting additional premium while doing so! You can not do that cheaply or easily buying options...and guess what? Adjustments have POP! Furthermore, Tastytrade studies are showing that managing winners aggressively (i.e., 50%) increases POP even further, in that, we are reducing the number of days the trade is on and therefore eliminating risk increasing win rate. We can see 70% POP trades actually become 80% POP by adjusting at 50% profit.
5) Why does TastyTrade coin the term POP? First of all, every trader and brokerage platform models the probability of profit in similar form, it's just terminology. IB calls it "percentage of profit" for example. But moreso, your brokerage doesn't know how to trade options, doesn't give a fuck to teach you about trading options. Buy calls, pay 1.50-$8 a trade, and wait until expiration helplessly. TastyTrade is free. Ad free even (how refreshing). And if you want, they offer the cheapest brokerage fee out there in TastyWorks, if you so oblige.
Keep in mind this discussion did not touch on theta (time decay/acceleration) or gamma (delta velocity) which further affect price movements.
References: Start at 8:30mins: http://ontt.tv/2cdvnF7
Start at 4:30mins: https://www.tastytrade.com/tt/shows/best-practices/episodes/probability-and-standard-deviations-06-12-2017
Start at 0:00 (MUST WATCH IN MY OPINION) https://www.tastytrade.com/tt/shows/market-measures/episodes/delta-and-probability-06-15-2017
submitted by Realdeal43 to options [link] [comments]

WEEKLY EVENTS 8/15 - 8/22

I'm exhausted, but this is only about half of the stuff for this week. I'll have to pick it up again tomorrow, so check back in a day or two for the full listing. Thank you!
Tally’s Independent Cinema and Theater Offerings:
Also
MONDAY 8/15
TUESDAY 8/16
  • Centre of Tallahassee: Alice Cooper. 6:30pm/all ages
  • Waterworks: Exotic Wildlife Gone Wild! Science Salon. “It's not just sock and sandal wearing tourists that set up camp in Florida but also a whole lot of critters that dig the scene here and never leave! Kristen Sommers from FWC will host and explain how mostly awful non native species negatively impact our environment and explain some of the steps taken to mitigate that impact and stop future interlopers from changing their address to Fla.” 8:35pm/free/21+
WEDNESDAY 8/17
  • Bird’s Oyster Shack: Wednesday Night Lab Session With Guest host: Ben Banks. 6pm-8pm/free
  • Fermentation Lounge: Quizmaster General Knowledge Trivia. “Quizmaster is hosted by Bennett Miller from 7-9pm every Wednesday, and features three rounds of general knowledge trivia (and a weekly food special). It is free to play and teams of up to 6 are welcome. The winner of each round receives a sample flight, and the Quizmaster for the night receives a $25 gift card and serious credit on Geek Street.” 7pm
  • Brass Tap on Gaines: Trivia. Check their FB page for the theme. 7pm
  • Hurricane Grill & Wings: Trivia With Greg. 7pm
  • GrassLands Brewing Company: BYOBG! Bring Your Own Board Game. “Our gracious host, Trevor Bond, will be featuring one game each week. Feel free to bring your own games to play & share.” 7pm/21+
  • Proof: Bar Trivia With Hank. Drink delicious brews and show off all those random factoids you thought you’d never use. Local beer, local trivia in the heart of Tally’s Art District. A food truck is always out front for this, too, or you can order and pick up something great at the Crum Box Gastgarden (the caboose in RR Sq). Bar tab for 1st and 2nd place teams. 7:30pm/no cover
  • The Warehouse: Open Mic. “There is a lottery for time slots. Now smoke free!” 8pm
  • 926 Bar & Grill: Karaoke with Nathan. He’s got all the songs. All the songs you want to sing. If you see me there, don’t make too much fun. 9pm
  • Just One More: Karaoke with Roger. 9pm
  • Bird’s: Comedy Night. I’m pretty sure this is both a performance and an open mic. 9:30pm/free
  • Parlay Sports Bar: Mario Kart Tournament. “Our first Mario Kart Tournament was such a success we've decided to do it again! If you're a little rusty, don't worry, you can stop by anytime and practice, we've got everything hooked up and ready to go, and you can play anywhere in the bar. First place wins a $50 bar tab, and second place wins $25! The tournament is limited to 16 players, and preference will be given to those that sign up beforehand, so make sure to stop by, grab a beer and get your name down!” 6:30pm/18+
THURSDAY 8/18
  • Lake Ella Area: Food Truck Thursday featuring Dorian Q Jazz Theater. 6pm
  • Beef O’Brady’s: Trivia Night from AJ Johnson Trivia. 6:30pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: Open Mic. “The only open mic that pays the performers! Bring your instruments and play an open slot or just come and be entertained in Tallahassee's best sounding room! Free draft beer for performers.” 7pm/$5
  • Gaines Street Pies: Bar Trivia With Hank @ Warhorse Whiskey Bar. With a picture round! Sound round! Speed round! Hoarder’s Delight drawing! And all the other trivias! Win a delicious 18” pizza! 8pm
  • Dux (Crawfordville): Karaoke with Big Bob. $25 bar tab given away every week. 8:30pm-12:30pm
  • Midtown Caboose: Trivia Factory. 8:30pm
  • Unique Wonders: Live Comedy with Big Hou! 8:30pm/$5
  • Pockets: Karaoke Dance Party with Keith Welch. 9pm/21+
  • Applebees on Cap Cir: Karaoke with Amanda Goram. 10pm
  • Birds: Karaoke Hosted By Jumpin Jams. Some of the most diverse and longest running karaoke in town. 10pm
  • Domi Station: Investing in Social Change: A Social Entrepreneurship Conversation. “Join us as we showcase Tallahassee’s social entrepreneurs that have made an impact on the community. Our speakers will discuss how to get your nonprofit going, local resources are available to the community, and how to make the biggest impact possible with your idea.” 6pm
  • Waterworks: August Paella Party! “We're trying to make summer more bearable with the best paella & sangria in the Big Bend! Real Paella will be cooking up three kinds of authentic paella and Waterworks will be blending up tasty sangria and cocktails all evening! Paella is $14 (tax included) per plate and includes a side salad. Types of paella available are: pork paella, chicken & seafood paella, vegan paella.” 7pm/21+
  • The Warehouse: Lady Comedy. “Join the female identified and non-binary comics & story tellers of Tallahassee at The Warehouse for a pop-up night of comedy! Brittany Meyer, cast member of the kates and FSU alumni, is visiting from Chicago and will be hosting a kates show with the great local talent of Tallahassee. We are giving ladies/non-binary folks the spotlight and drinking hella Yuengling at The Warehouse while doing it. (We don't have Yuengling in Chicago).” 8pm
FRIDAY 8/19
  • Camp Folks: Totally Tubular Fridays. “Spend a Summer's day floating down a lazy river! Every Friday in May, June, and July, Camp Folks will be doing tube runs to Spring Creek, otherwise known as "Bear Paw." Known for its leisurely speed and crystal clear water, Spring Creek and Chipola River, offers one of the most popular tube runs in the North Florida Panhandle. Let Camp Folks to take the wheel as you sit back and enjoy time spent with your tubular river crew! Choose to rent a single (bottom & no bottom), double, or cooler tube at checkout.” 11am-6:30pm
  • Parlay Sports Bar: Karaoke with Big Bob. 8pm
  • Leggetts: Karaoke with Paul. 8:30pm
  • Just One More: Karaoke with Roger. 9pm
  • 926 Lounge (Formerly Pugs): The Friday Night Party. “Get your pre-game on at Happy Hour with Tom from 4-9 and the dance party getting rolling at 10 pm with our favorite house DJs slinging sound all night long. At midnight, join our talented Queens for an amazing show!” 9pm/$5, $7 under 21/18+
  • Stetsons @ The Moon: Karaoke with Johnny Ray. 10pm/$5/18+
  • The Joint: Beer Olympics. “8 teams will battle it out in Flip Cup, Beer Pong, BattleBeer, BeerCube Blitz, and The Quarter Quell. Here's how it works: You put together a team of 4 players. The cost per player is $25, this includes the cost of domestic beer you'll use to play as well as pepperoni or cheese pizza from Gumby's. Head in to The Joint to pre-pay and secure your team's spot, all 4 members must be paid for at one time. You must be signed up by 8/17/16 to participate. Prizes are awarded to Gold, Silver, & Bronze finalists, and all participants receive a swag bag of goodies. There will be door prizes and drink specials for spectators, as well as a prize for the most "colorfully" dressed spectator.” 7pm
  • Bradfordville Blues Club: Toots Lorraine & The Traffic. 9pm
SATURDAY 8/20
  • Park at Monroe: The Downtown Marketplace. 9am
  • Corner of Georgia & Macomb: Frenchtown Farmers’ Market. “The Frenchtown Heritage Market offers a wide variety of fresh, naturally grown produce. Live music, cooking demos, fruits vegetables, and honey sold directly by farmers.” 9am – 1pm.
