Easy Come Easy Go
I know what it feels like to make over $1000 per hour. And I’m over it.
I spent much of 2020 traveling. As soon as there were rumblings in California of a lockdown, I started looking for ways to preserve my sanity. I had moved to the Bay Area in late 2018 after graduating college. My life was built around the idea that I would have a short commute to Palo Alto from my apartment in Redwood City. Most of my socialization would come through in-person work. My co-workers were great people and some are still close friends today.
But I knew instinctively that working from home - alone in a studio apartment, in a town where I knew one other person, a place I’d moved to 18 months prior - would ruin me. Immediately I started spitballing ideas over Zoom. My proposal to set up pods of people to cowork with got shot down. Thankfully, my close friend and coworker Wenyu was wrapping up his assignment in LA. He’d been jump-starting a group of door-to-door salespeople. The pandemic halted our company’s legacy operations. A 3 month old unproven initiative involving in-person contact was definitely not in the cards at the moment.
On his way up I called him. My lease was now month-to-month, he needed to start a new one, and we both couldn’t survive without human contact. We’d bonded during a mushroom trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains the previous summer. We decided to go back to the area in a long term AirBnB rental. A third member named Garrett - the only one of us with a car - joined our group. He left his apartment untended in San Francisco.
We piled into Garrett’s old BMW sedan. Two bikes on the back, bags in the trunk, food tucked in every remaining corner. At this point in time little was known about COVID-19. We weren’t sure how contagious it was. The CDC was spreading misinformation on masks in an attempt to conserve PPE for medical professionals. I’d even ran a cursory calculation for how likely I was to lose a parent to the virus given what information was available. The number was 31%. Of course I knew the statistics I was working from were dubious, but the number still frightened me.
We arrived at a cabin in the village of Arnold. This was about as far as you could get into the mountains while still maintaining access to a grocery store. What followed were two of the best months of my life.
The cabin’s fridge was given a calendar. On it each day had a different chef and meal planned for each lunch and dinner. I was assigned role of head baker. No store-bought bread was allowed! Garrett was master of the vegetables, our preparer of salads (some were very involved). Wenyu was the king of meat - smoked, roasted, fried and broiled.
Work was slow, so I spent much of my time outside of cooking on my bike. From Arnold it was only 5 miles to Big Trees state park. Big Trees houses a sequoia grove and is worth visiting in an average year. But to have sequoias as a solution to my pandemic boredom was a special privilege. The ride to the park included 600 feet of incline. I had been going to a regular spin class in Palo Alto and was in good enough shape to make the journey. The best part about Big Trees in 2020 was the quasi-closed status. Presumably the state wanted to keep people on payroll, but also wanted to prevent viral exposure. So the park was open only to pedestrians and cyclists. Every time I went, which was often, I was the only person in the park past the gate.
One weekend afternoon I took my bike to the logging roads, working from Arnold to Camp Connell before coasting back down route 4. Another weekend I cycled all the way to Lake Alpine. That’s 30 miles each way, 4100 feet of incline. Thankfully I didn’t get a flat tire because I was too rookie of a cyclist to even think of packing a spare!
I remember biking past a camp ground about 25 miles into the journey. A lone man stood by the entrance. He watched me pedal up the shoulder of the road. As I passed him he said “You’ve got the whole world to yourself!”. I gave him a chuckle in response. On the way back I coasted down through 30 miles of redwoods. It’s an experience I’ll never forget. When I got back Wenyu had finished smoking a tri-tip. I ate about 2000 calories of beef, roasted potatoes, and veggies before passing out. In hindsight I had nearly bonked.
The three of us spent the spring there in Arnold. We watched as snowfall turned to snowmelt. Eventually our lease was up and we all shuffled back to the Bay. But life in the Bay couldn’t compare and we soon found ourselves planning for round 2.
The second AirBnB was in Middletown - a little spot one ridge past Napa Valley. This time Garrett was out and Wenyu’s cousin Lily was in. Lily is an amazing chef and put us all to shame with her meals. I spent my days lounging on a hammock, my evenings eating meals better than most, and nights in a hot tub. We would frequently look at each other and say “we’re living our best lives”. After two months there we had a couple months in north-eastern Oregon.
But the hedonic treadmill runs fast and we soon decided to end our travels. I packed my apartment into a storage unit and headed home for the holidays.
Back in Pennsylvania I ended up buying my first car, a Chevy Volt. After New Years I planned to move back to the Bay Area. I took the opportunity to do my first road trip. 3,500 miles across the country. Starting in Philadelphia I visited a friend in Atlanta, dropped by New Orleans to eat the best shrimp of my life, and later found myself in San Antonio visiting a friend named Mike. Mike and I had been friends since High School.
I arrived in San Antonio late in the day on January 25th, 2021. While he was setting up my makeshift bed on his couch, Mike couldn’t stop talking about the GameStop stock. I’d been too busy driving the last 3 days to pay much attention to reddit so I had no clue what was going on. As Mike told it the stock price had been going crazy all day.
“I’m telling you, it’s going to the moon!”, he said. Picture in your mind a cartoon of a crazed gold miner. In this moment, Mike matched him in voice and energy. I’d just gotten into Robinhood and options trading a few months prior. The idea of gambling on the stock market was new to me, but I at least knew the basics. I’d been involved with Bitcoin back in the day and had technically made a profit, but missed out on making some serious wealth. This felt similar to me but with the market closed I put the thought out of mind and went to sleep.
The next morning I looked at GameStop’s call options. For some reason I trusted Mike. GameStop’s value had bounced back from certain death and the market seemed to think this was the peak. It was a Tuesday. I looked at call options for that Friday and bought one contract valued at $1,000. The price was $37 per share and I was betting it’d be at least $50 by Friday. Content with my gamble we headed out to look at the Alamo.
At some point Elon Musk tweeted about the GameStop price rise. This caused an explosion in value. Mike noticed this and let me know. I was alread up by thousands of dollars. I doubled down on my bet, buying a new call contract for $10,000. As we sat on the San Antonio river walk drinking beers I watched as my portfolio went up in real time. Over the course of a couple of beers I’d made at least $1000. I was giddy. Mike was in a curious mix of happiness from being right and jealousy from the RoI on my options contracts. By night time my $11,000 had turned into over $100,000. I set out the next morning headed West to El Paso.
On Friday I sold the contracts. I called Mike. He was convinced the shares were going to $1,000,000. I looked at my 6 figure returns and thought “Well, he hasn’t steered me wrong yet!” and bought back in. A few $100,000 call option contracts later and I was buckled up for the ride.
Some time between El Paso and El Centro, California I checked my portfolio. The highest value I saw was $360,000. I remember calling a different friend to let them know I was about to be outrageously wealthy. But by some time on Monday I woke up to a notification from RobinHood. “Your stop loss order has executed”. I checked the account and found around $10,000 inside.
I’d made a contingency plan. You can tell your broker to automatically sell an asset if the price goes below a certain point. I set it so I would get back my initial investment. Honestly, I don’t recall being more than mildly bummed. I’d gotten out what I put in and had fun in the process.
I can now say I know what it feel like to make over $1,000 per hour. It’s good! But that old hedonic treadmill is a bitch. It’s been about 4 years since those days and they don’t stick out nearly as well as my bike trips in the Sierra Nevadas or the meals with friends tucked into a cabin. Those experiences still come from a place of wealth and privilege, but the $80 per hour kind.