• 00:00:38 How Imran found his way from Wall Street to teaching option strategies at Options Insight.
• 00:09:42 What retail traders should learn before trading options. Why meme stocks options are such a 'rational choice' right now?
• 00:14:42 Where are the best opportunities for trading options to still have an edge?
• 00:24:45 What is Imran's view on the delation/inflation scenario? Are commodities a good hedge?
• 00:29:35 Why does a 'rational investor' buy negative yielding bonds (or very low yielding bonds) at all considering the inflation risk?
• 00:36:35 Did Softbank successfully manipulate the stock market for mid-tier tech stocks in 2020?
• 00:43:19 Is there a 'low risk' strategy to buy/sell volatility?
• 00:48:56 What are excellent, low risk hedging strategies for a portfolio? Can a option based 'hedge' actually make money?
• 01:03:15 What is the strong relationship between low interest rates and money losing tech companies?
• 01:08:10 Is there are place for 'value investors' left? Why does the investment world basically just 'bet on more free money' instead?
• 01:13:14 What is Imran's strategy to use options trading Bitcoin upside/ downside?

You may watch this episode on Youtube - #95 Imran Lakha (How to use option strategies to improve your market edge).

Imran Lakha has been working with Citibank, Bank of America and Credit Suisse trading options. He now teaches options strategies at Options Insight.

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Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, we love to have you on and we know your specialty is option trading. And do we also know you've been all old, all street, different banks, credit, Swiss, city bank over the years, and you've been doing this for a long time. And I was curious, what attracted you to the financial industry in the first place? And then why did you leave Wall Street at some point?

Imran Lakha: Okay, so in terms of what attracted me to Wall Street, I guess, you know, I did mathematics and economics at university. I was the son of an accountant. So my dad was in finance, both my brothers were kind of in finance as well. And so because I was always pretty decent at maps and had those quantitative skills, it was like, what career can I go into and utilize the skills that I have? And, you know, going to London School of Economics set me up to be able to, you know, be attracted by those big banks on Wall Street where, you know, as a 20, 30 year old, you can you can make good money and, you know, you can get some decent security and live a good life, right? That was the kind of goal when I originally started. I was brought up to be very motivated to get myself secure and comfortable in life, right? So, you know, my dad struggled, you know, he moved here. When he was 20 years old, he struggled through various jobs that he would, he was quite skilled, like in terms of knowledge and stuff, but he had to do jobs that were kind of, you know, maybe a little bit basic for him. And he didn't want us to go through the same strife, right? So he, he kind of taught us that, you know, work hard at school, get the skills, get a good job and make set yourself up, basically, right? So it's very Asian, very Asian mentality. But it kind of worked, right? It was, it was certainly worked on a materialistic level, like allowing me to earn enough money to get myself comfortable, you know?

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. Why did you end up, and I know you changed positions for different banks over the years, but I know you took a break a couple of years ago, and then you left Wall Street once out.

Imran Lakha: So actually, you know, a lot of that initially was driven by my wife. Yeah. So she, she was really keen on traveling before we had kids. So we were married for about, you know, seven years. We weren't in a rush to have kids, but we were like, you know, if we're going to have kids, she really, really wanted to see the world a bit and travel. And because my career was going pretty well, you know, I hadn't really taken the plunge until then. And, and it just came to a nice point in my career where I was feeling pretty burnt out. I've been doing it for about 10 years. And she really wanted to travel before we had kids. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to put my hand up, take voluntary redundancy, and let's use the money I get to travel the world. So that's what we did before we had kids. It's amazing.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, it sounds a bit like Jim Rogers, right? He, he took his money, he went on this two year long trip, you know, I think he did two trips around the world, both of them were around two years old. And then he ran his own shop after that, right? So he, he joined the ranks of the legendary investors who run their own shop, the company, the publisher, publishing newsletter, we know this is something that is as a business model, really, really popular right now, the stack exchange. Is that something that you, where you felt like, well, I can either make more money, or this is just fits my lifestyle better? How did you, how did you transition this way out of Wall Street at that point?