  • Wakulla Springs Lodge: Bob Carey on Piano. “Come on out and bring along your vocal chops, browse through my lyrics book, pick up one of my pass-around mics and sing your heart out, or just grab a stool and enjoy a fun filled evening of music and dancing. Full bar open til late.” 7pm
  • Salty Dawg: Karaoke with Paul. Family friendly! 8pm
  • Leggetts: Karaoke with Cowboy Chris. 9pm
  • El Patron: Pasion Latina. Bachata, Merengue, Salsa, Reggaeton. 9pm
  • 926 Lounge: Sanctuary (formerly Blue Monday). “Tallahassee's Longest Running Dark Dance Night is here again! Wear your finest for Darkwave, EBM, Industrial, and some of your other favorites with some of the best and weirdest people in town. Fetish Friendly.” 10pm/$5/18+
  • Tallahassee Junior Museum: Visit Tallahassee Free Admission for KIDS Day. “Don’t miss the next Visit Tallahassee T.O.U.R. Guide FREE Admission Day, Saturday, August 20 at the Tallahassee Museum, where admission is FREE all day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for CHILDREN 17 AND UNDER! There will be plenty of family-friendly activities happening throughout the Museum grounds including close-up animal encounters and living history demonstrations on the 1880’s Big Bend Farmstead. Special Group Rate pricing will be available for CHILDREN 17 AND UNDER on all Tree to Tree Adventures courses throughout the entire day!” 9am
  • Mission San Luis: Lures and Legends Pokemon Go Event. 10am/$5, kids $2
  • Proof Brewery: 2nd Annual Tallahassee Beer Mile. “Since 900 of you completed the race last year, we are bringing back the best mile of the year. Join us on August 20 when the Tallahassee Brew District and Capital City Runners present the second-annual Tallahassee Beer Mile. The Tallahassee Beer Mile is a one mile run/walk in which participants are asked to drink one 12 ounce beer at each location. Registration will begin at 4:00pm at Proof Brewing Company (You MUST bring your ID with you when you check in). Race will start at 6:00pm. Register at www.tallahasseebeermile.com. Start location: Proof Brewing Company. Stop two: GrassLands Brewing Company. Stop three: The Brass Tap - Downtown on Gaines St. Stop four: Madison Social. Your $25 registration fee includes a 12 ounce beer at each location. Note: this is a non sanctioned event and for fun...but love folks that race hard.” 4pm
  • Carolina Haus: RC Presents: Myakka,Vile Body, Seesaw, PLUS ONE. 9pm/$5
  • Side Bar Theater: Brighter Poet, Emerson & Corey Crumpacker. 9pm/$10
  • Bradfordville Blues Club: Geoff Achison & The Souldiggers. 10pm
SUNDAY 8/21
  • Lake Ella: Sunday Brunch. “The Spring Concert Series is here! Come out to Lake Ella every Sunday for food trucks and live music!” 11am-2pm
  • GrassLands Brewery: Let's Get Beers Together! “Each month, we will highlight a local organization that is committed to pulling the community together. 10% of the month's Sunday proceeds will benefit that month's featured organization! We are so thrilled to announce that our first featured organization is the Mickee Faust Club!!! An amazing group of people that are an extraordinary asset to Tallahassee.” 5pm
  • Salty Dawg Pub & Deli: The Famous Acoustic Jam w/ Wayne, Glenn, and Bo. Open mic, free beer for performers. 6pm
  • Capital Lanes: Spare-A-Life Bowling Event. “Join us for this year's Spare-A-Life Bowling Event. 100% of the proceeds benefit the homeless animals! Since our event has been so popular, we now have two bowling sessions. You can sign up to bowl from 2-4pm or 5-7pm. Fees include lane, shoes, pizza and beverage! You can sign up as an individual or a team. Register today before the lanes fill up!”
  • The Sharing Tree: Summer Food Swap. “Pickled tomatoes? fresh summer jams? Killing the sauerkraut game? All of the tasty treats are welcome for an afternoon of good food and community. We'll provide tables and drinks, you provide the trades! Please keep in mind that pre-registration is required, and the event is limited to forty participants. A $2 donation is also requested for participation. To register, please email [email protected].” 5pm
  • Quincy Movie Theater: Auditions for Jesus Christ Superstar. “Calling all Actors, Singers and Dancers! Announcing auditions for Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Please prepare sixteen bars of a song from the musical theatre catalogue or of the style of the show, and bring sheet music. An accompanist will be provided. Please wear or bring clothes for a movement audition. Callbacks will be held at director's invitation on August 23 at 7pm. Rehearsals will take place primarily in Tallahassee. Performances are October 7-16 at Quincy Music Theatre. Questions? Please contact Naomi Rose-Mock(director) at 850-879-0294 or via message here. See you at auditions!” 7pm
  • 926 Bar and Grille: Bit Brigade w/ Whateverer, Teen Baby & States Avenue. 7:30pm/$6
MONDAY 8/22
  • Burrito Boarder: Bar Trivia With Hank. $30 food & bar tab for first place. Specials on shots and $2 margaritas. 7:30pm
  • Waterworks: Patio Theater. 8:30pm/21+
  • 926 Bar & Grill: Karaoke with Nathan. He’s got all the songs. All the songs you want to sing. If you see me there, don’t make too much fun. 9pm
  • Side Bar Theater: Open Mic Mondays with Karaoke and Games. “Open Mic: Drums, Guitar Amp, and Bass Amp will be provided. (Bring your own guitars and various instruments!) Karaoke, Nintendo 64 ( Mario Kart, Starfox, and more!), Foosball, Cornhole.” 9pm/free/18+
  • Atmosphere Pub: Hip-Hop Open Mic Monday's // Dj T Wixx on site // Bring your Tracks. 10pm
  • Junction @ Monroe: Phantom of the Paradise & Forbidden Zone: A Trash Cinema Double Feature! “Hey Gang, The Primal Root her, inviting you out to an evening of cult cinematic musicals as only The Trash Cinema Collective can provide! I am thrilled to be presenting to you, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974) featuring the music of Paul Williams followed by Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone (1980) featuring the music of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo!” 7:30pm/$5
Keep checking back, sometimes I update. Got anything to add?
submitted by clearliquidclearjar to Tallahassee [link] [comments]

Perpetual Option: Och-Ziff Capital Management Group (OZM)

In his book, You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, Greenblatt talks about using LEAPs to make leveraged bets. The book included his trade in Wells Fargo (WFC, another topic for a future post, I suppose).
But sometimes, stocks get down so cheap that they become priced like options. In the Genius book, the WFC LEAPs were priced at $14 while the stock was at around $77.
Here, we have a hedge fund manager trading less than $3.00/share, which is a typical price for regular options, not even LEAPs. Of course, all stocks are options on the residual value of businesses. But sometimes things are priced for either a large gain or zero, just like an option.
I call this a perpetual option, but that reminds me of those lifetime warranties. Like, who's lifetime? The manufacturer's? The store's? Yours? Nothing is forever, so I guess there really is no such thing as a perpetual option. But anyway...
Och-Ziff IPO'ed in 2007 at $32/share and traded in the mid $20's right before the crisis, then down to below $5.00 during the crisis and back up to the mid-teens. I've been watching this since the IPO and looked at it again when it was trading around $10/share. It's down quite a bit since then. I didn't own it back then but I did take a small bite down at $5.00/share.
I have mentioned other private equity and hedge fund managers here in the past but haven't owned most of them because of the amount of money that seemed to be going into alternatives. I was just worried that the AUM's of all of these alternative managers were going up so quickly that I couldn't imagine them earning the high returns that made everyone rush to them in the first place. Look at the presentation of any of these alternative managers and their AUM growth is just staggering.
Extremely Contrarian We investors walk around and think about all sorts of things; look at store traffic, taste new foods/restaurant concepts, count how many Apple watches people are wearing (I recently biked around the city with my kid (Brooklyn to Central Park, around the park (around the big loop) and all the way downtown back to Brooklyn (30+ miles) and I think I counted two Apple watches that I saw compared to countless iPhones. And this was in the summer so no coats or long sleeves to hide wrists).
And a couple of the things that we tend to think about are, What does everybody absolutely love, and what are they 100% sure of (other than that Hillary will win the election and that the market will crash if Trump wins), and What do people absolutely, 100% hate and don't even want to talk about? In the investing world right now, it seems like the one thing that everybody seems to agree with is that active investing is dead (OK, not completely true because we active investors never really lose faith in it). The data points to it (active managers underperforming for many years, legendary stock pickers too not performing all too well, star hedge funds not doing well etc...). The money flows point to it (cash flowing out of active managers and into passive funds, boom in index funds / ETFs; this reminds me of the 1990's when there were more mutual funds than listed companies. There are probably more ETFs now than listed companies). Sentiment points to it (stars and heroes now are ETF managers, quants etc.).
