Business Education, Fintech, Personal Finance

My Feb 2022 Trades

I stayed away from the market in Dec and Jan. Here are my trades for Feb. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in Ukraine. So going to stay in cash and away from investing till end of June.

Sold 5 puts – FAS strike price 110 for Feb 4th – $450 – Expired.

Sold 3 puts – FAS strike price 120 for Feb 11th – $390 – Expired.

Sold 5 calls – FAS strike price 130 for Feb 18th – $2000 – Expired.

Sold 5 puts – FAS strike price 85 for Feb 18th – $950 – Expired.

Sold 5 puts – TQQQ strike price 35 for Feb 18th – $700 – Expired.

Sold 20 puts – SPXL strike price 70 for Feb 18th – $1400 – Expired.

Business Education, Fintech, Personal Finance

My Trades for December 2021

Back to selling naked puts! But traded on FAS for fun. Here are my trades for Dec.

Transactions

Bought 200 FAS at $124.00 and sold at $126.60.

Sold 10, Jan 22, TQQQ 60 puts for $1.70 & Bought it back at $0.03. Any idea why?

Sold 10, Jan 22, RIVN 70 puts for $3.30 (too attractive to pass)

Sold 10, Jan 22, RIVN 55 puts for $1.45 (too attractive to pass)

Sold 10, Jan 22, PTON 35 puts for $1.40 (just experimenting)

Business Education, Fintech, Options Trading

My trades for October 2021

Per popular request, I’ll be posting my monthly trades hereafter. Though the request was for weekly posts, I’ll start with monthly for now. I traded only naked puts last month and here they are. Guess how much capital I need if all the puts are exercised? Guess how much profit I would make if none is exercised?

Transactions

Sold 10, Jan 22, FAS 65 puts for $2.22

Sold 10, Jan 22, TQQQ 60 puts for $1.70

Sold 5, Jan 22 TQQQ 65 puts for $2.05

Sold 5, Jan 22 TQQQ 70 puts for $1.65

Sold 5, Jan 22 TQQQ 70 puts for $1.34

Any idea why Jan 22 TQQQ 70 puts were sold at different prices?

Business Education, Fintech

My last post on Negative Interest rates! I promise.

Remember our lengthy discussion on negative interest rates in the Fintech class? In these unusual times, so many truisms about finance are becoming untrue. In Denmark, a country with a long history of negative interest rates, the central bank announced 20 year home mortgages at a fixed interest rate of zero percent. A 20 year, $100,000 mortgage at 3% APR would cost a homeowner $33,000.00 in interest. But this begs many important questions. Will the rental market be impacted badly? Will home prices not appreciate? Click on the image below to read further.


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Business Education, Fintech, Options Trading

Investing in SPAC is not for everybody. Tread carefully!

I said in the class I will explain how options differ from SPAC. Here it is.

SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) is a shell corporation with no current business operation but has identified/is identifying potential targets for acquisition/merger. Upon completing the M/A, the SPAC goes public and those who invested in the SPAC get IPO shares allotted by the company. Whereas options are contracts between two parties (the company is not involved) either to buy or sell shares at a particular price within a specific period. The shared are moved from one investor to another if the options are exercised. SPAC issue warrants to the investors to begin with. To read more about SPAC click on the image below.


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CEO, Fintech, Options Trading, Private Equity

Can options trading influence valuation? Looks so, just as we discussed in PE class

Remember our discussion on how call and put volumes are used by some investors to measure sentiments? Investors who buy ‘out-of-the-money’ call options anticipate the underlying stock price to spike. Recenly Softbank bought $4B worth call options on its holdings AMZN and MSFT. Many investor interpret this move as a buy signal on these equities and this may have led to spike in prices. This ends up escalating the valuation of these companies even though the underlying business models don’t justify these levels of valuation. Click on the image below to read an interesting article on this topic.


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Career Management, Entrepreneurship, Fintech, Python, Tech

IIT Madras launches online Bachelor, Diploma in Datascience and Programming

It’s here finally! It has been my dream that a reputed school in India offer an online undergrad degree in Computer Science and now IIT-M is doing it. Now it’s open to all. Well, almost to all. I wish IIT-M opened it to all, not solely to those who completed 12th grade! I see a big demand for this course and wish IIT-M success. This is going to open doors to so many poor, bright students. Please send me your views to my Stanford email ID.


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Fintech, Machine Learning, R programming, Tech

IIM Fintech Lecture – Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore

In this course I plan to cover items 1 through 5. I’m flexible with the level of participation from students in programming exercises in step 5 (ML). Depending on backgrounds and goals, students may choose not to program (why learn programming if you can hire a developer for 10$/Hr?) or actively program in R and/or Python.

0) How much ‘Fin’ and how much ‘Tech’?

1) How banks’ reluctance to innovate/adopt led to Fintech. Banks! You can’t bank on them.

2) The ultra-personalisation of financial services through technology – the driver behind Fintech

3) Case Studies – Peer-to-peer lending, Crypto-currencies, Robo-advisers, online-only digital banks

4) My Money Karma

5) Machine Learning using R (or Python)

Ram Subramaniam Stanford