Genuine question as someone who thinks blockchains are neat but doesn’t really think currency is the right application, how is that better? The bank is technically closed a lot, but I never really have trouble buying stuff or sending money around in the off hours using regular dollars.

Good news: Another one of my hobby investing picks, CLS, is up almost 100%. Unfortunately my brokerage won’t let me put out a good til canceled order with fractional shares, so I’ll have to keep an eye out and put out daily limit orders to take some profit.

Bad news: Some medical stuff that I thought would be a reasonable price came back as more than I hoped. Still not really excessive, as American medical stuff goes, but more than I was told, so now I get the joy of calling people to talk about it.

Frankly I’m just confused why Goldman ever agreed to this in the first place. No fees on the card, no cut of interchange fees, where did they think they were going to make that up? I guess maybe borrow cheap to front people and then let those people carry a balance, which doesn’t work so well with higher rates. And even then, I kinda doubt the people who are so into the Apple ecosystem that they get the credit card are going to be carrying balances often and large enough to make that math work out.

Not a huge week, but I did decide where to allocate my profit from selling out of MHO. I picked GSL, a company that owns container ships and leases them out to people who conceivably need to ship lots of things. They are trading below book and at a low price/earnings, but have significant earnings growth and have beaten earnings estimates for the last several quarters.

As far as my main finances go, the biggest concern is that my FSA doesn’t seem to like to work with my mail away pharmacy, so every order they request documentation of the health expense. I can get that, but the website for the pharmacy is a real pain in the butt to use, so it’s a whole production. Luckily (or unluckily) my FSA is pretty much empty, so I’ll have to tap the HSA I have from my old employer.

For my hobby investing account, I took my first profit! I sold half of my shares in MHO to recover my initial investment of like $30. I am going to spend some time with a stock screener to find where I want to put that money, and let the other half of the investment run in the hopes that they continue to do well.

For my paper account, I hit my profit target on my strangle trade and closed it. I may try some similar volatility strategies on single stocks rather than SPY, just to see how it is.

Another relatively quiet week for me. I did join a gym, which based on some cancellation stories I’ve seen might as well be signing my life savings away, but I definitely don’t have anywhere in my apartment to keep a rowing machine. I’m also nearing the end of my FSA funds about 5 months earlier than I had hoped, which isn’t great but I still have some money left over in my old employer’s HSA that I need to start spending before the custodian nickel and dimes me out it.

For my hobby account I have had some dividends come in which is nice, it means I have about 5 more dollars than I did before with a smidge more on the way.

For my paper account, my strangle is in the green, though if I was looking short term and had been smart I would have closed it sometime last week for a few hundred in profit, which for a week at a risk of about $10k fake dollars is not so bad, but I am hoping that by looking long term I’ll be able to capture something more substantial.

I’m not sure how much churning we have representation for, given c/Finance is already on the smaller end, but could definitely be a good one to split out as activity increases!

I would be interested in you sharing some knowledge. I have been working on assembling the Chase Trifecta for maximizing my day to day spending into rewards points, but I haven’t seen any offers that look good enough for a true churn to get and cancel or forget about the card after. I’m familiar with MS as manufactured spend in churning lingo, but what is SUB?

Not too much going on for me real life money wise, which is how I like it, although I forgot to mention an account in my last post. I have a cash management account that holds what I hope to one day be enough money for the down payment on a house. Right now it is just set up with most of the balance to automatically roll into a short term brokered CD, and with some money set aside such that, given how banking has been lately, if my main bank had trouble right when all my bills came due I wouldn’t be completely screwed.

For my little real money fun investing account, the only notable development is that MHO is getting pretty close to reaching 100% gain. If it does, I intend to sell half the position to get out what I put in, reallocate that, and let the remainder ride to see what happens.

For my paper trading account, I took some of my own advice from last week and closed the position I had on F. I have also changed my approach to the volatility trades that I had been doing with the SPX iron condors. Volatility is low right now, so long term I would expect there to be more volatility at some point in the future. With that in mind, I decided to try a strangle strategy using LEAP options. This should minimize my exposure to theta while allowing me to profit whether the future volatility is upwards or downwards. For position sizing reasons, this is no longer held on SPX, but instead SPY.

Alright broad rundown time so I can reference on future posts:

For retirement I am currently following a portfolio allocation from Ben Felix, adapted for the U.S. by this website, with a 15% bond allocation. For those who don’t want to click through, this is essentially a total market portfolio that makes sure to cover domestic and international equities, with a bias towards small cap value stocks, which historically have shown additional returns over large growth stocks. The bond allocation is more by accident if I am being honest, and I will probably gradually reduce it as I am pretty young and I find the arguments presented for lifecycle investing pretty convincing, though not actually convincing enough to leverage my retirement without the direct advice of a financial advisor. I am more or less hitting my target allocation now, as I just finished a 401k rollover and was able to get everything the way I wanted.