By the Way Oh, and by the way, in case people say that it is no longer possible due to this or that reason for humans to outperform indices or robots, I would just say that we have seen this before. Things in finance are cyclical and we've seen this movie before.
From the 1985 Berkshire Hathaway Letter, Most institutional investors in the early 1970s, on the other hand, regarded business value as of only minor relevance when they were deciding the prices at which they would buy or sell. This now seems hard to believe. However, these institutions were then under the spell of academics at prestigious business schools who were preaching newly-fashioned theory: the stock market was totally efficient, and therefore calculations of business value -- and even thought, itself -- were of no importance in investment activities. (We are enormously indebted to those academics: what could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest -- whether it be bridge, chess or stock selection than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?)
What Do People Hate? So, back to what people absolutely hate. People hate active managers. It's not even stocks that they are not interested in. They hate active managers. Nobody outperforms and their fees are not worth it. What else do they hate? They hate hedge funds. I don't need to write a list here, but you just keep reading one institution after another reducing their exposure to hedge funds. There is a massive shakeout going on now with money leaving hedge funds. Others like Blackstone argues that this is not true; assets are just moving out of mediocre hedge funds and moving into theirs.
This is a theme I will be going back to in later posts, but for now I am just going to look at OZM.
OZM OZM is a well-known hedge fund firm so I won't go into much detail here. To me, it's sort of a conventional equity-oriented hedge fund that runs strategies very typical of pre-Volcker rule Wall Street investment banks; equity long/short, merger arb, convertible arb etc. They have been expanding into credit and real estate with decent results. But a lot of their AUM is still in the conventional equity strategies.
What makes OZM interesting now is that chart from the Pzena Investment report (see here). These charts make it obvious why active managers have had such a hard time. The value spread has just continued to widen since 2004/2005 through now. Cheap stocks get cheaper and expensive stocks get more so. You can see how this sort of environment could be the worst for long/short strategies (and value-oriented long strategies, and even naked short strategies for that matter). Things have just been going the wrong way with no mean reversion.
But if you look at where those charts are now, you can see that it is probably exactly the wrong time to give up on value strategies or value-based long/short strategies; in fact it looks like the best time ever to be looking at these strategies.
Seeing that, does it surprise me that many pension funds are running the other way? Not at all. Many large institutions chase performance and not future potential.
Conceptually speaking, they would rather buy a stock at 80x P/E that has gone up 30%/year in the past five years that is about to tank rather than buy an 8x P/E stock that has gone nowhere in the past five years but is about to take off; they are driven by historic (or recent historic) performance.
OZM Performance Anyway, let's look at the long term performance of OZM. This excludes their credit and real estate funds which are doing much better and are growing AUM.
This is their performance since 1994 through the end of 2015:
OZM fund S&P500 1994 28.50% 5.30% 1995 23.50% 27.40% 1996 27.40% 23.00% 1997 26.70% 33.40% 1998 11.10% 28.60% 1999 18.80% 21.00% 2000 20.60% -9.10% 2001 6.30% -11.90% 2002 -1.60% -22.10% 2003 24.00% 28.70% 2004 11.10% 10.90% 2005 8.80% 4.90% 2006 14.80% 15.80% 2007 11.50% 5.50% 2008 -15.90% -37.00% 2009 23.10% 26.50% 2010 8.50% 15.10% 2011 -0.50% 2.10% 2012 11.60% 16.00% 2013 13.90% 32.40% 2014 5.50% 13.70% 2015 -0.40% 1.40% 5 year avg 5.85% 12.57% 10 year avg 6.69% 7.32% Since 1994 12.05% 8.87% Since 2000 7.59% 5.01% Since 2007 5.14% 6.53%
So they have not been doing too well, but it's really only the last couple of years that don't look too good. Their ten-year return through 2013 was +8.2%/year versus +7.4%/year for the S&P 500 index. It's pretty obvious that their alpha has been declining over time.
For those who want more up-to-date figures, I redid the above table to include figures through September-end 2016. And instead of 5 year and 10 year returns, I use 4.75-year and 9.75-year returns; I thought that would be more comparable than saying 5.75-year and 10.75-year, and I didn't want to dig into quarterly figures to get actual 5 and 10s.
OZM fund S&P500 1994 28.50% 5.30% 1995 23.50% 27.40% 1996 27.40% 23.00% 1997 26.70% 33.40% 1998 11.10% 28.60% 1999 18.80% 21.00% 2000 20.60% -9.10% 2001 6.30% -11.90% 2002 -1.60% -22.10% 2003 24.00% 28.70% 2004 11.10% 10.90% 2005 8.80% 4.90% 2006 14.80% 15.80% 2007 11.50% 5.50% 2008 -15.90% -37.00% 2009 23.10% 26.50% 2010 8.50% 15.10% 2011 -0.50% 2.10% 2012 11.60% 16.00% 2013 13.90% 32.40% 2014 5.50% 13.70% 2015 -0.40% 1.40% 2016* 1.10% 7.80% 4.75 year 6.53% 14.58% 9.75 year 5.48% 6.72% Since 1994 11.68% 8.92% Since 2000 7.29% 5.27% Since 2007 4.82% 6.86%
So over time, they have good outperformance, but much of that is from the early years. As they get bigger, it's not hard to see why their spread would shrink.
They are seriously underperforming in the 4.75 year, but that's because the S&P 500 index was coming off of a big bear market low and OZM didn't lose that much money, so I think that is irrelevant, especially for a long/short fund.
More relevant would be figures from recent market peaks which sort of shows a through-the-cycle performance. Since the market peak in 2000, OZM has outperformed with a gain of +7.3%/year versus +5.3%/year for the S&P, but they have underperformed since the 2007 peak. A lot of this probably has to do with the previous charts about how value spreads have widened throughout this period.
I would actually want to be increasing exposure to this area that hasn't worked well since 2007. Some of this, of course, is due to lower interest rates. Merger arb, for example, is highly dependent on interest rates as are other arbitrage type trades. (The less risk there is, the closer to the short term interest rate the return is going to be.)
One thing that makes me scratch my head, though, in the 3Q 2016 10-Q is the following: OZ Master Fund’s merger arbitrage, convertible and derivative arbitrage, corporate credit and structured credit strategies have each generated strong year-to-date gains through September 30, 2016. In merger arbitrage, certain transactions in which OZ Master Fund participated closed during the third quarter, contributing to the strategy’s year-to-date gross return of +1.3%. Convertible and derivative arbitrage generated a gross return of +0.5% during the third quarter, driven by gains in convertible arbitrage positions, commodity-related volatility, commodity spreads and index volatility spread trades. Year-to-date, convertible and derivative arbitrage has generated a gross return of +1.3%. In OZ Master Fund’s credit-related strategies, widening credit spreads and certain event-driven situations added +0.4% to the gross return within corporate credit during the third quarter, while in structured credit, a +0.9% gross return during the quarter was attributable to the realization of recoveries in certain of our idiosyncratic situations. Year-to-date, the corporate credit and structured credit strategies are each up +1.2% on a gross basis. Gross returns of less than 2% are described as "strong". Hmm... I may be missing something here. Maybe it is 'strong' versus comparable strategies. I don't know. Anyway, moving on...
Greenblatt Genius Strategies Oh yeah, and by the way, OZM is one of the funds that are heavily into the yellow book strategies. Here's a description of their equity long/short strategy: Long/short equity special situations, which consists of fundamental long/short and event-driven investing. Fundamental long/short investing involves analyzing companies and assets to profit where we believe mispricing or undervaluation exists. Event-driven investing attempts to realize gain from corporate events such as spin-offs, recapitalizations and other corporate restructurings, whether company specific or due to industry or economic conditions.
This is still a large part of their book, which is a good thing if you believe that the valuation spreads will mean revert and that Greenblatt's yellow book strategies are still valid.
One thing that may temper returns over time, though, is the AUM level. What you can do with $1 billion in AUM is not the same as when you have $10 billion or $30 billion. I don't think Greenblatt would have had such high returns if he let AUM grow too much.
This seems to be an issue with a lot of hedge funds. Many of the old stars who were able to make insane returns with AUM under $1 billion seem to have much lower returns above that level.
Here is OZM's AUM trend in the past ten years. Some of the lower return may correlate to the higher AUM, not to mention higher AUM at other hedge funds too reducing spreads (and potential profits).
Just to refresh my memory, I grabbed the AUM chart from the OZM prospectus in 2007. Their AUM was under $6 billion until the end of 2003 and then really grew to over $30 billion by 2007.
Their 10-year return through 2003 was 18%/year vs. 10.6%/year for the S&P 500 index.
From the end of 2003 through the end of 2015, OZM's funds returned +7.2%/year versus +7.4%/year for the S&P 500 index. So their alpha basically went from 7.4%/year outperformance to flat.
