Ashwini: Daddy, can you pick up my book? Me: No. Do it yourself. I am busy. Ashwini: Can you please pick it up? Me: Do I have to do everything for you? Ashwini: No. I don’t ask you to do everything. I go to the bathroom by myself.
I muttered to myself while picking up the book for her, “I am so thankful for that.”
It has been one year since I started dabbling in options as a strategy to boost investment income. I sold out-of-the-money covered calls for many stocks that I hold. There are three possible outcomes when these contracts reached expiration:
Stock price stays below the strike price of the call option and the contract expires worthless. For most of my options, this was the case. I got to keep the premium I received with no change in stock positions.
On two options, the stock price was above strike price. I didn’t want to sell the stock, hence I bought back the options. As the buying was done close to expiration, there was no time premium left and even on those trades ended up with small profits.
On two options, the stock price was above strike price on expiration and they got assigned. I sold the stock and started buying them back in following weeks. After I had to sell those shares, the whole market had a correction and my buying back price was lower than my selling price. Profit was made in these trades, too.
Even if one plays options very conservatively (which I did), they don’t always yield profits. There is an improved chance of making profits versus a loss. In my case, I was just lucky that all trades turned out profitable. The biggest chunk of money was made from expiration of worthless options. One can look at this strategy as if getting an extra dividend payment for holding the stock. The only problem is that money made from option trading is taxed as regular income and not as dividends which are taxed at lower rate.
Anyway, I made more than enough money through these trades to support my yearly wine consumption. Hope to keep this streak going in 2010.
I always want to buy the best produce for my family, i.e., most nutritious and least polluted with pesticides etc. But, it is hard to achieve that many times. We live in an area that doesn’t have conveniently accessible “Whole Foods” or “Trader Joe’s”. Our local supermarkets have a limited selection of organic produce. Also, the organic versions are much more expensive and look stale as there isn’t very high demand. This makes it hard to decide what to buy organic and what not.
Here is a nice handy guide from foodnews.org about pesticide levels in produce. Please go to their website to download the complete guide.
It is 20th anniversary of this photo taken by Voyager 1 and famously named by Carl Sagan as “Pale Blue Dot”. Read the full NPR story here. I really liked Sagan’s description of the photo.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar’, every ’supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
In the last 20 years, Voyager 1 and 2, traveling at about 35,000 miles per hour, have moved farther away (at about 10 billion miles or 16 billion km currently) from Earth out on the fringes of our Solar system. If they look back and take a picture now, Earth will not even be seen in it.
Small amounts of dark chocolate (one piece of a 16 piece bar of 100g or around 30 calories a day) when eaten daily for about 18 weeks can lower blood pressure, which in turn can help reduce the risk of stroke or death from coronary artery disease.
Use the Valentine’s day as an excuse to buy some good dark chocolate for yourself and your loved ones.
Due to our babysitter’s limited availability, instead of going out for a movie and a dinner, we had to choose between movie and dinner. It only took a few seconds for mexican food at Soltoro to kick Avatar out of contention.
Soltoro is Michael Jordon’s third restaurant at the Mohegan Sun casino. In the mexican food desert that is aka Connecticut, this restaurant is an oasis. Good food, good drinks and good atmosphere. They had a great collection of Tequilas. I did one ‘flight’ of tequilas and 2 out of 3 were quite good. We shared a flan for dessert and it came covered under a big dome of caramelized sugar. Very innovative design — I had never seen this before.
There are about 350 forts in Mahararastra. For whatever reason, I kept going back to the same forts I had visited before. This time when we decided to go somewhere new. Our choice was Kulanggad (कुलंगगड) and it turned out to be just great! This fort is in the same range as “Kalsubai” (कळसुबाई), the tallest peak (~5300 ft) in Maharashtra. This fort has two neighbours, Alanggad (अलंगगड) and Madangad (मदनगड) aka Mandangad (मंडणगड). Climbing on one of those is very technical and requires rigging up ropes. Thanks to bombardment by the British when they took this set of forts from Peshwas in 1818.
Elevation at the top of Kulanggad is about 4850 ft requiring a climb of about 3500 ft from the base. It is quite evident from the photos that this mountain has pretty straight rock walls and the trail goes along notches in the rock. There are steps carved into the rock and at many places they are very narrow and you have to watch your footing carefully. It was probably one of the most difficult climbs in Sahyadris for me.
This views of rugged mountains all around while climbing and from the top of the fort are absolutely amazing. Other than a few caves, there are ruins of old buildings on the top of the fort. Some of the buildings are right on points that are at the ends of the fort. There is a sheer drop of more than 2000 ft on three sides of these building. These must have been watch posts. Due to the fort’s natural defense, there wasn’t much fortification required.
There are a lot of water tanks (carved in stone) on the fort and that makes spending a night on the top easy. Some people might not even touch this water after looking at it but, believe me it is potable. No one in our group had any problems from drinking it right out of the tanks. All our problems arose from not being in good physical shape for such a rigorous hike.
. It is a good read.
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