Imran Lakha: Well, my, my actual transition out of Wall Street happened later. So when I came back from traveling, I wasn't desperate to go back to banking. I was, I was kind of fishing around to see if there were any hedge fund opportunities, didn't manage to find any, and then ended up joining an old boss of mine at Citibank, and actually got back to banking, which was slightly annoying, because I was kind of enjoying not being in it. But it was only later after I had kind of, you know, had my little go on the buy side, you know, satisfied that sort of itch, scratch that itch as it were. And then it was only then that I was okay, now it's time to maybe try something else. And that was the teaching, because I'd always quite enjoyed the idea of teaching and I'd always in, you know, throughout my career at banks, I'd always trained people that came through, and, and that was something that I really liked to do. And I found that I was quite effective at it. So then I was like, okay, so I've got a bunch of knowledge on a subject that's quite niche, and I've got a lot, I've got a big network of contacts that I could probably, you know, turn into clients, you know, ex colleagues or whatever that I might have. So why not give it a go? So that was the night when I created Options Insight.

Torsten Jacobi: And Options Insight help us to understand that a little better. It's really about trading options in the market, what's available to the retail investor, or does it go in a different direction?

Imran Lakha: No, well, when I first started Options Insight, it was about how, how do I leverage my network, right? So I've got a bunch of old colleagues at banks, some of them are asset managers who are old clients of mine. I've got some brokers who I used to be their clients, all these people who have, I've probably have staff, junior staff who need proper training, and probably don't get proper training, right? So it was actually at the start, it was more of an institutional product and an institutional offering that I was giving, because that was the contacts that I already had, right? And no one, no one in the public sphere, no one in retail knew me, right? So, so it was very much the first couple of years, just leveraging those contacts, building up my content, building up my sort of product suite. And it was only post COVID, really, that I realized that, you know, the people who really need the education and are still out there looking for it, and are more consistently always going to be there, are the retail traders, right? And as the growth in retail trading exploded in the last couple of years, particularly in options, and I was seeing some really basic sort of errors or mistakes that I think, you know, novice option traders kind of make, I was like, these are the people that I need to try and educate, right? So then it was a case of try to build that sort of profile that I'm not just for institutions, even though I've been on Wall Street for 20 years, and those are the people who I know and know me, I'm happy to teach the retail people, because, you know, it doesn't have to be only professionals, you can, you can teach this knowledge to anyone, right? So that was the goal and that was the idea.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I feel like they should make your initial course mandatory on Robinhood. I was really surprised, you know, I had a portfolio for, I don't know, 25 years, first eTrade, you know, that was the first online broker a long time ago. Anyway, from the minute I started, but Robinhood, about two years ago, 18 months ago, I was really surprised that the approval to, for option trading used to be a pain, like it was possible, but you needed to file some documents and you need to text something, you needed to validate your ID. I think that's all true with Robinhood too. But I feel like I was instantly approved for options trading, and I couldn't believe it, I could suddenly, I could, I could sell calls, I could buy points, it was amazing. But from, and I think I know what I'm doing, well, we all think that, right? But I do have 20 years of experience with the subject, not in detail. But I was really surprised that Robinhood really opened up options trading to the masses. And I had this suspicion, that might be just me, that most people have no idea what these options actually do, right? Why are they so different, why are they different than the equity that I'm investing in? What is all this game about, why would they decay? That seems to be not really open to the retail investor, at least from what I see in the Robinhood app.

