It’s been awhile since I’ve made an actual community announcement and I think that honestly speaks to how things have gotten a little off track around here. Over the weekend I did some reflection and realized that the community is kinda in disarray so I’m going to be working this week to get things brought back around and restore the luster on this place we all love.
With that in mind I’m going to make a two quick changes:
Changes
Ascending is no more
I’m going to be removing the visibility of the ascending role. While I believe in the roles purpose, I don’t think it’s ever quite achieved it and I think the community is better off with a little less roles blended in. Those that have the role will be grandfathered into it, but it’ll just appear in your list of roles, but will no longer color the name or display the icon.
Inactive mod removals
Due to their busy lives, I’ve removed Balu, Raiben and ATL from mod duties. Their contributions to the community are supremely appreciated, but we’ve gotta keep things streamlined in that department. I’ll be looking into some further shakeups throughout the week.
State of the Ascension
With that out of the way, I wanted to comment on the direction of the community. The challenge, while being a substantial success has been drifting a little in the past two weeks while the RSX ordeal played out. However, now that is behind us (in the sense that the options are now expired), its time for the main focus to return to trading and facilitating that the best we can.
The RSX hit
Taking a second, I wanted to let everyone know that you did nothing wrong. I know a lot of people took a pretty decent hit on their account from OZON and RSX. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the loss and feel as though there was something you did, but that’s really not the case. You cannot trade as though the free market will end. That’s not a legitimate risk factor and it completely undermines the purpose of the market.
We were robbed. It sucks to say, it sucks to admit but the trade was right. There was no precedent for a non-liquidating ETF to be halted while the underlying is frozen and there was no reason (especially given VanEck issued a press release the same Friday stating that it “continues trading”) to think that a halt was incoming on this one. Especially one that would’ve resulted in a 100% loss of premium.
So don’t spend too much time living in hindsight. Sure, when it’s 100% gone your position sizing may have looked awful, sure you could’ve taken more profit or cut before close and not held through the weekend. However, if you remove the event that you couldn’t have planned for and that shouldn’t have happened, all of those things were likely right.
The only lesson to be learned is that sometimes things are simply out of your control and when that’s the case, you do what you can to change it, but in the meantime… you move forward.
The opening balance on the challenge account after RSX & OZON was 4,116.00. I’m currently up $249.98 on the day which is +6%. All told I lost about $9,000 on RSX & OZON puts expiring worthless.
Why didn’t I exercise?
This is actually a question I’ve been getting in DMs that I figured I’d address. The point of the challenge account is to take the starting balance and never modify it upward. If I had added the money to exercise those puts to the account, it would’ve defeated the purpose and I would’ve avoided a loss than many here had no option but to take. That is not in keeping with the purpose of the challenge and therefore wasn’t an option. If I found a way out, I wanted it to be something that was accessible to everyone and if I failed to, I wanted to take the loss alongside everyone else.
We’ll trade it back.
Getting back on track
I’m going to be committing to steering the community back towards being more active on the forum. Undoubtedly our best time was when we were using this religiously and we need to do so again. I’m going to be working diligently myself and with the Architects to push forward with our various projects so expect some quick occurring changes to our bot offerings and features.
But most importantly, The Challenge goes on. I will be dedicating the brunt of my attention to the challenge account and making consistently profitable, meticulously executed trades as I was doing originally. The last few trades have been plagued by misplays (our really profitable oil trade being wrecked by AMC puts which were destroyed by the SPY rally for instance) and I believe it can just be chalked up to a lack of focus… so focus we shall apply 
We ride at dawn.