The returns are on the premium paid for options (or margin), not the notional (which is where fees are paid). That $4bn fund is counting its performance on only $40 million of invested capital (of the $4bn). So they are up 3600% on $40 million.
Universa’s model is they take 3.5% of a portfolio value per year and use it to buy puts over the course of a year. So at any time, maybe they have 30-60 basis points of the portfolio in puts. So they are up 3600% on 30 basis points or like 12%.
"Spitznagel included a chart in his letter showing that a portfolio invested 96.7% in the S&P 500 and 3.3% in Universa’s fund would have been unscathed in March, a month in which the U.S. equity benchmark fell 12.4%."
"The same portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year since March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index."
2.6% per annum is a lot of outperformance, albeit not quite as eye popping as 3600%.
We built Fomo to make it easy to display recent actions (Github pushes, reviews, recent purchases, website visits, etc.) on your website. We're launching version 1 today along with our API that allows you to pass any data into Fomo's notification tool.
Investing in spaces you don't know or don't have strong hunches is difficult. I'd recommend just putting money in index funds unless you feel really, really strongly about an investment and/or have some special knowledge of the space or company.
Though, in the long run, losing $250 while getting your feet wet in investing isn't that bad.
Best investment (outside of investing in myself) was buying into Ethereum when they first announced it. In the 2-3 years since, that's been up nearly 50x.
Basically because we were 1st-time authors. We hired a professional editor and paid him to edit our first draft. Then, we shared that draft with readers and it just wasn't good enough. So, we had to go back, re-edit the entire thing, and then pay for the editor to go over it all again.
Pretty frustrating, and the reason why editing was likely 2-3x more than it should have been. However, it also resulted in a much better book.
I'm around $5500 a month total from 2 Udemy courses and a launching Traction book. It breaks down like this (all links below):
My SQL for Marketers course on Udemy does about $1500 a month, and has been pretty steady since launching the course on Udemy in late April. This takes almost no maintenance, though I am starting to work on improving it in response to student feedback.
My other course, Productivity for Mac Users, is a simpler keyboard shortcuts one can use to be more productive on Mac. This one makes $400-800 per month, though average over the lifetime (launched in May) has been around $500.
Lastly, we launched Traction book 3 months ago, and it continues to sell really well. Even after splitting with my co-author, I make about $3500 a month from that. You can see full numbers breakdown in the blog post we wrote summing up our launch.
After having a product - Traction (book) - hit #2 on PH a few weeks ago, I can say that PH drove more and higher quality traffic than several other well-known blogs we were mentioned on.
PH is great and Ryan is awesome - really excited to see where PH goes after the raise!
In the book we talk more about offline channel tracking, but basically you can tie them to online activity (e.g. discount codes, unique URLs, etc.) or via the "how did you hear about us?" questions.
For beating chicken and egg problem, generally you want to figure out which side is more difficult to get (demand or supply side) and then think about what traction channels work to acquire people on that side of the C&E problem. Happy to chat more over email if you'd like specific help.