I have a small hobby investing account, funded from my hobby budget and currently less than $1k in total after getting a $100 bonus for funding the account. The investments there are mostly picked based on what I think is interesting, including the following:

• Funds
  • NTSX: Efficient core fund that uses futures to replicate a 90/60 leveraged stock/bond portfolio, for only 0.2% in fees
  • RSP: S&P 500 index fund that holds all 500 stocks in equal weight rather than market cap weighting. This keeps the portfolio from being mostly the top few countries, ideally improving diversification.
  • MUB: Municipal bond fund, this is a taxable account and I thought it would be fun. Plus lending to local governments makes me feel like I’m doing my civic duty.
  • VBR: Small cap value ETF from Vanguard, tries to capture the size and value premia. I also hold this in my retirement accounts for my domestic small cap value allocation.
  • DISV: Dimensional small cap value international fund, similar to VBR but outside the US. I hold similar fund AVDV in my retirement accounts
  • ICLN: Renewable energy fund, because oil companies suck
• Individual Stocks
  • These were selected on the basis of small companies trading at or near book who had consistently beaten earnings expectations around last fall. It’s been mixed success, but a lot of fun! These are sized at ~1/4 the size of my individual fund positions
  • MHO: U.S. homebuilder, up around 80%
  • CLS: Software and hardware provider for logistics solutions, up around 27%
  • UNM: Insurance company, they do life and critical illness but not main healthcare, up around 17%
  • WRK: Paper packaging company, down around 30%. I let a cheap valuation blind me to the fact that they don’t actually make that much money, and their Q2 reports were BAD.

For things that are too risky or capital intensive for my hobby account, I have a paper trading account. Right now this is mostly options strategies, and it’s a good thing it’s not a real trading account because I fat finger the app on my phone regularly enough that it would be a problem lol. Anyway, the main plays there are:

• Bullish call spread on F using LEAPS. This was originally a backratio spread which I think is a neat defined risk trade but I wanted to roll it out to a further strike date and messed it up.
• Poor mans covered call on GLD. I originally opened a relatively deep in the money LEAP position on GLD during the debt ceiling talks, thinking it would be a nicely leveraged way to get some exposure to gold in the event that things went south there. Happily, the government continues to function, and so I decided to use the position as a way to practice the PMCC, though realistically I should just close the position and take my loss.
• Iron condors on SPX opened on Fridays to expire on Mondays. Originally I thought this would be a very pure theta play, but upon further review I am shorting vega. I don’t think this is an egregious trade overall given how volatility has declined in the last few months, though it has burned me the last two weeks and I think my timing and management of the trade could be significantly improved.

Huh, I have never heard of that one. I’ll have to look into it. As I mentioned in my other comment, I am working on assembling the Chase Trifecta of cards, which should help me pay for the majority of my travel needs via points. How do the redemptions work on the Shop Your Way card?

Would you care to explain the tax loss harvesting point? Is it just that the fund price drops a bit post dividend and you can squeeze out a bit more “loss”?

There are still some good credit card bonuses out there. I am working on assembling the Chase Trifecta, and right now that involves using the Freedom Unlimited card on all groceries to get 5% back. I don’t think that promotion is still going, but I am pretty sure that both the Freedom Unlimited and Freedom Flex are offering $200 back on $500 in the first 3 months, though you do have to be careful about really churning them because I think Chase gets mad if you apply to too many cards in a certain time frame.

As far as FI/RE goes, on Beehaw at least that community is mixed in with general finance. I think we’re just about the size to start having a viable general finance community, and if we split it up we would see even less activity.

That may have been unclear. I didn’t consider contract roles and am working a remote, direct hire role currently. The reasons contract roles were not for me are:

1. A lot of contract roles wanted me to move. While in my line of work I can be remote with no issues, my wife can’t move her work for another few years at least, so moving is not really an option. I also want to work from home since that’s essentially all I’ve done in my career due to starting during the pandemic.
2. I’m a pretty risk averse person, so the idea of taking a job knowing I’d possibly have to do more job hunting in the future because the contact ended was not appealing. Of course, if I hadn’t seen much interest from direct hire opportunities this probably would have been negotiable.
3. My wife has some pretty expensive specialty medication that she can’t go off of, and it seemed to me like health insurance benefits for contract work are not as good. Sometimes this extended to other benefits like 401k, but sometimes health insurance was the main aspect that was lacking.

Alright waited until the weekend so I could write this one because it might be long we’ll see.

First off, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this bullshit. I changed jobs last year, and even as someone who was getting interest and interviews in my search, it still made me want to scream pretty much the whole time, and it took like 9 months at varying levels of intensity. I can’t imagine how frustrating putting in all that work and getting what seems to be worse than nothing back has been.

Second, I want to echo some of the comments in this thread emphasizing that some less traditional career paths may be open to you. The idea to apply at LMG is great, as is the possibility of freelancing. If you haven’t already, you could also consider contract roles. When I was looking there were lots of recruiters trying to pick people up for technical jobs on 6-12 month contract. That may be different now, or you may have your reasons for not considering them just like I did, so I understand if it’s not an option or if you’ve already considered it. If it works for you though, an employer may be less strict on what they think is the “right” background for a role if they know it’s only for a shorter time. Also, I think I saw some discussion from you about considering a van lifestyle, which could be pretty compatible with freelancing or moving place to place for contract work, so that is something to account for as well.

Third, I want to encourage you not to give up. Employers frankly suck, and in the absence of better labor organization, changing jobs is the best way to get what you need. Even if all you can do for a week or a month at a time is the super simple instant apply stuff on places like LinkedIn, that’s still progress. Or if you need to take a break for a while to keep yourself sane and make sure you’re at your best when you do have a new opportunity, that’s also a valuable use of your time. And if you represent yourself even half as well in interviews as you do in your writing I’m sure you can make a good impression, the challenge is getting in front of the right people.

Lastly, I actually want to thank you for this post. Job hunting is a super important aspect of personal finance that I’m not super able to write my own posts on since I’m pretty early in my career. I have been thinking of making a weekly discussion thread for this community, so if you want to continue to vent or journal about your search then it would be great to have more posts, either as standalone posts like this one or comments on the discussion thread.