12/16 Weekly Summary

Got my two positions for the JAN/12 expiration cycle this week. After evaluating our trading goals for 2012 we have landed on keeping it simple and staying the course with only a few strategies. So I'm going to focus on the IBM triple calendar and the NDX Iron Butterfly (with less adjustments).

Cheers!

Gustavo

12/8 Weekly Summary

Posting my weekly update a day earlier as I will be out of pocket for the weekend. Today I closed all my last remaining cash-secured put positions, they were all profitable at or around my profit goal. Last week I took out the NDX iron butterfly. For the JAN-2012 cycle I plan on rolling the cash-secured puts, a NDX Iron Butterfly (entering with 1/2 of the position size) and an IBM triple calendar.

Cheers!
Gustavo

12/02 Weekly Summary

This week was good for all my positions, first with the NDX iron butterfly, I took it out this week when the market rallied back and it got to my profit goal (around 10%). Now, for the cash-secured puts, they are looking good and I may start trimming them down this week week as some of them are approaching very close to the profit targets (about 90% of the credit, or 1% of the margin value).

I mentioned in a few postings that I have been looking for much more of a no-touch trading strategies, and to be honest the most challenging part of trading is what happens when your position starts to be under water.. Controlling the urge to not look at the market every 10 to 15 minutes is not easy, at least not easy to me. So I have some controlling to do last week and was very glad I was able to keep my cool and only adjust at the time of day and price levels I had originally planned. I think just by being aware of that it helped me to stay on control and manage the anxiety.

Other than that, we are getting ready for the Holidays!
Cheers!
Gustavo

11/25 Weekly Summary

The short week for Thanksgiving holidays was harsh on my positions, we had a lot of down-side pressure and most of the trades took a hit on P/L. I added another Iron Butterfly to the NDX trade, this is the adjustment I have decided to do in order to keep this trade as close to no-touch as possible. On the bright side, the volume was very light and due to this being a Holiday week a lot of the heavy traders were not in this action, so let's see what next week bring.

11/18 Weekly Summary

Looks like the market took a bearish instance this last week, in the past 10 days we had a few 1+ standard deviation days to the negative side and very few positive days to show for on both the daily and the 5-day spike charts. On the portfolio the positions are doing well with no need to adjust anything this week. Only adjustment in sight for the NDX is to add another butterfly if we hit the down-side adjustment level.

11/11 Weekly Update

Last Monday, Nov 7th I have closed the NOV cash secured puts and reloaded with the DEC contracts. I also started a NDX iron butterfly and am planning to trade it with a very simple adjustment strategy: add another butterfly at the top or bottom if the market moves up or down to the outside range of the butterfly, the plan is to go for about 10% of the total position size and so far I have only 1/4th of the position loaded.

Notice NDX trading in wide swings on a daily basis, the key difference is that these swings are not moving on a trend, it has been moving in a zig-zag sideways mode.

10/31 Daily Summary

Did not remove the cash-secured puts just yet, truth is I did not have time to work on it early this morning. I want to see it reach 90% of the max profit, it is not quite there yet, so will hold on for a few more days to let time decay do its job. NDX took a dive Today, as you can see, the past few days have been so active that Today's move is not even 1 standard deviation. In the old days a 40+ points (-1.72%) move was quite an event, not so much these days.