This is actually not so bad as these types of funds often offered 'equity-like' returns with lower volatility and drawdowns. The long/short nature of OZM funds means that investors achieved the same returns as the S&P 500 index without the full downside exposure. This is exactly what many institutions want, actually.
But still, did their growth in AUM dampen returns? I think there is no doubt about that. These charts showing tremendous AUM growth is the reason why I never owned much of these alternative managers in the past few years I've been watching them.
The question is how much of the lower returns are due to the higher AUM. Of course, some of this AUM growth is in other strategies so not all new AUM is squeezed into the same strategies.
Will OZM ever go back to the returns of the 1990's? I doubt that. First of all, that was a tremendous bull market. Plus, OZM's AUM was much smaller so they had more opportunities to take advantage of yellow book ideas and other strategies.
Boom/Bubble Doesn't Mean It's a Bad Idea By the way, another sort of tangent. Just because there is a big boom or bubble in something doesn't necessarily make that 'something' a bad idea. We had a stock market bubble in the late 1920's that ended badly, but owning parts of businesses never suddenly became a bad idea or anything. It's just that you didn't want to overpay, or buy stocks for the wrong reasons.
We had a boom in the late 1990's in stocks that focused on picking stocks and owning them for the long term as exemplified by the Beardstown Ladies. Of course, the Beardstown Ladies didn't end well (basically a fraud), but owning good stocks for the long haul, I don't think, ever became a bad idea necessarily.
We had a tremendous housing bubble and various real estate bubbles in recent years. But again, owning good, solid assets at reasonable prices for the long haul never became a bad idea despite the occasional bubbles and collapses.
Similarly, hedge funds and alternative assets go through cycles too. I know many value investors are not with me here and will always hate hedge funds (like Buffett), but that's OK.
We've had alternative cycles in the past. Usually the pattern is that there is a bull market in stocks and people rush into stocks. The bull market inevitably ends and people lose money. Institutions not wanting to lose money rush into 'alternative' assets. Eventually, the market turns and they rush back into equities.
I think something similar is happening now, but the cycle seems a bit elongated and, and the low interest rates is having an effect as alternatives are now attracting capital formerly allocated to fixed income. In the past, alternatives seemed more like an equity substitution, risk asset.
Valuation OK, so what is OZM worth?
Well, a simple way of looking at it is that OZM has paid an average of $1.10/year in dividends in the last five years. During the past five years, the funds returned around 6%/year, so it's not an upside outlier in terms of fund performance.
Put a 10x multiple on it and the stock is worth $11/share.
Another way to look at it is that the market is telling you that it is unlikely that OZM will enjoy the success even of the past five years over the next few years. Assuming a scenario of failure (stock price = 0) or back to sort of past five years performance ($11), a $3.00 stock price reflects the odds of failure at 73% and only a 27% chance that OZM gets back to it's past five year average-like performance. Of course, OZM can just sort of keep doing what it's doing and stay at $3.00 for a long time too.
There is a problem with this, though, as the dividends don't reflect equity-based compensation expense; OZM gives out a bunch of RSU's every year.
To adjust for this, let's look at the economic earnings of the past five years including the costs of equity-based compensation.
Equity-based compensation expense not included in economic income is listed below ($000):
2008 102,025 2009 122,461 2010 128,737 2011 128,916 2012 86,006 2013 120,125 2014 104,344 2015 106,565
It's odd that this doesn't seem to correlate to revenues, income or AUM; it's just basically flat all the way through.
If we include this, economic income at OZM averaged around $520 million/year. With fully diluted 520 million shares outstanding, that's around $1.00/share in economic earnings per share that OZM earned on average over the past five years. So that's not too far off from the $1.10/share dividends we used above.
One of the interesting things about investing is when you find alternative ways to value something instead of just the usual price-to-book values, P/E ratios etc.
So how would you value this?
What about adjusting the implied odds from the above. What if we said there's a 50/50 chance of recovery or failure. Let's say recovery is getting back to what it has done over the past five years on average, and failure is a zero on the stock.
50% x $0.00 + 50% x $10.00 = $5.00/share
In that case, OZM is worth $5.00/share, or 70% higher than the current price. You are looking at a 60 cent dollar in that case.
Let's say there is a 70% chance of recovery.
70% x $10.00 + 30% x $0.00 = $7.00/share.
That's 130% higher, or a 40 cent dollar.
By the way, the AUM averaged around $37 billion over the past five years, and remember, their return was around 5.9%/year so these figures aren't based on huge, abnormal returns or anything.
As of the end of September 2016, AUM was $39.3 billion, and this went down to $37 billion as of November 1, 2016. OZM expects continued redemptions towards year-end both due to their Justice Department/SEC settlement and overall industry redemption trends.
The above ignored balance sheet items, but you can deduct $0.60/share, maybe, of negative equity, or more if you think they need more cash on the balance sheet to run their business.
Preferred Shares As for the $400 million settlement amount and preferred shares, the settlement amount is already on the balance sheet as a liability (which was paid out after the September quarter-end). The preferred shares were sold after the quarter ended. They have zero interest for three years so I don't think it impacts the above analysis. You would just add cash on the balance sheet and the preferreds on the liability side.
If you want to deduct the full amount of the settlement of $400 million, you can knock off $0.77/share off the above valuation instead of the $0.60/share.
Earnings Model The problem with these companies is that it's impossible, really, to predict what their AUM is going to be in the future or their performance. Of course, we can guess that if they do well, AUM will increase and vice-versa.
But still, as a sanity check, we should see how things look with various assumptions in terms of valuation.
First of all, let's look at 2015. In the full year to 2015, a year that the OZM funds were down (master fund), they paid a dividend of $0.87. Adjusted economic income was $240 million (economic income reported by OZM less equity-based comp expense) and using the current fully diluted shares outstanding of 520 million, that comes to $0.46/share. OK, it's funny to use current shares outstanding against last year's economic income, but I am trying to use last years' earnings as sort of a 'normalized' figure.
Using these figures from a bad year, OZM is current trading at a 29% dividend yield (using $3.00/share price) and 6.5x adjusted economic income. This would be 8.3x if you added the $0.77/share from the settlement above.
OK, so average AUM was $44 billion in 2015, so even in a bad year, they made tons in management fees. Fine. We'll get to that in a second. AUM is $37 billion as of November 2016, and is probably headed down towards year-end.
2016 Year-to-Date So let's look at how they are doing this year so far. Fund performance-wise, it hasn't been too good, but they do remain profitable. These fund businesses are designed so that their fixed expenses are covered by their management fees. Big bonuses are paid out only when the funds make money.
Anyway, let's look at 2016 so far in terms of economic income.
In the 3Q of 2016, economic income was $57.4 million. Equity-based compensation expense was $18.3 million so adjusted economic income was $39.1 million. Annualize that and you get $156 million. Using 520 million fully diluted shares (share amount used to calculate distributable earnings in the earnings press release), that comes to $0.30/share adjusted economic income. So at $3.00/share, OZM is trading at 10x arguably depressed earnings. (This excludes the FCPA settlement amount). If you include $400 million of the FCPA preferreds (total to be offered eventually), then the P/E would actually be closer to 12.6x.
For the year to date, economic income was $195 million, and equity-based comp expense was $56 million so adjusted economic income was $139 million. Again using 520 million shares, that comes to $0.25/share in adjusted economic earnings per share. Annualize that and you get $0.33/share. So at $3.00/share, OZM is trading at 9x depressed earnings, or 11x including the FCPA preferred.
OK, so maybe this is not really 'depressed'. With still a lot of AUM, it is possible that AUM keeps going down.
AUM was $37 billion in November, but let's say it goes down to $30 billion. That's actually a big dip. But let's say AUM goes down there. And then let's assume 1% management fees, 20% incentive fees, and economic income margin of 50% (averaged 56% in past five years) and the OZM master fund return of 5%.
In this case, economic income would be $300 million. Equity-based comp costs seems steady at around $100 million, so we deduct that to get adjusted economic income. This comes to $200 million.
That comes to around $0.40/share. At $3.00/share, that's 7.5x adjusted economic earnings, or a 13% yield, or 9.4x and 10.6% yield including the FCPA preferreds.
So that's not bad. We are assuming AUM dips to $30 billion and OZM funds only earn 5%/year, and with that assumption the stock is trading at this cheap level.
Things, of course, can get much worse. If performance doesn't improve, AUM will keep going down. You can't really stress test these things as you can just say their returns will never recover and that's that.
On the other hand, any improvement can get you considerable upside.
If assets return to $40 billion and returns average 6% over time, economic income margin goes to 56% (average of past five years), adjust economic income per share is $0.76/share and the stock could be worth $7.60/share for more than a double.
Here's a matrix of possibilities. Skeptics will say, where are the returns below 5% and AUM below $30 billion?!
