Well, its Football time again. The first game of the pre-season, the 'hall of fame game', is this Sunday. Wow, time flies. Football time is one of my favorite times of the year. Although it starts in the dead of Summer, to me in indicates that Fall is at hand. Along with football means buying my yearly tickets to the Thankgiving day Dallas Cowboys game, which is ALWAYS a fiasco. You can read more about it here: http://a0001718.blogspot.com/2007/03/every-year-i-go-to-thanksgiving-day.html.

So this year I figured I would try a new approach. I will buy shitloads of tickets, and sell them for more than I paid for them, and use the proceeds to buy a pair for myself. I figure this way I can put up a little starting capital from my own pocket, and end up buying a lot better tickets for the same price, or maybe even free if I play my cards right.

In the past I have thought about just buying season tickets, and selling all the tickets except for the pair on Thanksgiving, but it just so expensive. While I am on this subject, let me show you something that will almost certainly piss you off and perhaps even make you want something bad to happen to good people. Observe:

http://www.dallascowboys.com/tickets/ClubPricingMap.pdf

WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK? YOU HAVE TO GOD DAMNED BE SHITTING ME RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HUMAN ASSHOLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To sit anywhere in the new facility anywhere near the field where you can see the game properly, you have to fork over a MINIMUM of $32,000.00, just for the OPTION to buy a pair of fucking tickets. And then, as if that was not insulting enough to Cowboys fans, you then have to buy the mother fuckin' tickets themselves! And, on top of that huge fucking pile of shattastic fecal matter, you still have to pay even more for parking!

Also, in case your are sorta blind or just stupid, to sit in the _really_ good seats in the middle sections, YOU HAVE TO PAY $300,000.00, JUST FOR THE OPTION to buy the tickets, which are then another $6,800.00, plus parking on top of that. By the way, did I mention the sales tax on this shit would be nearly another 30 grand? BITCHES!

Ok, well, fuck that. Fuck Jerry Jones, and fuck the Cowboys. I'll just sit in the shitty seats....

http://www.dallascowboys.com/tickets/ReservedPricesWLoge.pdf

DOH!, foiled again! The option to buy a pair of tickets IN THE SHITTY SEATS ranges anywhere from $4,000.00 up to $12,000.00, and then the tickets are another $790.00 to $1,250.00.

So, then there is the option of sitting in the no seat option $59.00 ticket section, where you will not be able to see anything, except Jerry's fantastic glorified Jumbotron, which is 200 feet long. Oh, but those are usually all sold to season ticket holders as well. Most of these 'season ticket holders' are really ticket resellers, that charge you a minimum of twice face value, but usually closer to 3x or 4x face value.

I am not a religious person, and I don't believe in heaven or hell in any conventional sense, but I do believe in something similar to karma, and I would hate to be anyone involved with the Cowboys organization as a whole, because they've certainly got some bad shit headed in their general direction. What in the fuck are these people thinking? Believe me, I am all for supply and demand, but you'd think there would be a line indicating poor class and taste, not to mention unethical and immoral practices by such an entity. I guess greed and the almighty dollar rule the world, and that's just sad.

So, back to the matter at hand. I went on a bidding spree in eBay and have purchased 14 pairs of tickets so far. I am paying an average so far of $83.00 per ticket (total, factoring in shipping and everything), which is only $33 per ticket over face value, not counting tax and fees, and all the other junk they usually add. I believe I will be able to collect around $130.00 per ticket upon resell, for a profit of $47.00 per ticket, which will get dragged down to probably $40 after eBay fees, PayPal fees, and all these other bullshit fees that seem to appear. If I sell all 14 at that rate, I will make $560, profit, which will get me pretty nice seats to the Thanksgiving game. Also, if I can sell the entire batch for that much, I likely will buy another batch of 14, and try it again, and pocket that 560 bucks for more stock options, or for vacation fun.

So there you have it. Next time you see Jerry Jones at the K-mart buying a new enema bag, make sure and tweak his nipples, its only fair since he is already fucking you in your ass.

SCHIZO!

I really got nothing to say today, I just felt 'off' for not posting in a while.

I skipped work again today. took a vacation day. I sorta wish I had gone to save the vacation day for use later, but it's too late now.

I mowed my yard, refilled all my gasoline stock for my motorcycle, and tightened my chain on said motorcycle. It is so hot and humid that 5 minutes in the garage, and I am completely totally drenched and dripping profusely with sweat.

I spent the rest of the day researching stock options, and trying to find something good to jump in on. There are too many stocks and way too many options to make it easy. I also have learned that I really don't like to leave my money tied up in options for any long period of time. The craft of options is to get in and get out, and take your profit.

