Monday, August 10, 2009

Trade Monitor day-by-day

The spreadsheet you see for every trade I take is nothing fancy, I simply create a volatility cone when I start the trade, and on a daily basis I copy and paste key values I want to track on a daily basis for my trades.

For example, let's say I'm starting another MNX Iron Butterfly. As soon as I enter the trade in my tracking spreadsheet, I calculate and plot a volatility cone, then I start to track the closing value for MNX (close line in the cone), as well as the P&L for the trade, the change in volatility, and how many standard deviations we moved every day.

This information is then copied and pasted on a daily basis into a series of columns I keep for every trade. Once you have the trade's history, it becomes an easy process to plot those values in a chart. Those values is what you see in my trade log.


I hope this helps.
Gustavo

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Gustavo,

Great Blog!

What are the TTN Target & TTN Close in the trade monitor spreadsheet you use?

Cheers

Gustavo's Trades said...

Hi there, this is a term Dan Sheridan uses quite often, it stands for Tighten The Noose. It means adjusting the trade so that you don't let the profits you already have "evade" the position.

For instance, say you're up 10%, if the P&L drops to 5%, you should seriously consider closing the trade. Another option is to take 1/2 of the table once you reach a certain P&L, in such a fashion that a market movement won't erode too much of the profits left (lastest example is the AUG IBM Calendar).

Hope that helps!
Cheers!
Gustavo

Anonymous said...

Hi Gustavo,

Thats great, thanks!