Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Interspersed with the near real-time machinations of Boss Tweet over the course of last year, heavy consumers of US financial press may have also noticed a certain nameless trader with a habit of picking up VIX call options priced around $0.50 per contract – the press has dubbed him or her “50 Cent” (which is of course also the name of a rapper who, in 2003, released the chart-topping album Get Rich or Die Tryin’).

Times have been tough for Mr. Cent – volatility is an important ingredient in the option game and 2017 was biblically dry in that respect – the CBOE Volatility Index had been flirting with 10 year lows in the lead-up to 2018. A number of ‘Fiddy’s’ contracts are presumed to have expired worthless. Pravit Chintawongvanich, head of derivatives strategy at Macro Risk Advisors, elegantly explained his plight: “I think for a while '50 Cent’ became ‘30 Cent.’”

But persistence is a great substitute for talent (certainly a mantra I personally subscribe to) – Luke Kawa from Bloomberg reported that our trader was up to his old tricks: “the trader dubbed ‘50 Cent’ resurfaced as 50,000 March VIX calls with a strike price of 24 were purchased at 49 cents a pop.”

Being early is akin to being wrong as the saying goes – hopefully the recent flash of volatility represented both affirmation and accretion for Mr. Cent: those VIX calls, which fetched 49 cents a contract less than three weeks ago, traded as high as $5 a contract last week and 260k March $15 calls were sold for $8.20 and appears to be closing a trade from Feb. 2 when 260k were bought for $1.83.

But it’s a zero sum game: Bloomberg detailed the unfortunate financial outcome for an investor who took the other side of the volatility bet: 260k March $25 calls were bought for $4.90 and appears to be closing a portion of a trade from Feb. 2 when 521.2k were sold for $0.52.

Bravo Fiddy, Bravo.