Well, OK. If returns persist at lower than 5%, it's safe to assume that AUM will go down and this may well end up a zero. That is certainly a possibility. It wouldn't shock many for another hedge fund to shut down.
On the other hand, if things do stabilize, normalize and OZM recovers and does well, there is a lot of upside here. What is interesting to me is that the market is discounting a lot of bad and not pricing in much good. This is when opportunities occur, right?
5% 6% 7% 8% 9% 10% 30,000 $0.45 $0.52 $0.58 $0.65 $0.71 $0.78 35,000 $0.56 $0.64 $0.71 $0.79 $0.86 $0.94 40,000 $0.67 $0.76 $0.84 $0.93 $1.01 $1.10 45,000 $0.78 $0.87 $0.97 $1.07 $1.16 $1.26 50,000 $0.88 $0.99 $1.10 $1.21 $1.32 $1.42 55,000 $0.99 $1.11 $1.23 $1.35 $1.47 $1.58 60,000 $1.10 $1.23 $1.36 $1.49 $1.62 $1.75
The row above is the assumed return of the OZM funds. The left column is the AUM. Assumptions are 1% management fee, 20% incentive fee, 56% economic income margin (excluding equity-based comp expense) and $100 million/year in equity-based comp expense.
It shows you that it doesn't take much for adjusted economic income per share to get back up to closer to $1.00, and can maintain $0.45/share even in a $30 billion AUM and 5% return scenario making the current stock price cheap even under that scenario.
Conclusion Having said all that, there is still a lot of risk here. Low returns and low bonuses can easily make it hard for OZM to keep their best people. But if their best people perform, I assume they do get paid directly for their performance so that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
A lot of the lower returns in recent years is no doubt due to their higher AUM. But it is also probably due to crowding of the hedge fund world and low interest rates leading to an overall lower return environment for all.
If you think these things are highly cyclical, then you can expect interest rates to normalize at some point. Money flowing out of hedge funds should also be good for future returns in these strategies. The part of lower returns at OZM due to higher AUM may not reverse itself, though, if OZM succeeds in maintaining and increasing AUM over time.
But even without the blowout, high returns of the 1990's, OZM can make decent returns over time as seen in the above table.
In any case, unlike a few years ago, the stock prices of many alternative managers are cheap (and I demonstrated how cheap OZM might be here) and institutional money seems to be flowing out of these strategies.
So: OZM is cheap and is in a seemingly universally hated industry Money is flowing out of these strategies, particularly performance chasing institutions (that you would often want to fade) there is a bear market in active managers and bubble in indexing (which may actually increase opportunities for active managers) value spreads are wide and has been widening for years making mean reversion overdue etc. These things make OZM a compelling play on these various themes.
I would treat this more like an option, though. Buy it like you would buy an option, not like you would invest in, say, a Berkshire Hathaway.
There are a lot of paths here to make good money, but there are also plenty of ways to lose. If you look at this like a binary option, it can be pretty interesting!
Posted by kk at 8:11 PM No comments: Links to this post Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest
Labels: OZM
Saturday, October 29, 2016 Gotham's New Fund Joel Greenblatt was in Barron's recently. He is one of my favorite investors so maybe it's a good time for another post.
Anyway, this new fund is kind of interesting as I am sort of a tinkerer; this is like the product of some financial tinkering. I don't know if it's the right product for many, but we'll take a look.
But first, let's see what he has to say about the stock market in general.
The Market Greenblatt says that the market is "expensive". The market is in the 21st percentile of expensive in the past 25 years. Either a typo or he misspoke, he is quoted as saying that the market has been more expensive 79% of the time in the past 25 years. Of course, he means the market has been cheaper 79% of the time.
The year forward expected return from this price level is between 2% to 7%, so he figures it averages out to 4% to 6% per year. In the past 25 years, the market has returned 9% to 10%/year so he figures the market is 12% to 13% more expensive than it used to be.
He says: Well, one scenario could be that it drops 12% to 13% tomorrow and future returns would go back to 9% to 10%. Or you could underearn for three years at 4% to 6%. We're still expecting positive returns, just more muted. The intelligent strategy is to buy the cheapest things you can find and short the most expensive.
But... Immediately, bears will say that this 25 year history is based during a period when interest rates went down. The 10 year bond rate was around 8% back in 1991, and is now 1.8%. In terms of valuation, this would have pushed up asset values by 6.2%/year ($1.00 discounted at 8%/year then and $1.00 discounted by 1.8% now).
Declining rates were certainly a factor in stock returns over the past 25 years. Of course, the stock market didn't keep going up as rates kept going down. The P/E ratio of the S&P 500 index at the end of 1990 was around 15x, and now it's 25x according to Shiller's database (raw P/E, not CAPE). So the valuation gain over the 25 years accounted for around 2%/year of the 9-10% return Greenblatt states.
Here are the EPS estimates for the S&P 500 index according to Goldman Sachs:
 EPS P/E 
2016 $105 20.4x 2017 $116 18.5x 2018 $122 17.6x
Earnings estimates are not all that reliable (estimates have been coming down consistently in the past year or so). But since most of 2016 is done, I suppose the $105 figure should be OK to use.
I don't know if it's apples to apples (reported versus operating etc.), but if we assume the 'current' P/E of the market is 20x, then the valuation tailwind accounted for 1.2%/year of the 9-10%. But then of course, even if this was a fair comparison, there is still the aspect of lower interest rates boosting the economy by borrowing future demand (and therefore overstating historical earnings).
In any case, one of the main bearish arguments is that this interest rate tailwind in the past will become a headwind going forward. Just about everyone agrees with that.
But as I have mentioned before, calling turns in interest rates is very hard, Japan being a great example. If you look at interest rates over the past 100 years or more, you see that major turns in trend don't happen all that often; it's been a single trend of declining rates since the 1980/81 peak, basically. What are the chances that you are going to call the next big turn correctly? I would bet against anyone trying. OK, that didn't come out right. I wouldn't necessarily be long the bond market either.
Gotham Index Plus So, back to the topic of Gotham's new fund. It is a fascinating idea. The fund will go long the S&P 500 index, 100% long, and then overlay a 90%/90% long/short portfolio of the S&P 500 stocks based on their valuations.
The built-in leverage alone makes this sort of interesting. Many institutions may have an allocation to the S&P 500 index, and then some allocation to long/short equity hedge funds. The return of the Gotham Index plus would be much higher (when things go well).
I think this sort of thing was popular at some point in the pension world; index plus alpha etc. Except I think a lot of those were institutions replacing their S&P 500 index portfolios with futures positions, and then using the cash raised to buy mortgage securities. Of course, when things turned bad, oops; they took big hits in S&P 500 futures, tried to post cash for the margin call and realized that their mortgage funds weren't liquid (and was worth a lot less than they thought).
Or something like that.
There is risk here too, of course. You are overlaying two risk positions on top of each other. When things turn bad, things can certainly get ugly.
I think Greenblatt's calculation is that when things turn bad, the long/short usually does well. I haven't seen any backtests or anything, so I don't know what the odds of a blowup are.
Expensive stocks tend to be high-beta stocks and cheaper stocks may be lower beta, so in a market correction, the high-beta, expensive names may go down a lot harder.
To some extent, lower valuations may reflect more cyclicality, lower credit risk / lower balance sheet quality too so you have to be a little careful. In a financial crisis-like situation, lower valuation (lower credit quality) can tank and some higher valuation names may hold up (like the FANG-like stocks).
But Greenblatt's screen is not just raw P/E or P/B, but is tied to return on capital, so maybe this is not as much of an issue compared to a pure P/B model.
The argument for this structure is that people can't stay with a strategy if it can't keep up with the market. Here, the market return is built in from the beginning and you just hope for the "Plus" part to kick in. In a long/short portfolio, the beta is netted out to a large extent so can lower potential returns. This fixes that. But there is a cost to that.
In any case, I do think it's a really interesting product, but keep in mind that it is a little riskier than Gotham's other offerings.
Oh, and go read the article on why this new fund is a good idea. Greenblatt is always a great read.
Chipotle (CMG) Well, Chipotle earnings came out and it was predictably horrible. The stock is not cheap so it hasn't been recommendable in a while, but I really like the company. There was a really long article on them recently which was a great read. It didn't really change my view of them all that much. I think they will get a lot of business back, eventually.
The earnings call was OK, but what was depressing about it was that they decided to ditch Shophouse. I don't think any analysts asked about it so it was a given, I guess. I had it a couple of times in DC and liked it and was looking forward to it in NY, but I guess that's not going to happen. As an investor, that was not baked into the cake, I don't think, even though there was probably some hope that the CMG brand can be extended into other categories.
This puts a lot of doubt into that idea. Someone said that brand extensions in restaurants/retail never work, and that has proven to be the case here. I wouldn't get too excited about pizza and burgers either. Burgers are really crowded now and will only get more so.
