Movies Watched -- GETT: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2015)

In Hebrew and French. 115 minute running time, so way over the sacred 100 minute mark, but I liked this one. Who knew that divorce in a rabbinical court could be so thrilling? The absurdity of it all is just so great that it plays like a comedy at times… but of course it’s a tragedy. The cast of characters who come through the court … it’s hilarious (and terrible). Really well done. Recommended. Green rating.

The movies I can recommend from 2015 are:

• 45 Years

• GETT: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

• Mad Max: Fury Road

• Shaun the Sheep Movie

• Son of Saul

• Tangerine

• The Diary Of A Teenage Girl

• The Revenant

• Wild Tales

Unending Trial

Movies Watched -- Berlin Syndrome (2017)

115 minute running time so at least 15 to 20 minutes too long. There were quite a few scenes that I could have cut to get it closer to the sacred 100 minute mark, but I liked this one. It’s a thriller that borders on horror … really well made, but not easy to watch.

It was not on the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 list, so I just stumbled across it, and I’m glad that I did. Again, this proves that the Rotten Tomatoes list is deeply flawed.

Abduction and sexual captivity movies aren’t for the faint of heart, but if you’re a tough guy or girl who enjoys a well-crafted, well-acted thriller, you’ll like it. I just wish it had been tighter, cut 15 minutes out and it would be near perfect. Teresa Palmer is another super talented Australian actress (like Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman).

Recommended. Green rating. This is the fifth movie I can recommend from 2017 … the others are Thelma, Land of Mine, Graduation, and Wind River.

(I see now that the director of this movie also made Lore, which had one of the best endings I’ve seen.)

Why do you always throw yourself at me?

Movies Watched -- Appropriate Behavior (2015)

86 minutes so well within the sacred 100 minute mark. Not just a W.D. By movie (written and directed by the same person), but a W.D.S. movie — written, directed, and starring the same person, in this case a young woman named Desiree Akhavan.

It’s mainly a homosexual love story, but it’s more complicated than that — she can’t reveal to her Persian parents that she’s gay, so there’s a cultural barrier thing going on too. It’s about educated rich kids living the hipster life in Brooklyn. “Shirin” is an Iranian-American … her family has money and she went to Smith. She’s attractive, but sometimes looks like a transgender man, her body type is manly — it’s weird. She has a deep, sexy voice and she’s smart and not conventional — all attractive qualities.

The movie is very funny in parts … I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t like it enough to recommend it. If you’re interested in privileged hipsters in Brooklyn, and the sexual experimentation that some young people engage in, you might like it. Yellow rating.

Stephen Holden titled his excellent review Aimless Adventures of a Hip Narcissist, which is spot-on.

Mom, I’m a little bit gay.

Movies Watched -- Lady Bird (2017)

94 minute running time so well within the sacred 100 minute limit. A coming-of-age story set in 1992 … the trouble I had with it is Saoirse Ronan couldn’t pass for a seventeen-year-old in my mind. In every scene, I thought why is this woman in her twenties going to Catholic high school?

There are a lot of cute scenes (the discouraging guidance counselor made me laugh out loud), it’s quirky, but it’s sort of overly precious throughout (though it doesn’t descend into Wes Anderson or Little Miss Sunshine or, god forbid, Noah Baumbach territory.) The class element interested me (east Sacramento versus west Sacramento), going to state college versus some private school in NYC, etc. But I wasn’t that thrilled in the end. Yellow rating.

Hottie from Haifa closer to seventeen than the lass from Dublin

Notes for Chat with Traders, Episode 87

Episode 87 ... Tom Sosnoff (60:58)

• Aaron recommends Sosnoff’s Ted Talk

• Caddying 18 holes is called a "loop"

• Jimmy Rocko, his caddy master, grifted him out of all his earnings, cheap life lesson

• Current generation way too risk averse

• Current generation has too much student debt, makes them scared

• Take risks when you're young ... it's common sense

• Risks usually aren't efficiently priced

• Graduated college in summer of 1979

• Wanted to work for a lobbyist but couldn't find job

• Worked for Drexel Burnham right out of college, fall of 1979

• "Bullshitted his way" in

• Pre-Milken, he was long gone before the collapse of Drexel

• Gold and silver exploding then

• Stepped on floor of CBOE and knew that's where he belonged

• National Semiconductor (NSM) pit, first words to him: "f-ck you!"

• Trading floors: all alpha males, strong egos, independent, grifters -- fit his personality

• Spent 20 years on the floor of CBOE

• 3-5% of the people they hired made it

• He just got lucky and made it

• Only instruction to trainees was "go make some money"

• Couldn't outsmart anyone so tried to outwork them

• Made enough money so he could build ThinkOrSwim

• The only way to make money with options: trade small, manage profits, sell options naked

• All about creating a statistical chance of success with options

• No such thing as a quantitative model that can beat the markets

• Market making models (and HFT) can beat the market, but that's it

• The world prices everything perfectly -- no free money, no edge out there

• Derivatives overprice for fear, take advantage of this opportunity

• Sell high implied volatility

• There are people who make money, but they're outliers

• Can't steal money from your customers anymore, this is how people used to make money

• Be product and strategy agnostic, all your focus is on liquidity

• Manage your winners, forget about your losers

• Learn all about implied volatility, learn how to sell premium

• Price is not mean reverting, but implied volatility is

• He's on pace to do 10,000 trades for the year (2016)

• Start young and start small and learn

• If you can order a pizza, you can trade. It's not rocket science

• 100,000+ tastytraders [not sure what this means? active viewers?]