Imran Lakha: Yeah, I mean, that's a no brainer. I mean, I actually, the regulators should make it compulsory for platforms that offer the use of leveraged products, like options, to make sure that those, those people using that platform have got a minimum level of education, because you're totally right, you know, people can lose all their money in a week with some of the crazy things that they're doing by buying one week call options on a, on a crazy hot meme stock. I mean, it's insane. Yeah, so yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think that's the problem. Like, people just, you know, get into fads and trends, right? And the fad and the trend was, okay, what's the next hot stock like Tesla or whatever, that's going to explode? And how can I turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money? And, you know, on these, on these Reddit forums, they all got excited and they all started doing the same trades and it became self fulfilling, I guess to an extent. But yeah, I would love to be able to, and it's not, it's not because I want to necessarily, you know, capitalise on this, right? But I just don't like the idea that these, a large part of a large percentage of these people at some point are going to lose all their cash, right? And if there was a way of preventing that, that would be a good thing, right? Because the idea of all these retail traders losing the 10 or 20 grand that they have to play with is not a nice thought really, right? You know, banks can afford to take it on the chin and lose a few billion here and there, because they'll always get bailed out by the government, right? But the retail guy won't.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I found it quite mesmerising when they, when the data that I've seen about raw trade is extremely young, it's most likely male. And they bet a relatively small amount of money, between $500 and $1000. Yeah, I think it's a little bit, you know, we, I've been talking on the podcast a lot about the dearth of opportunities. This generation probably has the highest overhang from the previous generation in that, in, in, in mainstream thinking that is hard for them to, to break out and use new opportunities. Yes, you can drive for Uber, but it's not going to, not going to change your life, right? Do you know there's a level, there's like a glass ceiling, so to speak, as an Uber driver, and it makes cash. And I think from that point of view, I actually feel it's kind of smart what they do. They take this bet that most likely won't go anywhere. But if it pays off, you're going to have a few hundred thousand in your portfolio, just two days later. But worst case scenario, and most likely scenario, your money is gone. And this, this virtual casino, what the odds are certainly probably better than going to Vegas to get, if you're thinking about $200,000 or a million dollars that you want to, want to, want to bring back. I think this is actually a pretty, I almost want to say it's a smart way to make money. I know how crazy it is, right? But if, if you don't have enough opportunities to get to these levels, because most people, you know, under 30, they can never buy a house in San Francisco. I don't, I don't know if it's ever going to change.

Imran Lakha: I guess, you know, another way to think about it is they're all buying a lottery ticket, but you can have multiple winners and they can share, share the payout basically, right? And the more, the more people they get to buy the lottery ticket, the more likely they are to get paid out, right? So that's kind of the game that they're playing, which, like I say, it's fine. And it's great when it works. And, you know, I wrote an article, one of, one of the things that I do occasionally is, is write articles about the market and just, just to sort of put my thoughts down on paper and they go on my blog on my website. And I wrote an article about the retail army, because I was loving what was going on with the retail army and how they were, you know, sticking it to the, to the hedge funds and stuff and creating short squeezes and stuff like that. And it's great, but it's great while it works. But then when you, when you get these problems, like, oh, you know, your account just got, your account got frozen because we've got margin issues on our side. And now you can't do anything. You know, had they had the foresight or the knowledge to be able to maybe do some smarter trade implementation, right? Then maybe they could protect themselves against that tail risk. I don't know, right? I don't know for sure. I mean, trade, even if you know how to trade options well, it doesn't mean you're always going to call the market correctly. But it's just, you know, the trade, for example, the trade that I was doing when the GameStop stuff was happening was quite funny. It was in one of the other stocks, BlackBerry. And BlackBerry was kind of following the AMC and the GameStop price action. It was one of the meme stocks as well. And it was, I think it was at like $26, $27, something like that. And I was like, you know, this thing might just keep going. It might do a GameStop, right? So, but the bowl is absolutely on the moon, like the bowl was in the hundreds. Okay. So I sold, I think the stock was at $26, $27. I sold the $15, $10 put spread, the $15, $10 put spread. And I collected $2.5 for that thing. And it was expiring in like two or three weeks. Okay. So it was miles out of the money. And I was collecting half the premium of the most it could ever be worth. Okay. And that was happening in two weeks, it was going to expire. Right. So I was like, rather than trying to buy this stock and take the risk that it drops in my face, that's the best expression of being long this stock. Right. And as it happened, I was completely wrong. The stock dumped 40% over the next week. And I lost no money. Right. So if I just bought the stock, I would have lost 40%. But because of the pricing of that put spread and understanding how the optionality works and where the opportunity lies, I was able to sell that put spread and take a zero hit on a 40% drop in the stock. And then I just cut my position. And it was fine. Right. So, so that's what I want to learn. That's what I like to be able to empower people to learn how to kind of swing the odds in their favor a little bit.