If CMG has to look to Europe for growth, that is not so great either as the record of U.S. companies expanding into Europe is not good. I would not count on Europe growth.
Anyway, this doesn't mean it's all over for CMG. I think they will come back, but there are some serious headwinds now other than their food poisoning problem; more competition etc. They were the only game in town for a while, but now everyone seemingly wants to become the next Chipotle, so there are a lot of options out there now.
As for Ackman's interest in CMG, I have no idea what his plan is. There is no real estate here as CMG rents all their restaurants, and their restaurants had high 20's operating margins at their peak. I don't know if they will ever get back up there, but it's not like these guys don't know how to run an efficient operation. Maybe Ackman sees SGA opportunities, but pre-crisis, SGA was less than 7%, so there wouldn't be that much of a boost from cutting SGA. Or maybe he thinks it's time for CMG to do what everyone else is doing and go for the franchise model. Who knows? I look forward to seeing what his thoughts are; hopefully some 500 page presentation pops up somewhere...
McDonalds I don't want to turn this into a food blog, but I can't resist mentioning this. I have been a lifelong MCD customer; I have no problem with it. OK, it may not be my first choice of a meal in most cases, but it's fine. And when you have a kid, you tend to go more often that you'd like. But still, it's OK. It is what it is, right?
I like the remodelling that they are doing, and the fact that they have free wifi is great too. But here's a big clustermuck they had with their recent custom burger and kiosk idea. I walked into a MCD without knowing anything about any of this recently. A lady said I can order at the kiosk and I said, no, I'll just go to the counter, thank you.
And I waited 10 minutes or so in line, looking up at the tasty looking special hamburgers on the HD, LCD menu board. It was finally my turn at the cash register and I said I want that tasty looking hamburger up there on the screen. And the lady said, oh, you can only order that at the kiosk. I was like, huh? That was really annoying. So I wait all this time and I can't get what I want; I have to walk all the way back and get in another line again? Come on! At that point, I didn't want any other burger so I just ordered a salad (and the usual for my kid).
OK, so it's my fault, probably. User error. But as a service company, as far as I'm concerned, that was a massive fail on the part of MCD.
OK, Now That I started... And by the way, since I got myself started, let me get these two out too. Yes, I spend too much time at fast food joints. Guilty. But still, here are my two peeves related to two of my favorite fast casual places:
Shake Shack: Being dragged there all the time, I have learned to love the Shack-cago hot dog. Chicken Shack is awesome too, in case you don't want to eat hamburgers all the time. But I can't tell you how often they get take-out and stay wrong. I had a long run where they didn't get it right at all and had to ask for things to be packed to go. It is really annoying and wastes everyone's time.
Chipotle: This hasn't happened to me the last couple of times, but this is the usual conversation that happens to me just about every time I go to Chipotle.
CMG: "Hi, what can we get you today?" (or some such) Me: "Um, I'll have a burrito..." CMG: putting the tortilla in the tortilla warmecooker, "and would you like white rice or brown rice? Me: "White rice is fine" CMG: with tortilla still in the cooker, "and black beans or pinto beans?" Me: "black beans". CMG: laying a sheet of aluminum foil on the counter and placing the tortilla on it, moving over to the rice area, "Was that white rice or brown rice?" Me: "white rice" CMG: sliding over to the beans, "and black beans or pinto beans?". Me: "black".
I can't tell you how many times this exact thing happened to me. If you can't remember what I say, don't ask beforehand! Just ask when we get to whatever you are going to ask me about! This is not rocket science, lol... Incredibly annoying.
Anyway, I still love CMG and will keep eating there.
Oh, and to make things interesting, I decided to post a contact email address in the "about" section of the blog. I will try to respond to every email, but keep in mind I may not look in that email box all the time.
I will try to post more, though.
http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2016/11/perpetual-option-och-ziff-capital.html (read original with tables)
submitted by BobFine to stocks [link] [comments]

[Table] IAmA Reverse engineer who broke millions of hotel locks. AMA

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Date: 2012-08-17
Link to submission (Has self-text)
Link to my post
Questions Answers
While there is no doubt that your expose' will only improve security in the long haul, what are you thoughts/feelings on the immediate impact of your findings? At the end of the day, I know that people will use this for malicious purposes, just like any important vulnerability that's disclosed. However, I have to balance that out with a question that's been on my mind for a long time: How many people used this before I even thought of it? How many people have been robbed or worse, because of these buggy locks?
Did you do any sort of responsible disclosure such as contacting Onity before going public? Covered at Link to www.reddit.com
I'm in the navy, and currently living in the barracks which are secured by these locks. This explains how a friend of mine had some of his stuff taken. Thanks for doing your part to stop this, we kind like our stuff here. Wait, they're using HT locks or CT locks? They look slightly different, and this stuff won't work on CT. HT is usually only used in hotels, whereas CT is used for commercial buildings, dorm rooms, barracks, etc. I know CT locks are used on some carriers, for instance.
What are you working on over at Mozilla? I work on Boot2Gecko, primarily doing gfx optimizations. Currently working on overscroll animations (what happens when you scroll a page too far).
Do you use Boot2Gecko as your primary phone or for any "serious"/actual normal stuff you'd use with your previous Android or iOS phone? Not yet. I use it as a side phone when I need it, but honestly I break it too often to do so. Sometime soon I'll set a phone aside for stable testing and dogfood it properly.
Why is it important to have an animation for it? Why not just have it have a hard stop? It feels very unnatural to have a hard stop.
Why doesn't Firefox/Gecko recognize my website's beautiful CSS3 stylized scrollbars? Sad. Couldn't tell you, sorry. I work much, much lower level than that; know nothing about the layout side of things.
None of our guests knew anything about it, so no having to deal with the fallout. Let me ask you, though, since I have your attention, what your beer of choice is? Depends on my mood. Overall favorite is Clown Shoes Black IPA, but I'm also a huge fan of Anchor Steam.
Clown Shoes? Damn, just looked them up and they don't seem to be available to California. Anchor Steam is a damn fine beer, though. Have you had their Breckel's Brown? So tasty and malty, like a biscuit. Don't believe I have. I'll check it out :)
Dude you're a MA guy? Western MA reporting in, Clown Shoes is AWESOME. Link to beeradvocate.com. Nope, sorry. NYC for a few more hours, then CT. Fell in love with Clown Shoes after they came to a local craft beer festival.
Also, something I was wondering earlier. Why didn't you give them a full heads up before releasing it full disclosure? Isn't it ethical to give them a warning you are going to release a pretty big vulnerability in a companies product? Tl;dr: I figured that getting the information out there and exposing this as the major issue it is was priority number 1; the safety issues involved make it a really risky proposition, and letting people know how bad things are was the best way.
I saw a couple options if I had gone to Onity with these issues ahead of time: 1) They file a lawsuit and keep me tied up in court to keep the info out of the public eye and save face. Result: information doesn't go public (and get fixed) for years. 2) They ignore it, I release everything. Result: same thing we have now. 3) They claim to fix it repeatedly and pressure me to hold off on releasing anything until X% of hotels are fixed. Result: nothing happens, ever; they fix it in an improper way and hotels never update. I eventually release, maybe. 4) They fix it quickly, get the fix out to hotels on their dime, and all is well. Result: Complete safety.
In my opinion, #1 and #3 are most likely. Either way, hotels continue to be unsafe for a very long time. That isn't okay in my book. This forced their hand such that they had to respond and fix the issues, and they're taking steps to do that now.
All of this is combined with the fact that I know I'm not the first person to discover this. It's simply too damn simple; how many people have used this in the past for malicious reasons? The cat has been out of the bag for many years, IMO.
Lets say you have 30 days until the presentation, you get an anonymous email address and send the company a description of the flaws with a note saying you will release the info to the public in 30 days and will not be checking your email until after that time. Maybe screenshot/record the mail being sent for evidence in case they deny it. In this scenario they have 30 days to fix the problem, they have no way to threaten you (or maybe they they could threaten the conference and this idea only works if you leak the info online independently?), and you can expose them as being even bigger pricks if they fail to take timely action to fix the problem. A decent idea, or not workable? That sort of thing would probably work if you wanted to remain anonymous while giving them a heads up. However, it seems like it'd increase your liability if you were to get into a legal battle after it.
Wikipedia tells me you were interested in computing by the age of four. What was it that got you interested at such a young age? I discovered a book on BASIC for the Apple ][E in my school library, and started tweaking the code in there, then started writing little text-based games; that was probably kindergarten or first grade. It was short (maybe 30-40 pages?) and IIRC its cover was orange with white lettering, if anyone has a clue. Would love to get a copy again.
The other thing was that I learned about EDIT.COM and opened the game Pilgrim's Quest in it, on my old 386. I was maybe 6 or 7, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I mashed keys and typed in words and such; it wasn't source, it was a raw binary. I ran the game, and the screen was completely corrupted, but on pressing a key, you'd hear a sound. Each key had a different sound. It was then that I realized that if you understood what these things did, you could be the master of a little universe of your own.