• Markets 35 years ago were inefficient

• Individual investors today at no disadvantage to professionals -- fees, technology the same, only know-how different

• Trading psychology is 100% bullshit

• We make people feel good about their lack of know-how

• People aren't successful because they don't take the time and the commitment to be successful

• Industry makes money by managing other people's money

• There's no psychological element to blackjack or even poker (it's all mechanics, playing by the book)

• He stood in the same two foot spot for twenty years in the pit

• Saw the hurricane coming and wanted to be the first one out

• Scott Sheridan his partner ... hired great technologists to build ThinkOrSwim

• Hired smart people to execute their vision

• He didn't see his family for ten years while building ThinkOrSwim

• Built a great company and product

• Didn't want to sell ThinkOrSwim, but it was a public company and TD bought them out

• Sold ThinkOrSwim for $750MM

• Went to CEO of TD Ameritrade and told him he wanted to leave

• Built tastytrade, which is a media company, profitable since Day One

• In order to trade for a living: you need capital and need to know what you're doing, stay small

• His biggest revelation was that he was trading too large ... got smaller, got successful

• Eight hours a day of live content on his website every day, tens of thousands of hours archived

• Website: www.tastytrade.com

Movies Watched -- Only the Brave (2017)

134 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long. SPOILERS: I didn’t realize this movie was commemorating a real tragedy, memorializing a group of wildfire firefighters, a.k.a., “hotshots.” It did make me wonder if the disaster were avoidable … were bad decisions made? I guess that’s something you can’t dare ask.

What interested me about it most were the parallels to War Porn … Josh Brolin is a sergeant (“Superintendent”) leading his squad of brave and buff young white men into battle, except they’re not killing ragheads in the desert to protect the homeland, they are battling mother nature to protect homes in the western United States. The classic-rock soundtrack, the pretty blonde wives (and nurses!) who call their men heroes, the fetishizing of the gear and the rigors of the training — all the usual macho stuff, just a different context.

It wasn’t badly made, but it was way too long … the culture of wildfire firefighters is interesting, and they did about as good a job dramatizing it as they could … but, it gets a yellow rating from me.

Mark Zuckerberg, former junkie, current hotshot

Hard To Categorize

I skimmed this Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape (PDF) report. This is how they segmented the groups:

• Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.

• Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.

• Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.

• Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial.

• Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.

• Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.

• Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic

Where do I fit in this? I’m secular, cosmopolitan, retired, open to compromise, rational, detached, patriotic, and civic-minded.

Movies Watched -- Girls Trip (2017)

122 minute running time so at least 20 to 30 minutes too long. I only made it 10 minutes in before going to 16x fast forward. This is so squarely aimed at black women of a certain age and class that it holds no appeal to anyone else. Who wants to watch foul-mouthed women with chemically-straightened hair spout vulgarities for two hours? Terrible. Red rating, avoid at all costs.

This made the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 list, which shows you how broken that list is.

Donald Clarke’s review.

Gag me with a banana

Trading Psychology: Painful versus Hurtful

I learned the following idea from Jeff Davis, who is a wise man and a veteran trader.

When you’re trading, it’s important to distinguish between things that are hurtful and things that are painful. For example, if you don’t take a trade that goes in your favor, that’s hurtful but not painful. If you’re in a trade and get stopped out at breakeven, only to watch it go in your favor, that’s hurtful but not painful.

Painful is when you actually take a loss, there is real harm done (even when it’s a planned, controlled loss). Missed profits are not painful. You don’t want to equate missed profits with actual losses in your mind. You have to be very careful about this. Your mind will play all sorts of tricks on you, so you have to stay right on top of it.

So the next time you get tricked out of a position (or “juked” out as my buddy Smash likes to say), quickly ask yourself, was that truly painful or merely hurtful?

The Politically Correct Beatrix Potter

I’ve been reading all of Beatrix Potter’s many “tales” with my daughter, and was surprised to see in one of the books from our local library that the original text had been changed and an illustration had been excluded!

In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, the original text, which I remember well, reads: “When old Mr. Bunny had driven the cat into the greenhouse, he locked the door. Then he came back to the basket and took out his son Benjamin by the ears, and whipped him with the little switch.”

In the 1991 Ottenheimer Publishers edition from our local library, the text reads [my emphasis]: “When old Mr. Bunny had driven the cat into the green-house, he locked the door. Then he came back to the basket and took out his son Benjamin by the ears, and spanked him with the little switch.”

The politically correct editors of 1991 had no trouble with Benjamin being pulled out by his ears, but they did change “whipped” to “spanked.” They also dropped the accompanying illustration of Mr. Bunny whipping Peter Rabbit, while in the background Benjamin Bunny is holding his backside and crying:

Then he took out his nephew Peter