Torsten Jacobi: Right. Yeah, I love that. You know, what I am, what I was my experience with options, it's the market is incredibly illiquid. It's very difficult often to get a good price for that option. Depending even on relatively well known stocks, I think I had some Uber calls. And I felt like, I don't know what the strike price was, but there were like five of them traded the whole day. I'm like, holy smokes. I mean, this is not exactly a small stock. Right. And there's always something going on where I feel like the market maker, someone on the other side is way more inside than I have. That's probably true in all of Wall Street. But I feel with options, I feel like, especially that's, I don't know actually what's going on behind this. So maybe you can help us a little bit, but when you just eliminated one of those strategies, what are the strategies where you feel like you still have an edge out there, even do Wall Street is basically against you. And these computers are super smart.

Imran Lakha: Yeah. I mean, when you're talking about liquidity, I mean, I think that's a bit of a special case on the Uber side. Like, you know, big large, relatively large cap names, options markets are quite liquid if you know what the expires are that trade, right? So the problem I think you had there was most likely you were picking some obscure expiry that was like a weekly expiry rather than one of the monthly expires, where that's where most of the trading volume is. So you'll get better pricing on that. So you kind of need to know what is the stuff that trades liquidly, like even on something like the VIX, for example, right, the VIX index, you can trade options on the VIX, but the monthly expires are super liquid, whereas the weekly expires are horrible. And that's on something as deep and as liquid as the VIX, right? So you kind of need to know what you should be, which instruments provide you the liquidity, right? In terms of where the edge is, the edge is in understanding how to implement a trade, right? So you're right, on trade execution, you are probably going to give some edge away, right? But so if you're like trying to trade it on a super short term horizon and day trade it, then the odds are not in your favor, right? But the odds, the way to swing the odds in your favor are to have slightly longer time horizons, right? And know that the structure or the strategy that you're using is optimal for the market conditions and for your view, basically, right? And you should also be careful to not constantly buy options all the time across everything, right? Because systematically paying premium is generally a losing game. So you want to try and be a bit more selective about how much premium you burn and when you burn it, basically, right? That's kind of how I, that's my general sort of feeling.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I read the original post of the GameStop saga and I think it appeared in early November, second week of November. And basically the idea that was given in that original post was why don't we buy really long dated call options? And the same thing happened for Tesla. So this was, this was like the go to strategy for people on Reddit by long dated three months, as long as they could find it on Robinhood, basically, and I think they don't go so far out. That's a big problem. You can't buy a two year option. Even if that exists for professional traders, it doesn't really show up on Robinhood. And what I found interesting, they bought this three month or two and a half month option, it was a long user was available. And the stock barely moved during that time. And the second it expired two days later, it started to explode when like 5,000% higher. So it was a little bit from the original post this year, if you don't roll over your options, you would have given up all the upside through your health and position basically till the end, it only moved 20% until then. When you look into two options strategies, what does it kind of do? You just said that short term, it's a problem. What is a typical investment horizon? Is it two months? Is it one week?

Imran Lakha: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, generally, I prefer to err on the side of buying a bit of extra time. So I might have a view on an underlying, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that my timing is going to be perfect. Maybe it's just because I've been doing it for 20 years, so I know how often I'm wrong. So the idea then is say, okay, well, how much does it really cost me to give myself an extra month for this view to play out? So rather than buying a July option right now, maybe I should go to August or September. Yeah, so always err on the side of buying a bit of extra time for your view to play out is kind of my default. And then it's like, how much am I having to really pay extra in terms of volatility premium to push myself further out the curve basically, right? So that's kind of, and then that's one thing, that's my general sort of default in terms of if I'm expressing directional views using options. And then like you said, rolling is very important, right? So if if it turns out that my thesis isn't playing out as quick as I thought, or so I can change my mind, right? And then just say, okay, can I salvage back some premium? Because my views changed. If my view hasn't changed, and I still like the scenario that that stock or that underlying is going to go in the direction I think, but it's not playing out, and I'm getting within a month of expiry of my trade, then I think, how can I make that premium that's left? How can I make that live for longer? So where could I roll that premium to what strike and what maturity to just keep that premium alive for a bit longer, right? Because you just don't want it to get to the point where it's very digital, where it's very binary, whereas you get one bad week in the stock, and now your options definitely dead, basically, right? And that tends to happen when you let the option get too close to expiry. So the people who play it from the professional side and the more statistical side will always want their long premium to be sitting in maybe a one to three month expiry. And when it gets too short dated, and it starts to get too binary, and the theta, and the theta bleed basically gets too heavy, then you push it out to a longer expiry to make it live for longer. Well, that's kind of how I think about it.