Of course, playing Shadowrun on the Genesis when I was a little bit older helped a lot. I still want to be a decker; hell, I even named my old OS "Renraku".
How does a 30 year old newbie learn to code? I'm not really sure. The hard part is just getting started, so maybe something like Link to www.codecademy.com could be of help.
I think the book you used was called "BASIC Programming for Kids." If so, that's the exact same book that got me into programming too! Link to www.amazon.com. Holy shit, I think you're right. Thank you!
Now that you've mentioned Apple, what is your opinion of Apple? I hear a lot of opinions here on Reddit regarding Apple, but I would love to hear what someone like yourself thinks of Apple or their direction/machines. I like some of their products (I couldn't live without my iPad, particularly) but despise their business practices.
I want to be a white hat security guy; how do I get started? my background is unix sysadmin/qa, etc. Learn to program in at least one high-level language (Python, Ruby, JS, whatever), learn to program in at least one low-level language (C is best, C++ is almost as good). If you want to work on the reverse-engineering side of things, learning assembly for at least one ISA (x86 is best) is a very good thing. If you want to work on the web side of things (which you'll likely need, at some point or another) then you have to understand how web development is done, how the web itself works, how JS works, etc.
Start from the top down; first step is the web. OWASP has lots of good information, but use it to just get a feeling for what's out there, then Google around.
Run through some web security challenges, e.g. HackThisSite, and use WebGoat as a test.
Read up on native security a bit -- learn the basics of buffer overflows and all that fun stuff.
Grab old versions of open source software with known vulnerabilities, and rediscover them. This applies equally well to native and web software.
Practice, practice, practice. Every time you encounter a piece of technology or a security process, think about how you could attack it. Take a shot at every piece of software you come across (-NOT- web-based services; that's generally illegal).
Surround yourself with people smarter than you are on every topic you're interested in. This is easy to do in the age of the interwebs.
I'm also writing a book on getting into security; the outline is available at Link to gist.github.com . The point of it is not to be a complete guide to every detail of every part of security, but rather to expose you to enough different things that when you need to learn something, you're able to. It'll be out... sometime before I die :P.
Are these generally the same set of instructions necessary for someone of less than honorable morals to learn to get into the criminal side of things? I ask out of curiosity if the difference is entirely intentions, because i'm really interested in psychology. Totally not a criminal and stuff :P. The only difference between an honorable hacker and a dishonorable hacker is what they do with their knowledge, not the knowledge itself.
Do you have an idea when this book will be released? I'm quite interested :) Can you suggest any other book(s) on the subject? I really have no idea. I'm about a quarter of the way finished, having started it maybe 4-5 months ago, so it's coming along pretty quickly. I'm happy with how it's turning out, though I have no idea how I'm going to publish it; some friends keep telling me to throw up a Kickstarter project to fund it, pay for an editor, etc but I'm on the fence still.
Ask you ANYTHING? well why don't we start with how do you do it? As in how it works? Well, there's a port on the bottom of the lock that's used to program the lock. That port allows direct memory access, enabling you to read the sitecode (unique code for the property) out of memory, then send it back up with the open command. No authentication is required, and it takes about 200ms for it to pop open. Full details are available at Link to daeken.com if you want more details.
Or do you mean how I actually got to that point?
Well I was actually jokingly asking you to disclose the secrets of your trade. Answer was totally unexpected and satisfactory :) First step is to figure out what your goal is. For instance, you may want to understand the model format in a game, so you can render them yourself.
Once you have your goal, think about how you would design the system you're trying to reverse-engineer. It doesn't have to be detailed, just a general idea.
From that, come up with a set of assumptions about the system. E.g. "there will be a field in the header that is roughly the size of the file divided by 12 (3 x 4 byte floating point values, for coordinates)". Then check each of those.
Once you've done that, rethink your model of how it works using the new information, and repeat until you figure it out.
It helps massively to know a little about everything, so you can draw conclusions about how things work just by seeing what it does. Yep. That example is real, btw -- I worked on reversing the Everquest file formats many, many years ago to write my own client for it. I was still in high school at the time; I printed out a couple pages of the hex dump of a few files in a given format, then I'd go over them with highlighters and figure out the specific bits. It's all about pattern matching and checking assumptions.
Even though I didnt understand a huge amount of acronyms in that it was still really interesting! thanks! Anything specifically? I might be able to clear things up.
Do you think the lock manufacturer will fix the vulns at least for newly produced locks? Or are there maybe even inherent protocol weaknesses that would make a patched lock incompatible with existing programming devices or cards or so? Fixing these vulnerabilities consists of two parts: changing the protocol for the portable programmer such that direct memory access is not possible, and changing the crypto to use a safe algorithm and a large key size (a 32-bit key on a terrible proprietary algorithm is very much Not Ok (TM)).
This means that the portable programmer and encoder both have to be changed, in addition to the locks. I can only hope they'll do all of this, and get it audited to know that it actually works properly.
So they need to replace 4 million locks and other stuff too. Wouldn't they be worried that a new RE will then come by and expose new vulnerabilities? They should be concerned about that no matter what. That's why I strongly, strongly recommend them to have everything thoroughly audited by independent security professionals. Will they catch everything? No. Will they catch these sorts of horribly obvious vulnerabilities? Absolutely.
Thought the mfr issued a statement that they were fixing "most" of the locks with a physical deterrent and "firmware upgrade"? Am I missing something? Am I in the wrong thread again?? Fuck! What they've described as their plan to fix these issues is, I believe, not actually going to solve everything. Details are at Link to daeken.com
Does Onity actually think that people don't have access to Torx bits? I'm sure they realize that people have them, but that it'll add quite a few seconds to the opening process, rather than it being instant. It also makes it harder to not be obvious that you're doing it or that you were there.
Honestly, it's not a bad solution, it just should be paired with fixing the underlying vulnerabilities.
Caleb from Hackaday.com here. Think they'll just ignore it like bump keys? Seems like so much money and trouble to go back and fix everything. I think that it's public enough that they'll be forced to do the right thing eventually and release a fix/recall in the future. I just don't know when that'll be.
How did you become so smart? College? Self-learning? If so, what did you read or follow? Everything I know was self-taught. I just found interesting things and started doing them. I'm actually a high school dropout, no college at all haha.
Why wasn't your presentation part of the normal blackhat briefings (the last two days)? Did one need more than a standard 'briefings only' badge to see your talk? I was frustrated to be excluded, having paid so much money for entry. They decided they wanted a "fun" presentation for the Zero Day Briefings that happened the night before everything, and I was picked for it. You didn't need any special badge, but it was woefully under-advertised. Amazed I got as many people as I did, honestly. That said, the presentation sucked -- my timing was totally off, so I ran through my 60 minute slot in... 30.
How many people actually came to your presentation? I assume only those from the trainings sessions ($5,000+ entry) were able to see your talk? For what it's worth, I'm planning on doing another one of it which will be livestreamed with a public Q&A. Not sure when, but I'll announce it on Twitter (@daeken) and my blog (Link to daeken.com) ahead of time.
Thoughts on Ada vs. C? Never wrote much Ada at all, so I don't have much of an opinion on it. C is my mother tongue (along with x86 asm) effectively, so I'm naturally biased towards it.
How much did you enjoy Stuxnet? Never looked into Stuxnet at all; malware doesn't interest me in the least.
Is reversing as boring as I imagine it? Reversing for me is amazingly interesting. Don't get me wrong, it definitely gets old sometimes. But it's a combination of the ultimate application of the scientific method (ok, this is how it would work if I designed it... what assumptions can I make from there, and how can I check them? Rinse, repeat) and putting together mental jigsaw puzzles while only having hints of what the image should be. I love it.
How does it feel to work in a field society absolutely doesn't give a shit about? Are there actually organizations out there that care about IT security in a way that deserves the word? Law firms? Drug cartels? The Vatican? I'm in it for the challenge, above all else. While most people have no idea what I do and those that do frequently dislike it, it's immensely challenging and fun for me. The money helps too, of course.
Can you tell me any secret IRC rooms where reversers hang out to be away from the noobs? PM me if necessary. I don't really know of any. I hang out in a lot of IRC channels, though, where this sort of thing is discussed in passing frequently, but they're mostly social. PM me on Freenode (nick is Daeken) if you want to join any of them. Also, #lockresearch (Freenode) is a channel I started to continue the Onity work, if you're interested.
Do you know of any secure hard-drives where the ATA security feature cannot be circumvented by firmware update or overwriting certain disk sectors? If not, are there other ways to reach this goal like cutting write-enable pins to flash chips? Never looked into ATA security stuff, sorry.
What do you think about the "oh, we'll send out some screws to stick into the reprogramming hole" response from the vendor? Would you stay in a hotel room with that patch applied? I think it's actually a really nice temporary fix, and I think it's good to have it there even once these issues are fixed -- after all, there are likely others there. It's not perfect, but it raises the bar slightly, and that's a good thing. The rest of the response... not so much.
