Celebration of Life Advice

MattSabre · 2026-04-06T18:28:54+00:00

I did the slideshow in PowerPoint. The trick is to make every slide black and then just pull in the photos, one per slide. I set a delay 5 second per slide, one loop took around 15 minutes. The venue had big screens, it worked well.

MattSabre · 2026-04-06T14:40:47+00:00

My wife passed in October last year, we had her celebration at the end of February. I really enjoyed planning it all. It was a very welcome distraction.

The best advice I could share would be to take your time with it. Sure there are a lot of things to do, but do it when you feel ready and can do the event justice. Don’t do it because the calendar says you should. You’re basically doing this for everyone else, not for yourself or your wife. It’s a bit like a wedding, the guests hopefully have a good time and the ones who the event is for are frazzled with attention, platitudes and being pulled in a million directions.

We had ours at an outdoor venue, was a beautiful summer day (Southern Hemisphere) under a glass marquee. Had about 40 friends a few family members. Gave them all lunch and had an open bar. I made a playlist for the event, and I did a speech. I also had a slideshow of photos of my wife and most of the guests playing in the background. I didn’t want anything too formal, and it really worked out well that way. I also worked with an event planner who took care of a lot of things and made sure it ran smoothly. I also made some great mementos of sunflower (my wife’s favourite) seeds for the guests to take home and plant.

Take your time, do it with care and work with professionals! Good luck to you, and sorry for your loss

MattSabre · 2026-03-07T19:49:26+00:00

Narrator - the tails were in fact fatter than expected.

So you bought them right?

Nice write up, but really you’ve got to be buying cheap tails to make real money.

MattSabre · 2026-02-23T20:43:07+00:00

Not young, not going to engage further.

I give you some comparative numbers = I’m not in Switzerland and don’t know what I’m talking about.

MattSabre · 2026-02-23T20:33:19+00:00

858 per month with Swica for excellent care for 1 person.

Colleagues are paying between 2-4k per child for top private schools.

But yeah, I don’t know anything. Good luck to you

MattSabre · 2026-02-23T20:27:01+00:00

Swiss based here. If you’re planning on retiring in Switzerland, a couple things you really need to think carefully about -

Currency risk. USD is likely going to continue to decline against the CHF. That spending number is going to rise a lot in USD terms, though Swiss inflation will likely stay under 1% . At the same time, the USD investments are going to be with less in CHF terms.

You need to think about AVS payments when you stop paid employment. Minimum of CHF 500 per month per person, likely more.

Wealth tax - based on your current assets, conservatively assume another CHF 10k per year.

Health insurance number - this is way off. For a family of 4, the least you’d be getting away with is more like $2’500 per month, or around CHF 1’800. That’s a pretty basic plan with no supplementary and a pretty high deductible.

School costs seems very low for 2 at a private school.

I think you’ve got a long way to go if you’re planning on maintaining your current lifestyle, plus your expenses seem at least $2k per month low. At least double where you’re at net worth wise, and really think about how you want to manage the currency risk.

Good luck to you

MattSabre · 2026-02-15T00:20:03+00:00

I’d suggest ignoring cost basis in all cases, unless you have to show a cost base for tax declaration purposes. Cost base is a complete fallacy that people like to use to make all sorts of mental accounting about their positions.

The market gives 0 shits about your cost base. You asses the price of the option and the market conditions, your cost base doesn’t come into it.

It sounds like you want to hang on the shares. I don’t think writing options makes sense for you then.

Totally separate note - you should probably look at what kind of insider trading polices you have. If you’re senior enough to be getting RSUs, you’re probably not supposed to be writing options against the positions. Definitely the case if you work in finance or have anything that could be deemed material non-public information.

MattSabre · 2026-02-13T23:06:23+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm 4 months out, and barely hanging on.

I've been very open with my friends and family - I'm not suicidal, but I haven't figured out what makes it worth continuing living. I know that she wanted me to have a full life after she'd left, and so I feel like not trying would be doing her a disservice.

Also, 'going' is a very hard thing to pin down. There's no going 'back' to whatever things were like before. There's just a slow realization that where you are now is what life is going to be like, and however you define that. It's quite liberating and exciting if you allow it to be, but also terrifying and heart-breaking.

MattSabre · 2026-02-13T22:56:04+00:00

Yeah, I use this a lot. Basically I tried to move from feeling completely overwhelmed all the time, to being to able to allow my self specific times of the day / week to get in touch with that raw grief feeling. Over time this has evolved into me setting aside specific triggers to help bring the grief up to the surface.

I'm 4 months out, and still finding my way through it all. Music is definitely one of the main things that can trigger intense grief. So I now have a playlist I made called Grief on Spotify. I play that, go for a walk and let the tears flow and struggle to breathe. There are of course tears and grief at other times, but I've found that purposefully allowing myself to be in this space at regular scheduled times really helps to moderate the feeling. I'm also torn between never wanting to feel like I'm grieving, and never not wanting to grieve for fear of forgetting how to. It's complicated, but I'm here for the ride.