Another thing I was focusing on was trying to get as much profit as possible, which is a piss poor plan. A better method is to have a set amount of profit you would like to achieve and then pull out when you reach it. Most checking accounts, CDs, money markets, and other "solid" financial instruments will get you anywhere between 3% and 5% profit. That sucks monkey balls. That is virtually nothing. Sure, if you had 10 million in one of those types of investments, that would be ~400K, which is a lot of money, but think proportionally. If you had 10 million to toss around, 400K probably does not impress you any longer. I have set my goal 40%, plus enough additional profit to cover any commissions I may pay in the process. How did I arrive at 40%? Pulled it straight outta my ass. That's about 10 times what you might average with a savings account, so it just sounded good to me. 40% of 200 bucks is only 80 bucks, and that does not sound like a lot, but if you were able to get a 40% return on your money 5 times, you'd have over 1500 bucks, and if you did it 25 times, you would land just a hair under $900,000.00. Add another zero, and you have 9 million bucks... and that, my friends, is money momentum!

I saw Jerry Seinfeld over the weekend. I had great seats. No one in front of or to the left of us. He is doing well, and his comedy was terrific. It was like watching a weird episode of his TV show, only you were in it. I firmly believe in my heart of hearts, that he could start the show back up and it would not miss a beat in terms of writing style or the quality of the episodes. He would probably have issues with the other actors though. It is retarded to even think that would be possible.

I also booked my room at the MGM Grand for vacation. I snagged front row tickets to Carrot Top and to the Cirque show called Mystere. Should be interesting. Also, this time around, instead of doing some light gambling to fill time between doing other stuff, I am going to commit time to gambling as a feature, rather than a filler. When you are using it for filler, you tend to quit when you win or lose a certain amount, which is probably not a good thing. If you sat down and lost 50 bucks in 10 minutes, you would probably walk away... after all, you are just killing time, and that should be free. On the flip side, if you turned that 50 into 150, you would be happy and walk away, but then you have more time to kill. Also when I go this time, I am going to ask for a free or low cost room upgrade. I'd like to branch out in try another room at their fine establishment. If they won't do it, then perhaps next time I shall explore another hotel. Last but not least, the NFL season will kick off while I am there, so I will enjoy making sports wagers and raping the casino of their hard earned cash.

Also, I saw a dead raccoon on the way to work the other day. Obviously raccoons are not as awesome as squirrels.

A perfect day? is that even possible? perhaps.

Saturday morning I woke and and cooked breakfast outside on my grill. Sausage, fried eggs, waffles, and all the extras. It was fantastic.

I then grabbed my DRF and my reserved seat tickets and headed out. I swing by and pickup a friend, an then another, and then head to the track. I took $120 with me, and planned to leave with none, but I would have fun all day, so it would be OK.

Dollar day! Yay! One dollar beers and one dollar hot dogs. You can't beat that. I stick exactly $40 into the betting terminal. The first two races come and go. Bam, I hit the first daily double. Sweet! I don't remember how much my profit was, it was a 2$ bet, and I think it was around 50 bucks. I grab a beer and dog, and head back to my seat. A few more races go by, I win a few miscellaneous bets, but then i hit a pick 3. Bam... $147 on a 2$ bet. I have more than doubled the amount of money I brought to gamble with, and quadrupled or more the amount I stuck into the terminal. The rest of the gambling was pretty normal, I hit a few exactas and some 10 cent superfectas, and lost some other pick 3s and trifectas. I lost track of beer and hotdog counts. I cashed out my credit voucher at the end of the day with 157$ on it, after starting with $40, and that does not count the cash for the dogs and beers. Woot! I think I could consistently do well at the track. I have a system that appears to work fairly well. I think next time I go, I will take $200 instead of $120 and bet essentially twice as much per bet.

On the way home, we started thinking... food! We decided on Shogun, a local hibachi grill. So I had some fantastic jalapeno steak, prepared by a Japanese chef who flipped his knives around with precision. It was entertaining to watch and the food was quite tasty. Best of all, it cost me nothing. I plan to use the rest of my winnings to buy more stock options. Hopefully I can let it ride and turn it into even more money.

So, friends, good food, free money, good times. Does it get any better than that? I am not sure that it does. I plan for that to be what every day life is like for me when I am older. I might not make it to that lifestyle before retirement, but the day I retire, I will become that guy permanently.

Well, now I have gone and done it. I am an options trader.