Honestly, the likelihood of anything happening to you (even if you left the door latch off and had a vulnerable lock) is tiny. I always throw the door latch/chain on when it's available, but I don't stress about it. If someone wants to rob me or whatnot, they'll do it.
Did you get any blow backs from this? Like did any hotels or security companies (the lock companies) get pissed at you? I'm sure a lot of people are pissed at me, but outside of some rude comments on the internet (gasp) I haven't heard a thing.
Favorite sandwich? Reuben with thousand island dressing. Pretty much all I ate for a week after moving to NYC.
Damn, I replied before that we had very similar introductions into computers and now this. Are you the black hat version of me, though we both love Reubens, our universal weakness? Lots of sauerkraut, no lean meat, go hard or go home? Wouldn't the blackhhat version of you eat pastrami sandwiches instead? Then again, I do love pastrami...
You're in NYC now? I just moved away after several amazing years. Enjoy! Try the burgers at Paul's on 8th. Good work on getting a repeatable hack on these locks published. Now I can finally use the pool at the Hilton! I've been in NYC for a little under two years, but I'm actually moving to CT tomorrow haha.
Living in NYC, moving to CT, computer knowledge... Are you Foamy? Nope, sorry.
How does one get started in reverse engineering? Learn C.
Learn x86 assembly (start by compiling C you write down to assembly and reading it, then get your friends to write some stuff and compile it for you, then decompile it back to C by hand)
Start digging into every protocol and file format you can find. Pick a goal (e.g. I want to write a model viewer for WoW) and jump into it.
Practice, practice, practice.
If you want to go down that path, shoot me a PM on Freenode IRC; nick's Daeken.
I see from other comments as well that you are an advocate of C. What are your thoughts on C vs C++? C++ has its place, much as I hate to say it. I've recently begun relearning C++ properly, along with Boost, so that I can make use of Cinder. I don't completely hate it.
One of the reports mentions your code/device failing to open some locks in a few cases. Was that just a matter of your stuff being mostly proof of concept code that needed refinement, or were the locks any different from what you had been working on previously? I know that the locks were different (in that they used slightly different boards), but the key problem was a timing issue with my Arduino sketch. The night before the Forbes demo, I hacked the sketch up to add some extra functionality (reading out the code key values needed to make master cards, in addition to just opening the door) and I'm fairly confident that screwed up the timing, which I calibrated carefully a long while back.
Outside of some random documentation issues and a little bug in the code, I'm fairly certain that the code that I released in my paper (largely the original code) works 100% of the time. That's definitely been what I've heard from people who have tested it. Not sure how I feel about that.
How I'd solve this: Port it to a much faster uC, run your communications code in a fast high priority interrupt handler, will be rock solid. I think a PIC32MX7 would probably do it. Yep, a number of people have built independent implementations on random uCs and had full success.
Have you ever used your skills for something mischievous? or for a personal gain? Mischievous, not really. For personal gain, nothing directly outside of just using my skills for work; my projects like these have ended up boosting my reputation and making it easier to get work, so that counts I guess.
Did you see the industry having to do a complete overhaul of their procedures? Or was that the point? That was the point, by and large. The Onity vulnerabilities are terrible and obvious, and obviously need to be fixed, but I think the bigger picture is: there are plenty of other lock vendors, and I'm sure they aren't that much better. Security -- real, hard security -- needs to be the norm here, and that won't happen without getting some knocks.
Did you ever fear repercussions by Onity? I mean you're hurting their business and public image quite a bit. Fear? Not so much; I feel I've done the right thing and stayed within the bounds of the law. I'm surprised there hasn't been an attempt to 'shut me up', though.
Are you working on your next big hack? If so, can you give us a taste? You know, at this point I have no idea. I'm amassing hardware hacking equipment at the moment (well, putting in orders; moving tomorrow, so I had to wait), so something will be coming eventually. Mainly focusing on work, demoscene stuff, and some independent consulting at the moment.
It's very likely this won't be the last of the lock stuff I do. I've got some things on my mind, but I have no idea what will come of any of it.
Do you have more information on reversing the Emotive brain-computer interface that can be publicly released? I wrote about my reversing process at Link to daeken.com It's currently maintained as part of Link to www.openyou.org
If you have any questions about it beyond this stuff, feel free to ask. That was a fun project.
Cheers, Cody. (Awesome name for a hacker, btw) Definitely something I'd like to get involved in when my programming skills are less shit. The brain hacking thing's sure to be a big thing in the future - especially now there's a cheap consumer virtual reality headset on the way. Well, if you're interested go ahead and jump on ##reversing on irc.freenode.net -- just started it to help people get up to speed.
Is there anything else that you like to do with your spare times besides reverse engineering things? In terms of tech, I spend a lot of time working on demoscene productions and writing random little apps/tools. Otherwise, just doing things with the girlfriend; seeing movies, going to plays, bowling, shopping, etc. I'm pretty boring, generally.
Occasional acid flashback? We don't talk about that these days. Not after the incident.
I heard that when they tested your hotel door unlock scheme on several randomly chosen hotel locks, it only worked on a small percentage. Covered that at Link to www.reddit.com
So, I see a lot of questions about security and whatnot, but I have something totally different to ask you. What do you do for fun? Things both in and out of the realm of CS. First part is covered at Link to www.reddit.com
Do you ever do random challenges for the heck of it (like writing a Befunge interpreter in Befunge, for example)? Or do you strictly do stuff like that for work? I do a lot of random challenges in programming/reversing/security. Bug bounties (see Link to www.ccbill.com ) are a lot of fun, and I used to do a lot of esoteric language work ( Link to esolangs.org ). Also, a lot of Project Euler; it's slow going, though, since I don't allow myself to Google anything, ask questions, etc.
That's pretty awesome. I don't think I'm good enough at programming for any serious bug bounties, but I totally respect people who are. I used to do a ton of work in esoteric languages (mostly Befunge '98 and Piet) but the esolang community seems to be all but dead lately. Hey, nobody starts out awesome. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where you can totally dominate bounty programs; start small and work up. Simple sites like CCBill (whose bug bounty program is unfortunately terminated. May or may not have been my fault...) are a great place to start.
Can you break the lock on my Chasity belt I lost the key?!? Given the 'Lord' in your name, I believe I will pass ;)
How many hotel owners do you think even care or will bother to change this? For the majority of the people staying, no one would even realize that this is a flaw in the particular hotel they're staying at. So how/why would owners actually go ahead and do this fix, especially since its going to be out of their own pockets? How do you convince them to change it? Lots will care, simply because of the black eye the industry as a whole is getting in the press right now. However, I think many won't do anything about it, simply because they do have to pay for it themselves. That's why I believe that the responsible response from Onity would be a proper recall, at their expense. It's the only way that hotels are going to fix this.
Is it true that you find this easy but riding a bike very difficult? Quite so.
What ever happened to that chair you hate? Hah. I have no idea. Do you still have the sound bite of "Fuck! I hate this chair" ?
Purely hypothetical of course, but would it have been possible to make a little more money...doing this the other way? Are those routes possible? Are there people who are interested? Where there's money involved, there's always a moral and immoral path; someone will always be willing to throw you some money.
Have you figure out, how to unlock the heart of a woman? I believe so, yes.
I may be very naïve with this question and stuff but I really want to get into hacking/security. However, I really want to learn a programming language too. With what programming language would you suggest that I start with? I was thinkig between Python and C. Thanks in advance! I absolutely recommend both Python and C. They're the two languages I use most commonly. From there, go for x86 assembly.
Oh man so much thanks for answering! I honestly didn't expect you to answer my little question in this thread of a 1000+ replies, thanks a lot man! I'm making an attempt to answer every reasonable question haha.
You said a while back here that you were working on a book about software emulation. Is this still in the works? It is. Sort of. I wrote half the book, scrapped it, wrote half the book, scrapped it again. I can't come up with anything that 1) teaches the things I want to teach, 2) isn't a million pages, and 3) actually makes sense to anyone but myself. If it's ever going to work, it's going to be in the form of a bunch of separate ebooks on specific issues, I think.
Why didn't you tell the lock manufacturer and hotel chains instead of blasting it to the entire world so everyone can break into any hotel room? Covered this all over the thread, but here: Link to www.reddit.com
Like a bikechain that can be broken through with lockcutters? I don't think security through obscurity works anywhere, but just like on the interwebs, anything that raises the barrier to entry makes things safer, even if not more secure.
Can you comment on my thoughts above? As for how long it takes to open a lock with the vulnerabilities described in the paper, you're several orders of magnitude off; you plug a device into the lock (which can be done in under a second), it opens in 200 milliseconds or less, and you're in.
Last updated: 2012-08-22 11:01 UTC
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