motley fool options — a 1-man defense of expiring sundays

motley fool options, as a phrase, contains a verb hiding inside it. options expire. so do sundays. that, to my mind, settles HT10. nobody asks for a sermon, and yet here is one anyway. mom calls. mike pours. i defend the position with the conviction of a man who owns no positions.

11:34, a thursday, parked at the workstation while the boss is on a fireside chat two doors over. the projector hums through the wall. nobody is asking me about the deck. i have, generously, the next forty minutes to argue with a calendar nobody else thinks is broken.

so. motley fool options. three words that, in the right corner of the internet, point to a paid newsletter about contracts with a deadline the buyer chose. in my corner, the same three words point to a small private theory about sundays. i intend to defend both readings, on company time, between a fireside chat and whatever lands in slack at noon.

motley fool options: motley fool options is the umbrella label for the options-trading research and education products from the financial-advice firm commonly called the motley fool. the service teaches retail investors how to buy and sell contracts that, by design, expire on dates the buyer chose at signing. the underlying instrument is engineered around a deadline.

EVERY OPTION. HAS. AN END DATE.

that, frankly, is the part i respect. most financial products pretend to be eternal — savings accounts, index funds, the slow grind toward a pension tom understands and i do not. options are honest. options are scheduled to die. you buy them knowing the calendar. the calendar wins. that posture is the same one the noble tradition of the licensed truth-teller has been holding since the throne room — the costume that admits, in advance, that nobody in the room is winning forever. options wear motley.

Table of Contents

1. motley fool options, the financial product, briefly

the product is a paid education-and-signal pipeline for retail investors who want to learn how to write or buy options without first reading a textbook with a cracked spine. you pay annually. they explain the mechanics. they suggest trades. the trades expire on the date the contract chose at signing. some pay. some do not. the people running it have been doing this longer than i have been ignoring my bank app.

i looked it up on a wednesday in three tabs, badly, the way the company that bought the trademark on the word probably wishes nobody looked it up. tiered subscriptions, a forum, weekly recommendations. the product is a feed: a relationship between a calendar and an inbox. options is the version where the inbox itself has a deadline.

i mention this from the desk, eating the back half of a granola bar from a bulk place membership i keep renewing because the lone-shopper-in-a-warehouse-cart shape of my life makes it a load-bearing piece of identity. options are the opposite shape — the bar has a date, the membership renews in the dark.

2. options expire, sundays should expire, the symmetry

here is the position, said in plain language, because the position is the whole post.

an option is a contract that ends, by appointment, on a day the parties already wrote down. sundays should end at 6 PM. not by tradition. by appointment. by contract. by something written down between the parties involved, where the parties are me, the calendar, and whatever residual hope i still have for the week ahead. that is HT10.

the symmetry is exact. the option, on its expiration day, stops being an option. the sunday, at 6 PM, should stop being a sunday. the rest is the long, leaking final hours where you cannot start anything but you also cannot rest, because the laundry is still possible and the email is still openable and the dread of monday is beginning to bloom. close the day. expire it. let the week begin at six. that is the only honest contract sunday could ever sign. dispatched.

this is not a take the rest of the week wants to hear. fridays hate it. fridays prefer to extend, to creep into a saturday morning that creeps, eventually, into the slow untimed sunday i am, at this desk, trying to evict. fridays are wrong on this. with affection.

3. mike at the corner agreed, mostly by not disagreeing

i ran the take past mike at the corner bar, three weeks ago — the closest thing i have to peer review. mike is the bartender. mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. mike listens with the patience of a man who has heard worse positions held by worse men.

i said: “options expire. sundays should expire. at 6 PM.”

mike said: “okay.” he poured the second pint without asking. that, in corner-bar grammar, was an endorsement. mike does not pour second pints for opinions he disagrees with. mike pours second pints for opinions he can survive listening to.

by the third pint we had agreed the calendar should be allowed to fire people. by the fourth, mike had drifted to hockey scores, which is the highest compliment a position can receive in this room.

4. the half-built ikea shelf as evidence of sunday overrun

exhibit A: the ikea shelf currently leaning against the wall in the corner of the apartment the lease calls a “dining nook” and i call “the ikea graveyard”. half-built since the second sunday of april. box open. allen key missing. instructions face-down under a coaster. the structural, calendar-based reason: the build was started at 4:47 PM on a sunday.

at 4:47 PM on a sunday, no human should be allowed to start a piece of furniture. the contract is invalid. the option has no exercise window. but the sunday, uncapped, said: you have hours yet. and i, foolishly, listened. by 5:30 the side panel was upside down. by 6:14 i had abandoned the shelf and was doom-scrolling a site i would not name in court. by 7:00 the shelf had reached its permanent state — partially erected, partially abandoned, an honest monument to the part of sunday that should not legally exist.

if sunday had expired at 6, the shelf would either be assembled or unstarted. instead, the shelf is the third state. the third state should not exist. and the 9 minute snooze on the alarm, which i hit four times every monday morning, is the bill — paid in segments — for the hours sunday borrowed and never returned. options never invoice like this.

5. defending the take, with serif-font confidence

i want to defend HT10 in the voice of a man who has been reading too much into trading places, the 1983 dan aykroyd and eddie murphy film, where the climax takes place on a trading floor watching options-adjacent contracts expire in real time. the trading floor knows when to close. the calendar should learn from the trading floor.

here is the merits case. sundays should end at 6 PM because (a) the afternoon softens into useless dough by 4, (b) the evening is a failed format — neither rest nor preparation — and (c) the brain stops being usable around 6 for anything except low-grade dread. the dread is not an emergency. it is the body, correctly, telling you the day is over.

some people will say sundays are for rest. those people are not, on average, resting at 7 PM. those people are organizing. those people are looking at the calendar with the lights off. that is not rest. that is dread dressed as productivity. an option contract would not let you call that a holding period. neither should sunday.

6. closing pulpit, options expire at 6, so should the day

so the take, fully formed: motley fool options teaches retail investors that contracts work better when they have a death date. the rest of life would benefit. sunday is currently signed as an open-ended contract, and that is why it leaks. cap it at 6 PM. let monday begin in the evening, with the laundry already in the machine. give the week a clean exercise window. the shelf might even get built.

i have been ending sundays at 6 PM for two years and the data, internal and uncited, is conclusive: the mondays are softer. the snooze count is down. i no longer believe sunday is the reason. it is the man. and the man is gentler when the calendar is firmer. matter dispatched.

options, in the financial sense, are a small honest piece of architecture inside an industry that pretends honesty doesn’t pay. they say: this ends, by appointment, on a day you chose. that is the kind of contract i wish more days would sign. preferably the one tom — who owns the volvo, who holds the pension that is, broadly, the kind of decision the world calls dumb until it isn’t — uses to prep his lunches. the dumb decisions, in the long view, are the ones that closed on a clean date.

related listening lives over at the audio output of the same fool tradition, in nine-minute increments. they don’t talk about sundays. they talk about contracts. the math is the same. and the deeper riff on the abbreviation lives at the three-letter compression that smuggled the fool tradition into a stock chart.

the fireside chat down the hall has wound down. somebody is laughing in the breakroom. the granola bar is finished. the position holds. sundays, in this household, expire at 6 — parked beside a half-built shelf and a snooze button that has, this morning, taken three hits.

yours stupidly,
idiot again
the man who closed the calendar at six

P.S. the gym membership i pay for and use exclusively for the gym sauna is, in retrospect, a contract i did not give an end date. the sauna is not concerned.

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