8/31 Daily Summary

Ok, I have been a bit away for the past few days, things have been really busy at work and I don't have any live positions on. The only thing I have going are a few cash-secured puts on WMT and KO, but these are on the long part of my portfolio and I'm not tracking them on a daily basis. I have been looking at a few broken wing condors as per recent discussions in the Sheridan Mentoring community, so far these are only paper trades for me and I'm still trying to get a hang of it. I might do them live the next month or so. For now, here is the latest daily Summary chart.

SEP NDX Iron Butterfly - Day-by-day Review

September was a nice month for me, the position yield the 10% goal within less than a week and it was a very welcome result, provided that AUG was a looong trade. :) Here is the day-by-day review.


8/17 Daily Summary
8/18 Daily Summary
8/19 Daily Summary
8/20 Daily Summary
8/23 Daily Summary

8/27 - Daily Summary

Seems like I took out my trade right before a small roller coaster. I didn't watch the market since Monday of this week, and by the looks of it, I'm glad I was out with my target profit. If there is one thing I learned with trading this strategy for over 1 year now is get out as soon as you can. That's one of the things I love about the Iron Butterfly: You can get your money fast, and when the market moves against you, you can still stay in the game and recover.

8/23 Daily Summary

As we started the morning I saw we were trading around 10% so I started peeling off the position. I took 1/3 first and that flattened my deltas so I was confortable with staying till the end of the day to take the rest off. 10% in 5 days is awesome no matter how you cut it! :)

8/20 Daily Summary

Today will be a very brief posting. I am very grateful for the way the market behaved this week and how the position is looking going into its first weekend. More often than not I've noticed that going throught the 1st weekend with profits is half the battle on these trades, as it builds up reserves and allows you to manage the capital without the pressure. That being said, I'm looking for the exit, and as soon as that light goes green I'm out ;)

For now, enjoy the weekend, I sure will!
Cheers!
Gustavo

8/19 Daily Summary

As it turns out Yesterday possible gift was most likely a bad print caused by last minute action and bad quotes at closing time. As we opened this morning the position was no way near Yesterday’s level, we closed in the green Today, which is always good. Now it is a matter of navigating the trade a few more days to get my goal.

8/18 Daily Summary

It looks like the position is giving me a volatility gift! I love when that happens, and I am ready to cash in this gift Tomorrow if things develop as I think they will. Should we trade early AM Tomorrow and shows about 7 to 8% ROI I’ll seriously consider taking a portion of the trade off, I might actually remove the entire position given the fact this will be a busy month for me at work (traveling, long hours, etc).. We’ll see, either way I am very grateful for the gift!

8/17 Daily Summary

I started my SEP position Today. As we were trading at 1835 I got the first portion of the trade, then NDX moved higher and higher, so I kept adding to the position and got a slightly better premium for it, ultimately I had to add the extra long call. In the end I have the entire position, including a long call which I don’t usually start with but got triggered as we traded around 1852 in the morning. I’ll publish the dashboard and additional information Tomorrow as I have had a long day at work Today, for now the position is in!

8/16 Daily Summary

I’ll be looking to get in Tomorrow morning, Wednesday at the latest. While this pull back deflates the volatility, it gives me a chance to get in with a bearish bias and hedge the up-side if I’m wrong. That being said, if we pull back even further Tomorrow it will provide me with what I think is a good entry point, as I believe we’ll see a bit more down-side than this. Either way, it is time for me to get in, so I’ll just go for it.

8/13 Daily Summary

I took a few days off from trading after closing down my AUG position at a small profit. As it turns out, I’m glad I did. I think if the trade was still on I’d have to be dealing with this down-side move and with just a few days prior to expiration these could be hard to recover from. I’m now looking forward to jumping into the SEP contracts, likely to happen next week. I just want to see how we behave and if we break into lower lows on Monday.

AUG NDX Iron Butterfly Day-by-day Review

The AUG trade worked out ok, it started out rough and I handled a constant up-side swing that never seemed to end. We got out to being almost at a max loss level, and when I did the up-side cut and roll I did not add the extra butterfly, for the next cycle the extra butterfly will automatically be part of the cut and roll as I feel this would have made a great positive difference on the trade.

Also, I've made a mistake tracking my P/L with my log spreadsheet, as it turns out I caugt up with it sooner rather than later and it worked out ok. In the past 2 years this is probably the second time this happens, so not a big deal at this time.

Final count: +2.5% ROI, here is the position day-by-day:
8/9 Daily Summary
8/6 Daily Summary
8/5 Daily Summary
8/3 Daily Summary
8/2 Daily Summary
07/30 Daily Summary
07/29 Daily Summary
07/28 Daily Summary
07/27 Daily Summary
07/26 Daily Summary
07/23 Daily Summary
07/22 Daily Summary
07/21 Daily Summary
07/20 Daily Summary
07/19 Daily Summary

8/9 Daily Summary

Closed down the position this morning. I’ve decided that after 3 weeks dealing with this trade it was better to shut it down, wait a few days, let the FMOC meeting go by and re-load with the SEP contracts. I’ve got myself out of a deep hole on this trade, and in hindsight, one thing I’d do differently next time is to immediately add the extra butterfly to help pay for the cut and roll transaction, this will increase the theta and therefore help the position to recover a lot faster. Then again, not too shabby considering I was down by almost the stop loss level and was able to recover and land some profits for AUG.

8/6 Daily Summary

This morning as we were trading Lower I saw profits on the trade and took the opportunity to exit most of my calls, I closed a few spreads and rolled a couple out of the money, also got rid of my long SEP contracts and ended up closing one of the put spreads. As it turns out the market reverted hard by the afternoon, I had already locked in my profits and protected the call side.. Time to look for an exit, will do it soon, probably early monday, bottom line is that this position has been on for almost 3 weeks now, so I want to grab the little bit of profits it is showing.

8/5 Daily Summary

Volatility is crushing my P/L potential, I have too many long calls at this point, if I have some time Tomorrow will consider replacing at least one them with a cut and roll... The only thing preventing me from doing it now is that we can go lower from here (looking toppish on the daily chart), so I'm hanging on to the vega in case vols pop a bit.. In any event, I can replace and keep the vega exposure small, but not positive.. Will look into it. So far I'm around the zero line if we do pull back then I'll be in great shape.

8/3 Daily Summary

The position posted a small recovery Today, I have limited time to blog, so have focused my attention on the game plan for Tomorrow, so far so good, looking forward to a few quiet days between now and next week so this position can go back to the green.

8/2 Daily Summary

Here is the good news: I’m still in the trade, now, for the bad news: I made a mistake on my PL tracking spreadsheet, it was reporting more profits and a bigger recovery than it should. Back on the 23rd I did a butterfly roll to move my short contracts, as it turned out, I logged one of the trades twice. This did not affect my greeks and future adjustments, but it created a skew on my P/L reporting, it was almost as if I was trading with one gauge on my dashboard.. I need to expand how this happen, but Today was a big day and I’m looking forward to a bit of rest before Tomorrow, so it will have to wait. Bottom line, I’ve adjusted my P/L to report the current P/L, I’m still down on the trade, was up a bit last week instead of being up a lot as I thought I was.. Will have to stay longer on the trade.