Wednesday, March 16, 2011

3/16 Daily Summary


I have not started the APR position yet. To be quite honest I may just sit it out this month, give myself some time to regroup. The market seems to need some of that time out as well, notice the last 2 days have been really aggressive, Yesterday with a big gap down and Today with a crash down in prices. I'm glad I'm out to say the least.. Let's see how this market behaves moving forward.

A big thank you to the readers that posted their support on my last month's trading accident. I've basically gone back to flat in my 1-year performance, which is a big pain... Like I said, I need to spend the time and review play by play this MAR position as well as all my past trades to recognize the issues and lessons learned before jumping in the water again.. I find that back testing and journal review is a good way for me to build up confidence. I've been having very busy week days, so plan on doing it over the weekend. For now, will keep watching the day by day market action as I do have a few cash-secured puts/covered call positions I'm working on for the long-term portion of my portfolio.

3 comments:

LJF said...

Are you flat dollar wise or percentage wise? I was just rereading your blog, which I find quite helpful,
you stated that you dont like to lose more than 1.5 times your average profit, I see that you appeared to be beyond that earlier in the trade, what was the reasoning to stay in it?
Time left to recover?

jcvictory said...

I agree. I got out of all my APR positions today about flat. I'm about flat on the year also. These big 1.5+ SD swings in the SPX and NDX and the VIX spike have got me a little spooked.

I may wait a week or two for my MAY condor, just to see if things settle.

Best wishes,

James
jcvictory

Gustavo's Trades said...

Hey LJF, I did the mistake of staying beyond my stop loss this month and it cost me dearly. This was nothing but a mistake that I can see clearly now that it is hindsight 20/20...

I was too busy and got caught up in the action, thought there was time to recover and it did indeed recover, I didn't take that opportunity to exit and it went back down to worse.

Moving forward, I'm not yet fully committed to the APR position, am studying the market as we speak. I may get in APR with a smaller position sizing, or I may switch to a simpler strategy such as covered calls & Cash secured puts in a few select stocks..

Cheers!
Gustavo