For years, I have been trying to find some sort of financial instrument to allow me to gamble with spare money. High risk type stuff. I already have a 401k and a Roth IRA, and a money market account, so I am not worried about saving money for retirement, because I have those covered. I wanted to be able to take very small amounts of "spare" money, if such a thing even exists anymore, and use it to make quick turn arounds. If you have just 100$, and can double it 5 times, you end up with 3200 bucks… 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200. Is this hard to do? Yeah, maybe even impossible, but if you can't and you lose it all, it is just 100$, and you'd spend that much in a slot machine in a couple of hours in Vegas, or you would certainly drop that amount on a football game bet. So I was constantly looking for a way to truly gamble with the stock market. Let's face it, long term investments are great, but they are a bit boring. Watching golf on TV is the same way, until you bet money on it, it sucks donkey balls, and then suddenly it’s interesting.

Am I out of my mind? No. I educated myself enough to have firm grasp on the concepts, and I think I can explain it easily to anyone who might be confused on the subject. Options can be risky, but they certainly do not have to be. For the time being I am doing the most basic type of options trading, buying 'calls' and 'puts'. In these types of investments, you can NEVER possibly lose more then the amount you put into it. Never.

What the hell does that mean? Not much really. One thing I noticed while learning options is that almost every single term related to options is confusing and vague. I have no idea why this is, but it is. Here, I'll explain.

Trading Options is based largely on what you think the underlying stock will do, go up or down. For every Joe Schmo out there that thinks a company will go up, there is another who thinks it will go down. So similar to sports betting, there is action on both sides. "Options" are basically just guaranteeing the ability to buy or sell a stock as a specific price right now, regardless of what its future price is.

Let's look at the optimists first. They think a certain stock will go up, so they buy what is known as a "call". Again, no idea why it is labeled a "call" or "call option", but it is. I'll use a real world example so it will be easier to comprehend. I think Ford stock will go up. Why? Doesn't matter, I just do... I have my reasons. Ford stock was trading at around 4 bucks a share. I want 100 shares, but I don't want to spend 400 dollars right now. So I buy an option to buy ford stock for 4 dollars a share, regardless of its future price. To do this I have to pay a premium. In this case, the premium was .85 cents a share, or 85$ total for 100 shares. (**I should mention here that most options are always in batches of 100**). So in other words, I can pay 85$ now to buy 100 shares later for 4$ each. Pretty simple right? Oh, another thing, the "locked in" price of an option is called the "strike". Why the hell would anyone name it that? No idea.

So I do so. Now let's look at what happens. Each option has an expiration date. This simply means that I have to close my position on or before that date, and there are 3 different ways that it can close.

1 - Say Ford stock drops to 3$ a share. In this case, the value of the stock is worth less than I can buy it for, so I simply do nothing and let the option "expire worthless". It just disappears. I just lost my 85 bucks. No big deal I suppose.

2 - Say ford stock goes up to 8$ a share. In this case, I can "exercise" my option, and buy my shares for my locked in rate of 4$ a share. In order to do this, I would then need $400 to pay for the shares, but I will have just bought something for 4$ that is currently worth 8$. That’s money momentum! Pretty good shit. If I think the stock was going to go up more, I might hang on to the shares, but since I am only in it for short term quick cash, I would immediately sell the stocks, and enjoy my reward.

or

3 - Say ford stock goes up to 8$ a share, but I really don't want to exercise and buy the shares, because I just don't have 400$, or for whatever reason. Well, I still own a locked in ability to buy it for 4$ a share, so I then sell this ability to someone else, except instead of the 85 cents a share I paid for this ability (85$ total), I sell it for the new current going rate of that particular option, which at that point, would be dramatically higher. Now, the ratio of option price to current stock price is not 1 to 1, so the option isn't worth exactly double since the stock price doubled. In this example, Ford stock jumped about 25% in a couple of days, and the 4$ strike option jumped well over 50% in value. So I would have made some decent fast cash without ever buying or selling any real world stock had I sold it at that time. I plan to hold out a little longer and see what happens.

Ok, so that's buying a call, so what the hell is a "put"? A put is the exact opposite action of a call. Why name it a put? I assume because someone somewhere was a complete fucking moron. So you would buy a put if you think the stock is going to go down. A put is the ability to sell a stock at a locked in rate. So essentially there is someone on the other side, who thinks the stock will go up. The end of the option is also the same, it either expires worthless because the stock went up instead of down, you exercise and really purchase the shares at the lower current price then sell them at the higher rate you locked in, or sell the puts themselves for a handsome profit.

