Naked Calls

If you sell a naked call and the stock price moves against it, buy the shares before the strike price is reached, and sell another naked call at a new and higher strike price. You need adequate amounts of a cash position to cover all your naked calls with such stock buys. If you buy the 100 shares before the strike price is reached, you then want it to be reached, as this will make for a small gain on the sale of the stock and will also free you of it.

The big risk here is a gap up in stock price that goes well past the strike price, preventing you from buying the stock at a price below the strike price. Quarterly earnings or a takeover bid or some other unusual event can cause such a gap up. You might consider rolling the losing call out and up to get it closer to the higher price of the stock if you think this rise in the stock price is not going to be sustained. If you do think the stock price will be sustained and may well rise even higher, then take the loss and buy back the losing call — some losses are inevitable and are therefore part of the cost of trading options.

The other risk is if you buy the 100 shares before the strike price is reached, and then the stock price collapses — so you are left with 100s shares going into the red. If the stock price drops precipitously enough, but you consider this a normal and reasonable correction, consider selling a put to collect premium and establish a strangle. The premium on the sale of the put will lower your average cost of the stock.

Paul Morphy’s Games

Paul Morphy’s Games

What I like most about reviewing Paul Morphy’s chess games is that moment in the game when he does something that appears amazingly counterintuitive, like, for instance, not protecting one of the major pieces from being taken, just as an example. You’d think most players in that situation would do whatever it takes to protect such a piece, instead of just giving it away for seemingly nothing in return. I look for that incongruous moment in a Morphy game, and am often pleasantly surprised when it happens, and it’s often the turning point in the game, even though it looks to be on the surface a grave error by this chess mastermind. Instead, he is putting into place an imaginative attack.

Paul Morphy

The Press and Truth

As recently as just 4 years ago, I used to associated the press in the US with truth. Now, I see that attitude as hopelessly naive. In my opinion, the press is more akin to propaganda than truth. It peddles dubious opinions bolstered by very questionable assumptions to argue for a particular point of view — that’s propaganda, not truth.

And in addition to this outright deception to argue in favor of a particular bias, there is also the additional element of sensationalism to engage the public in order to sell more newspapers, sort of speak.

So I would advise people not to go and search for truth from the press anymore. There is scant evidence there is any to be found there. But then, that’s not what people do with the media and the press today, that is, search for truth. Instead, they are all just searching for their own particular biases to have them confirmed.

Supreme Court and the Election

Climate Change Tradition

Something you can actually do about the climate change crisis. Instead of buying a tree with clipped roots to put in your house for Xmas and then throw away, buy one with full roots to plant it somewhere on your property or in some other protected location. If you do that for 30 years, you will extract a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, and will have done something about the problem, instead of just talking about it. Talk is cheap.

Make planting one tree — not destroying one — the new Xmas tradition.

Wandering

Supreme Court and the Election

So what should the Supreme Court decide relative to the presidential election? My take is there is ample evidence that election fraud took place, and the results were therefore illegitimate. If so, I think the SC should call for a second round of voting in the 7 crucial swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, and Arizona — just these 7 states, as the results in all the other states are pretty much uncontested. But this time around, perhaps the voting should be limited to in person voting — no mail in votes — and there has to be present in the counting of the votes representatives from both parties so that there are no shenanigans.

If Biden and the Democratic Party believe the first vote in these 7 crucial swing states was legitimate, they shouldn’t fear the results the second time around.

Trumped

Omega 3 Fat Hurdles

Food in general has to go through quite a thicket of hurdles before its nutrition can actually be used by the body. First, there’s digestion that begins in the mouth, accelerates with the acid in the stomach, and really takes off in the small intestines with digestive enzymes and all those critical bacteria doing their thing, but then the nutrition that the small intestines admits into the body must first pass muster with that filtration system of the body, the liver, before it finally gets admitted to the blood stream and can actually be used by the body. Any inefficiencies in any of these processes along the way and that means the food you think your body will take advantage of — because you did eat it — won’t actually be fully utilized by the body but, to the extent it was not properly “processed,” instead passes right through you with no benefit.

This brings us to what many nutritionist speak about constantly — the all-important ratio between the very valuable Omega 3 fat and the commonly overconsumed Omega 6 fat. Why is this ratio so important, you may ask? It’s important because both fats use the same digestive enzymes in the body, and therefore compete for their use. And there is a finite number of these specific digestive enzymes in the body at any given time, (although the healthier your diet, the greater the number). If the ratio between Omega 3 fat and Omega 6 fat becomes too skewed in favor of Omega 6 fat, then the Omega 6 fat utilizes a disproportionate amount of those limited number of digestive enzymes, and the Omega 3 fat gets left out in the cold, so of speak. So this skewed ratio, which is very common in the SAD diet, produces a huge inefficiency in digestive processes mentioned above relative to the Omega 3 fat you ate versus the Omega 3 fat that the body actually ends up using.

They think the modern contemporary diet can be become as skewed as 1:16 when our caveman ancestors had a diet that was 1:2. Exactly what ratio is the ideal ratio is a controversial subject, but there is no question that the SAD diet is hopeless skewed in favor of Omega 6 fat, and therefore those people who have this skewed ratio in their diet may think they are getting enough Omega 3 fat in their diet, but because of their warped Omega ratio, are in fact not fully utilizing the amount of Omega 3 fat they eat, perhaps to an alarming degree.

And so it is not enough to know how many grams of Omega 3 fat are in your daily diet — you have to also know your ratio.

Omega Ratio

My Almost-Vegan Diet