Unusual options·Long-term investor··4 min read

Checking put flow between the main course and dessert

Dinner at the in-laws, a pocket full of buzzes, and the regional-bank position I resized the next morning - three weeks before the sector rolled over.

There is no polite way to check your phone at your mother-in-law's dinner table, so I didn't. I just felt it: buzz during the roast, buzz-buzz during the story about the neighbor's renovation, another during dessert. Four mails by the time I 'went to wash my hands' and speed-read them by the bathroom sink: put prints on a regional bank I own, all four in the same afternoon, biggest one at 6x volume over open interest.

Reading between courses, researching after coffee

I did nothing that evening except enjoy dessert - limit orders don't fill on Saturday night anyway, and decisions made by a bathroom sink are rarely good ones. Sunday morning, coffee in hand, I did it properly. News scan: the bank itself was quiet, but two sector pieces mentioned commercial-real-estate marks getting uglier at peers. Then a Perplexity deep research run on the bank's exposure: office loan book as a share of assets, reserve ratios versus peers, deposit mix, what management said about CRE on the last call versus the one before.

The comparison of the two calls was the tell. Same questions, noticeably softer adjectives. Reserves 'adequate' where they had been 'strong'. Nothing a headline would catch - exactly the kind of drift a position holder should catch, and exactly the kind of thing eight-figure put buyers apparently read closely.

Monday's trade

I halved the position at Monday's open and parked the proceeds in a boring index sleeve. Three weeks later the sector rolled over on - what else - CRE headlines, and my bank fell harder than most of its peers. The half I kept is underwater and I'm fine with that; it's sized for the thesis actually breaking, not for hoping.

Four put prints in one afternoon is the tape clearing its throat. You don't have to leave the dinner table. You do have to show up Sunday morning.

The buzzes in my pocket were annoying precisely once, and worth a mid-double-digit drawdown avoided. Point the alerts at your holdings and let dinner be dinner - the reading can wait twelve hours. The forgetting is what costs money.