So as you can see, there is really no risk beyond your initial investment in the premium for locking in the rate in either one of these scenarios. The problem with options trading that people run into is when they sell options as opposed to buying them. When you sell an option, you are legally obligated to purchase or sell the underlying shares, whereas when you buy them, you have the right, but not the obligation. So if some jackass sells a call on shares he does not have, and the price of the underlying stock skyrockets, he is obligated to sell you the stock at the rate you locked in, even though it will cost him more to buy it than he will get in return. In other words, he sells a call of ford for 4$ because he thinks the stock will go down in value, then the stock jumps to 8$, and the call buyer exercises the right to buy, he has to buy the ford at 8$ and sell it for 4$. Bad business.

There are really advanced extravagant and complicated stock options strategies that involve buying and selling both calls and puts at the same time, but they are far beyond my comprehension on this time, so I am sticking to the easy stuff.

Ok, so stock options are not that scary, and have huge potential, so go try it!


"Try and fail, don't not try, or you're a pussy"
--Me 2008

Wow, its been two weeks since I last posted. A new record! The truth is nothing has been happening that has been newsworthy.

I have noticed lately that I feel 'guilty', for lack of a better term, when I waste time. Today for example, is the 4th of July. Short of that fact, it is just Friday. My main normal festivities for the holiday take place tomorrow. Then Sunday, I am going shooting guns, so its not like the entire weekend is just wasted. Instead of doing something on the holiday itself, I am using the other days for activities, yet I still feel almost retarded for just sitting around doing nothing. It is summer time, and its Texas, so its almost 100 degrees, and the humidity is high, so going outside is damn near unbearable. Plus, I know I will be outside most of the day tomorrow, as well as Sunday.

It seems that it is perfectly ok to just do nothing on a today like today, but I just can't stand it. All of my friends are doing various things today, and I sort of wish I would have joined them, but on the other hand, they won't be doing something for the two following days, so they likely will be doing tomorrow, what I am doing today. As much as I sort of regret doing nothing today, I think I might regret it more if I did something yesterday, today, tomorrow, and Sunday, because then on Monday I would be dragging ass all day wondering why I didn't use one of the days for R&R. Potentially I would even have taken Monday off to recover from the long weekend full of activities, which would suck. Burning a vacation day to recover is always shitty, plus, by doing so, I would essentially be wasting more time. 8-)

I suppose I am just over-analyzing the situation. So what if I just sit around.

Speaking of wasting time, and I am not sure why this just lept into my mind, but I started thinking the other day about how animals may lead better lives than humans. In particular, I am referring to squirrels. I see an inordinate amount of squirrels now, since I do my daily commute on my motorbike. [80 MPG bitches!, suck it OPEC] A squirrel does not have to be anywhere at any particular time. A squirrel does not have to stress about a shitty boss, or deadlines. A squirrel does not worry about money. A squirrel is free to wake up and/or go to sleep whenever the hell it feels like it. So just about any type of human function that requires attention, the squirrel does not have to deal with. Squirrels generally, in my opinion, appear to be happy woodland creatures.

Nextly, squirrels seem to live an exciting life. Clearly no one can be exactly sure what type of emotions squirrels may or may not posses, but they are seemingly timid creatures. They spend their time just sort of hanging around, looking for food, and doing whatever seems like a good plan at that time. It would seem that this pattern is interrupted several times each and every day by some sort of amazing situation that requires them to do amazing things. Whether it is a predator, or a car on the road, or any other sort of danger, they spring into action, make amazingly quick decisions, albeit sometimes the wrong one, and generally are able to get out of hairy scenarios. Can you imagine a few times a day almost being hit by a fuckin car, or a huge dog chasing you, or perhaps walking 35 feet in the air on a thin tree branch of some sort of cable? Your life would be incredible!

A lot of the squirrels I see are are flat as a pancake on the road. I'm really not all that certain that this sux for the squirrel. If you are trying to evade certain death from the wheel of a fast moving car, I would imagine that you are so amazingly high on adrenaline, that you don't feel a thing. What a way to go.

I suppose it possible that squirrels have the ability to reason, have memories, have to make decisions, and are capable of thoughts similar to those of humans, and just lack the equipment for manipulating items with an opposable thumb, or the ability to communicate through voice based speech, which could result in their lives being quite similar to human life forms, and the stresses that come with it, but even if this is the case, they appear to lead lives like some sort of adventure heroes that we can only enjoy through various media.

It is for these reasons, that if I were forced to choose an animal to be, I may very well choose squirrel. Go team squirrel.


"If you can't see it, it can't hurt you."
--Cody Wayne Adams 1992