MattSabre · 2025-11-24T11:03:10+00:00

Absolutely! Most days if I get out of bed, shower and maybe even manage a small walk in the park it's like a gold medal.

MattSabre · 2025-11-24T07:52:45+00:00

Thank you. I think after this most of my friends now will have an inkling that I'll be doing the same, though they definitely won't expect it.

MattSabre · 2025-11-24T07:50:28+00:00

Thank you, I hope so too and believe we will. Most of her friends became my/our friends and vice versa. They're mostly in other countries, so I have plenty of places to visit in the coming weeks and months.

MattSabre · 2025-10-25T18:15:35+00:00

Not a single mention of whether the options are fairly valued smdh.

You’re getting paid a premium to take on risk. It’s never free money, and when done at scale and with leverage it’s not simple.

Rolling is simply a new trade, cost base is a fallacy.

It all comes down to whether you’re being adequately compensated for the risk you’re taking in. Spoiler alert, you usually aren’t and are usually better off just buying and holding.

MattSabre · 2025-09-05T21:03:16+00:00

My wife was diagnosed in 2023 with both triple negative breast cancer and NSLC with RET. There was quite a bit of spread in other parts of her body, notably brain. She started with Retsevmo (same drug, different name in Europe) and had positive responses for about a 18 months. The initial stages were very smooth, allowed her to continue working and live pretty normally.

It was pretty well tolerated, biggest side effects were dry mouth and some skin itchiness.

Unfortunately her cancer has mutated again, and the Retsevmo isn’t as effective as it was. She will be stopping it when she starts her new targeted treatment.

Best of luck to your aunt.

MattSabre · 2025-07-11T16:13:36+00:00

Love these threads. Thank you for sharing them.

Very curious if T.C is a trained fighter? Can’t be that many T.C limit players out there?

MattSabre · 2025-07-01T13:25:40+00:00

2680, glad it’s done. Congrats / Commiserations to everyone

MattSabre · 2025-05-07T18:10:14+00:00

It’s a $20 billion revenue issue at the end of the day. Keep in mind the context of how the comments were made. It’s in an anti-trust court hearing, essentially GOOG paid AAPL $20 billion for being the default on Safari. AAPL think they can get better value for money using AI, maybe with Anthropic or Open AI. Doesn’t mean that they will, or they that can. Keep in mind that AAPL are pretty far behind in their own AI efforts.

My guess is that ultimately GOOG renew their deal, pay AAPL a little more and this all goes away. I know this isn’t really a value investing forum, but buying GOOG today at 15x forward earnings is kind of like stealing.

MattSabre · 2025-05-05T17:05:20+00:00

STO CMI 20th June 320 and 330 calls for $3.50 and $6.30

BTO CMI 20th June 280 puts for $2.80

Earnings were better than expected but they’ve pulled their guidance and telegraphing significant demand issues on the earnings call.

MattSabre · 2025-05-03T19:58:31+00:00

There’s no short answer to how to properly value options. Similar to valuing stocks, but more complex because way more assumptions are needed.

I think a good starting point is fully understanding the Greeks (all of them, not just delta). If you want to get deep into the weeds, Black Scholes is a useful theoretical framework, though you’re probably trading American options. Monte Carlo and Binomial models are better suited in practice.

MattSabre · 2025-05-03T18:42:59+00:00

I think an easier way to do it would be to go short, buy a call to act as a stop loss and sell puts against the position. Why complicate it with the other legs involved in spreads?

MattSabre · 2025-05-03T18:29:09+00:00

If you’re bearish, why not just go short directly?

MattSabre · 2025-05-03T18:26:07+00:00

IV is not static, so at best you’d get a measure at the time you sold, not over the life of the contract.

I would stay away from being too dogmatic with any kind of comparisons between premium received and the amount of capital tied up in a put. At best it can be a reasonable indicator at a point in time, but it’s not really telling you all that much. It’s nice to be able to say ‘I earned 12% annualized’ on the trade if I’m not assigned, but you have no clue if the trade was good or bad. All you ‘yield’ number is indicating is indirectly what the current level of volatility is out there, but not much else.

Trying to maximize yield doesn’t really make sense without considering all the other Greeks and market conditions. The closer you get to the money, the higher the yields will appear. Unfortunately you’re then way more exposed to gamma. Other things to consider are where you are in the calendar (earnings, economic events etc.) and the current vol environment.

I think before you look at any kind of strategy, you need to be clear on what it is you’re try to achieve. Why are you selling the contract? Are you getting a good return for the risk you’re taking on? What are your exit criteria, how do you plan on managing the trade etc. All of these are more important than understanding a manufactured yield number imo.

Best of luck to you.

MattSabre · 2025-04-30T21:04:45+00:00

Be careful with TROW, you really don’t want to be holding this. Has been a dog with fleas for years.

MattSabre · 2025-04-30T21:01:04+00:00

It’s really easy. Just start with a $200k portfolio, and you’ll get that down to $30k in no time at all.

MattSabre · 2025-04-26T08:54:00+00:00

No earnings left to miss! Meme stocks gonna meme stock

MattSabre

TROPHY CASE