Sunday, November 14, 2010

11/12 Daily Summary



My Internet was down last Friday, yet I captured my thoughts to make sure I'd share with you my exact state of mind on Friday (I was highly upset and frustrated), now that I'm looking forward to Monday and starting to plan what should I do with the trade in its last week.
----- Excerpt from my notes on Friday:

My Internet connection is down, so I’ll capture my thoughts off-line and post them this weekend or whenever it comes back up. Bottom line is that Today was a lousy day for me and my trade, I felt frustrated with myself for not taking better precautions against a large move, this is especially dangerous in the last final weeks of the trade. All in all, I kept it under the max loss, yet this needed to be condorized and perhaps closed down when it was taking a small loss. This is something I need to work on, or perhaps improve upon next year: learning when to take a small loss given the market conditions and environment. I pushed and the market pushed back.

On the bright side: I have some lessons to learn from this month’s trade, will spend some time and capture those. Also have learned about the debit spreads, Today’s adjustments included a debit spread which gave a nice pump to the down-side, this seems like a promising way to adjust, I was also able to get the contingent order executed using a spread order instead of single orders, so these can also be used in my options for adjusting.

All and all, I’m still in the game, especially if we take a break on Monday then a lot of Today’s loss will be erased, otherwise, well, live and learn. Cheers!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When you say debit spread on the puts, do you mean rolling your short puts down to a new strike or adding a new debit spread, if so, why, as opposed to rolling?

Gustavo's Trades said...

I did a new debit spread with the intention of increasing the theta an actually giving the position a pump to the down-side. Not quite sure how this will work out, will see Tomorrow morning.

If I just rolled the put spreads out my trade would be without any theta left, so this was my extra kick, sort of speak, this is a rough trade and I intend to put out a fight as well :)

Cheers!
Gustavo

Manuel said...

Sorry to hear your butterfly getting eaten by the market :( About debit spread adjustments you may want to take a peak at this webinar.

http://community.tradeking.com/members/live-events/blogs/70774-tradeking-webinar-on-demand-recordings-from-october-2010

Tradeking webinars should be free to everyone but select the part 2 of adjusting condors. His talk on debit spread adjustments made me go hmmm in dealing with my butterflies.

The pundits seemed very fearful of Monday and the week but we'll see how it goes this week!

--Manuel

Gustavo's Trades said...

Today I've checked the debit spread vs. the long put I added on Friday, it seems the debit spread kept most of its value even though we snapped back up during the day, this was not quite the case with the long put..

I'll check the webinar, but it might be the case of a combination of both adjustments? We'll see, I liked the way it pumped up my down-side graph..

Thanks!
Gustavo