You would have to sell that option and just buy a new one, right? Correct. Yeah, exactly. When you look at the markets right now, there seems to be a lot of trend following going on, right? So it seems there is, and that's kind of my green topic a little bit, there's too few people who buy on value, who buy on their conviction, right? So we always have those, those contrarians, right? So they buy things and they're ready to hold it forever, some worn buffets, you know, as long as it's my return on equity is the same as what I projected. I'm good. It doesn't matter what the stock prices ever, because it will eventually be realized. But there seems to be what when you look at the markets right now, there seems to be a ton of trend following, right? Nobody actually is able to go out there anymore and say, well, this is the mania, crypto is crazy. But crypto, I mean, it just came down a little, but usually it would just double the next day, just because we're because someone said, oh, we're gonna be in in a bubble. When you, is that for you an investment criteria? You feel like, well, this is too, too big. I'm looking at more specific trading opportunities. So I would say trend following is definitely a valid strategy. You know, think about CTAs and why they exist, right? But go back to the turtle traders, right? And the birth of the CTAs, you know, that was trend following. And that worked, right? And they managed to teach people who knew nothing about trading and make them profitable traders by following a very simple trend following strategy. So clearly, it used to work and there was value in it. Now, whether or not there's as much value in it now, or it's as consistently profitable, it is debatable. I would argue there is still value in it just because why, you know, when you're a momentum or a trend follower, what I think you're basically getting rewarded for is patience. So you will, you will, you will basically find a trend, right? You will establish a trend that is established and you will say, you know, this is why I think that trend is, is going to continue. And I'm willing to just be in that trend and stay with it basically, right? And if you have the ability to size your risk and be patient enough with that position, that's kind of your edge, right? That you're not getting puffed out of the position on the first sign of a drawdown basically, right? So I think momentum seeking does get rewarded because it's some, but it depends on the time horizon, right? You need to probably look for, so the way I think about momentum is find longer term trends that you, that you expect can persist for years maybe, right? And have some sort of way to size into those trends and follow those trends and some indicators maybe that you use to identify those trends, right? But then around that, what a nice overlay strategy on top of that is to look for mean reversion in the shorter term time horizons, right? Because that's a valid strategy as well, right? You know, things can get frothy and things can get overstretched away from their mean. Simple things like Bollinger Bands allow you to sort of see that in terms of charting. So, you know, but then you look at daily time frequencies or even, you know, four hourlies or whatever, and they will give you a different sort of outlook about your short term tactical positioning that will sometimes kind of neutralize your longer term trend holdings. But then once those things mean revert back to their averages, then you're happy to unwind your tactical mean reversion bets and get back to the trend following position, right? So I think they work hand in hand as complementary strategies basically, but just across different time horizons. If that makes sense. Yeah, I'm trying to parse it. I'm obviously not from the industry. One thing that I think a lot, which is a big struggle right now, is basically all the trades are heavily impacted by either deflationary or inflationary scenario. Whatever you do right now, you have to have a position more or less. You can basically, this is very difficult, I feel to find anything right now that's completely neutral and not affected if either of the scenario comes true. So you've got to have a view of the future. Will it be inflationary and strongly inflationary? It seems to be this very bifurcated right now. Or will this continuous technology deflation keep going? China is very deflationary. It's just the bigger trend, which isn't this little trend that basically is a blip over the years. And we've seen deflation or deflationary scenario for a long time. Where do you stand on this? Yeah, I sympathize with both sides of the argument. And I've been talking about this on my YouTube channel recently. So I did one video a couple of weeks back, which was talking about how inflation looks like it might overshoot in the short term. And these are the reasons. And then literally the week after I was spelling out the case for the case against inflation. And I think David Rosenberg in his latest piece, and he was on podcasts recently, and he was spelling out why he doesn't believe in inflation longer term and he thinks it will be transitory and he actually agrees with the Fed. It's hard to argue against what he's