January 6, 2023

Two and a half years ago, I found myself in the ICU of the University of Vermont Hospital.  I had all the symptoms of Covid even though I had tested negative several times.  My doctor kept saying that the tests had to be false negatives.  Surely, it was Covid, he said.

I checked myself in to the ER of Porter Hospital in Middlebury at midnight on a Friday.  My blood pressure was 65 over 45, and after filling me full of fluids and keeping me awake all night, they couldn’t get that upper reading over 70.

In the morning, they rushed me north to the ICU where they anticipated doing a surgical procedure on my aorta.  They let me make a phone call to Jon Lewis who had been sharing the responsibilities of making the trades in our portfolios.  I told him that he would have to write the Saturday Report that day as well as taking over all the portfolios on Monday.  He said he didn’t think he could do it.  I told him that I surely couldn’t do it, and he was the only one out there who could do it all.

When the test results at the ICU came back, we learned that I did not have Covid after all, and the anti-biotic that they had given me at Porter had saved my life.  Seems that I had a tick-induced disease called Anaplasmosis, and a week later, I felt totally fine.

Ever since that Saturday in July, Jon Lewis has made every trade in every portfolio and written every Saturday Report.  I spoke with him and shared ideas on a regular basis, but he made all the final decisions.  Jon has done a better job than I have in carrying out the 10K Strategy.  For 2022, I traded this strategy in my personal portfolio and did far worse than the market averages. It was my worst year ever. 

Meanwhile, Jon beat those averages by more than 20%. He wisely handled the extreme volatility by keeping about half the portfolios in cash, and placing spreads at a larger range of strikes than we had ever used in the past.

I endured more health issues again this year.  I have had asthma-like breathing issues that prevented me from playing tennis singles or taking long-distance hikes.  In June, a biopsy showed a “high risk” cancer tumor in my prostate.  A long course of radiation has hopefully taken care of it.  And an adjustment to my pacemaker has improved my breathing considerably.

I am almost 84 years old and have been involved in Terry’s Tips for 21 years since I started in in 2001.  I continue to love options trading and place trades in my personal account nearly every trading day.  But this seems to be the appropriate time to turn the entire business over to Jon.

I want to thank my loyal subscribers who hung in there through the difficult years (like 2022).  I have enjoyed conversations over the years with many of you. I hope some of those relationships will continue as we move forward.

I will continue to read the Saturday Report each week, and surely have thoughts I would like to share with Jon. I may offer some additions to the quotations list at the end, but going forward, this is his baby. I am absolutely certain that if volatility falls just a bit to where it has hung out in the great majority of years, he will kill the market averages by a huge margin.

I wish Jon, and all the subscribers who make Terry’s Tips possible, all the luck in the world.  You have made this a wonderful ride for me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Happy trading,

Terry