Sell, Mortimer, Sell!

A dream of every 'Gen X' macro tourist - the 🐿️’s debut trade in frozen OJ.

Summary

• Last week the 🐿️ fulfilled the lifelong ambition of any macro tourist and went short frozen concentrated orange juice futures (FCOJ).

• The market is pricing a repeat of 2022 when hurricane damage decimated South Florida citrus production. We are taking the other side with an asymmetric setup in FCOJ put options.

Sell, Mortimer, Sell!

The 🐿️ knows how those 3 words feel when spoken to you in earnest. By your boss! To cut a long story short, in the early 2010s my bank was asked to bid in an auction for a large block of Indian shares. These types of risk bids were a nightmare at the best of times.

For this one, it was certainly not the best of times. I was away from my (Hong Kong) desk at an offsite conference in upstate New York. Not ideal. Next, the call had come ‘of the blue’ (i.e., we had no live read on demand for the shares), and the auction was being organized by an independent adviser (a boutique shop with no equities business!) that had promised the vendor a deal mu…