saying. The structural forces are strong. And these inflationary dynamics are because of factors that clearly are temporary. So you've got to assume these stimulus checks are not just going to keep coming forever. I mean, maybe they will, but your default base case needs to be at some point, they're going to expire because you're seeing the disincentives for people to work in the non farms numbers. And we've got another one coming this Friday. And if that's a bad number, it's going to be not because there's not demand for jobs, not because we don't want people to work. The job vacancies are sky high, but no one wants to go and work because they're getting paid free money from the government. So you are starting to see states in the US, you know, stop the unemployment benefits in an attempt to force people back to work. And hopefully you'll see that come through the jobs numbers over the summer. So June, July, August. So that I think that needs to happen. And that will address some of the kind of potential wage inflation that maybe we might start to see. And then, you know, people talking about Europe is not affected by this, right? So Europe seems to be because we have this scenario for the US, but beyond Europe, I'm currently too. It seems Europe has always had great generous benefits, right? If you if unemployment benefits, I remember that when I left in Germany, where large stretches of the population were all unemployment benefits, nobody had worked in 20 years. And that was not that was pretty normal. It was still in the decent neighborhood, right? It wasn't a neighborhood where you get shot at night. And it's somehow, I mean, Europe doesn't have any inflation, right? So it keeps giving people checks for 20 years. But inflation hasn't really shown up in the longest time in Europe, if anything, it's negative not rates. Yeah, that's true. And I mean, the structural I suppose the structural deflationary forces, you know, that spring to mind, right, are obviously technology, the big one, right? Demographics is another one. So what what is the demographic profile of Europe look like versus maybe places where we are seeing more inflation? That's probably a factor. And those and those structural demographic forces aren't going away, right? So, yeah, I think longer term, I kind of agree that we're not going to get some massive runaway inflation that's going to that's going to force yields higher. And it's the end of it, right? Is the end of bomb markets, basically. But I think in the short term, we might get an overshoot, right? In short term, we could get an overshoot. I don't think it will be enough to force the Fed to act. And so I think the interesting thing is what what a commodity market is going to do, right? So the way I've been playing and using, I've been using commodity markets as a bit of an inflation hedge, right? I think everybody's onto this trade. That's what commodities have done so well, you know, energy stocks and commodities obviously are kind of somewhat in sync. And they've been doing pretty decently. There's a whole electric car thing going on in the background with precious metals. But I sometimes I'm not sure it's just because all the traders think this is a good hedge or maybe because it is a good hedge. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, it's valid point, right? Because at some point, it's fully priced or, you know, too much money's in it. And it requires an unwinder, you know, that these are the whole trading game theory and psychology aspects you need to be aware of, right? Is the money in commodities, is it fast money? Is it fickle weak hands that are going to dump it at first side of trouble? Or is it a structural mega trend that's going to keep going for a long, long time? Now, arguably, because of the governmental sort of agenda towards clean energy and electrification and all that stuff, you'd have to think, or it's certainly easy to construct the argument that the demand for copper is going nowhere, right? And then not only have you got a strong demand story, because we need to have a shitload of copper to, you know, to do what we need to do for the electrification of the world, right? So demand side's there, and then you look at the supply side and you see there hasn't been enough capex, there's a supply shortage, it's going to take a while for that supply shortage to be addressed. So you can see copper, the copper mega trend being there, but then maybe some other commodities are getting a bit, you know, far ahead of themselves, like the agricultural commodities, like corn and wheat and things that have started correcting a little bit recently. You know, what if there is some bumper harvest in the US, right? This time round, all of a sudden, that supply shortage goes away and those things get sold another 30% quickly, right? Who knows, right? So I think you've got to be careful about what you own in commodities and make sure that you're comfortable with the underlying fundamental trends that are there, but then they also offer you a general kind of inflation hedge and a real asset type thing in your portfolio, right? Because having too many bonds in your portfolio right now against your equity exposure doesn't