Ashwin Iyer

Stocks and Investing

How I got invested

Paper Trading

I always wanted to go into computer science, but at the same time, I had an interest in the world of investing, whether that be through YouTube videos or trying to "predict the market.". In the 7th grade, I had asked my dad for a Robinhood account, which I was too young for, so I started paper trading on Alpaca Markets. I do not remember how good my portfolio was, but I just remember a lot of red...

Cryptocurrency

At the beginning of my freshman year of high school (2020), I got into crypto mining, specifically Ethereum. From this point, I tried to understand the market, to which I go back to Warren Buffet's quote on Bitcoin, "probably rat poison squared.". The crypto market does not accurately reflect a stock market, and it follows the random walk hypothesis as the volatility is not clustered. I still hold on to crypto, but I do not actively trade it. Crypto taught me about supply and demand as well as a basic understanding of volatility.

Stocks

I started trading stocks in my junior year with the help of ChatGPT (very dumb) and had no clue about technical analysis or the fundamentals of a market. My thought process was that past precedents preceded future movements, which was very incorrect, and it taught me that charts and other indicators are complete garbage when analyzing a market. At this time I had a very small holding of MSFT and FGD, which I held for the long term.

I picked up reading in my freshman year of college and got back into investing through the use of technical analysis and found my calling of poor man's covered calls as well as capitalizing off IV crush during earnings season. My best trades stem from META calls, ORCL calls, and MSFT puts. I chose this strategy as I am an optimist in the market and found that these blue-chip stocks proved to have overvalued volatility. If you want to know more about my strategy, feel free to PM me on Discord or email me.

My biggest regret was not selling QUBT when I was up over 300% in 1 day :').

I currently hold on to QUBT and BWXT as my speculative stocks, MSFT as my growth stock, and FGD as my dividend stock. I have stopped trading options due to the volatility and uncertainty of today's market; however, my paper trading strategy is to sell calls on overvalued stocks and hope for IV crush.

Side projects and my analysis of the market

I remember learning the Fourier series and getting hooked on the idea of creating any wave using the combination of multiple sine and cosine waves with differing amplitudes. In the shower of my freshman year London dorm, I thought I had uncovered a market opportunity by using the Fourier series to track the movement of a stock and relating that to volatility to price options. In one Google search, my ambitions were shut down as I saw a well-written article from an NYU professor and a 30-year consultant at Morgan Stanley, people who were more than qualified compared to me. This taught me that the market is almost already solved; it is hard to squeeze out alpha when the market is so efficient.

"It doesn’t matter if I’m one second slower or one microsecond; either way, I come in second place." -Flash Boys

My theory for gaining alpha from the market involves capturing the delta between implied volatility and realized volatility and using that to determine the correct pricing of options. Though this is rudimentary, I only discovered after months of research that when trading options, you aren't betting on the market's movement but rather whether the option is overpriced or underpriced. If the market were perfectly efficient, you would only make money from pure chance and not from any technical analysis.

Updated Strategy

"it's all basically arbitrage"

I update my blog to share a "finding", I have realized that everything is just arbitrage whether that be volatility, price spread, or fair price. End of the day, it is your intuition versus the market and how they value the underlying asset compared to your analysis. I also retract my statement on QUBT stock after a tweet by Martin Shkreli where he shows the value of quantum stocks as a mere paperweight. I also found out that the "NASA investment" into QUBT was a mere 26k while the market cap was 1.5 billion, which is a mere 0.000017% of the market cap.

The date is 3/11/25, and I have moved my strategy to cover puts on the S&P and CRSR. I hope to act as an "insurance agency" where I can sell overpriced puts during this fearful market.

I hope to dabble in alternative markets such as the arbitrage between probability markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket and capitalizing spreads during increased volume during events such as using indicators like limit order volume. Essentially I am following why someone is creating a large buy volume at a certain price and using that to determine the market's movement. I have no clue why it is moving but I am trusting their intuition and pricing just above that.