feel that sensible and that that goes back to your recent podcast with Harley, right? Talking about the correlation between bonds and equities going higher, if rates go higher, you know, then bonds aren't offering you any diversification. So how do I get that diversification in my portfolio? And I think some move towards real assets and commodities that have got a real demand, a real supply demand story going on that isn't about to disappear. Maybe that's the pivot that people are making in their portfolios away from bonds and into real assets, right? Yeah, sometimes I feel like the demand from bond is kind of came in by default because remember for the last 40, 50 years, people had been pitched, the simple investment approach put 60% on equities, 40% on bonds and more people got on the train to invest, right? So either that's demographic or this is just because we're richer, whatever it is that seems to be surplus of savings and we haven't put them in government savings as you would have to do in China, right? So what we did, we followed the 6040 model. I did it quite some time ago and I felt really confident with this because it gives you some stability, like think back to 2008, the bonds were doing well, relatively well compared to the equity portfolio that didn't do so well at least initially. Yeah, there is a lot of science to it, but I feel like that's what I'm trying to say, people are buying these bonds not because they want to buy bonds, no, just because it's basically inherent into this strategy. It's kind of what Mike Green is saying with the passive investors, they don't want to actually buy this stock, they just buy it because it's in that index and because it's in this index and you buy into that mutual fund or this index tracking fund that they're being bought. So it's in the fall of the investment because I cannot come up with any scenario where rational investor buys 0.2% bond with a perceived inflation of 2% that we always had, right? You can argue it's more like a point five or it's a 3.5, but it's somewhere we always had 2% more or less the pet target over a long time, right? Why on earth would you buy such a bond if you want to hold it, right? I couldn't agree more, like negative real yielding bonds, why are you putting them in your pension fund? You're basically saying I want a guaranteed loss, right? That's what I want, right? Maybe they know something they don't know, right? Maybe they're ahead of us, that's what I sometimes say, but there's something going on there. Yeah, I think it's more related just to the mandates of some of these funds where they just have to hold X amount of bonds, right? They have to hold some paper that doesn't look like equities because of the riskiness of equities and the volatility of equities. So they've got nothing else to own, right, other than these ridiculous negative real yielding bonds, but and then the truth is the price appreciation of those bonds hasn't been that bad until maybe recently as yields have backed up. So even though the yield on it is negative, I'm getting price appreciation out of it. So as long as I don't hold it to maturity, I'm getting a total return off it, right? Sounds like Bitcoin to me. You know, I don't want to hold it down, right? I just want to write it up all the way. Well, there you go. The definition of a bubble, right? Then, you know, if people look at Bitcoin and say it's a bubble that they should look at what bonds have done for the last 50 years, right? 40 years. I mean, that's clearly a bubble too, right? So one thing I want to pick your brain on is they call it the gamma meltup. So something that happened last year and we know a little bit about that story what SoftBank did. We don't know all the insights, but there's a rumor that they had the trader with lots of experience and options from Deutsche. And the idea was that SoftBank said on this portfolio with very strongly depreciating assets, all of these were underwater. They're real investments, right? And they put a billion each usually into those investments. So yeah, they raised 100 billion and two funds are 200 billion and they usually put a billion or more in. And the trouble was the valuations were falling because the real tech market was was dropping, especially because everything was dropping, right? In March and April last year. And the strategy came up with was why don't we try to manipulate the global market for tech stocks? And they weren't really focused on game stock and the meme stocks, but they were focused on why don't we push up the valuation in the public markets of the main trading stocks. And that includes Amazon, includes Apple, but mostly the mid tier, I'd say not necessarily the banks, because they of course were on a strong high valuation already. And I'm curious if that's even possible. So the conspiracy theory goes like this, they put a few billion, maybe five to 10 billion into call options. And what these call options did, of course, they wanted to drive up and did lots of leverage in it, they wanted to drive up the valuations, but it created this this effect that prices for these options went higher than the options or the equities went higher, the options dealers had to buy it because