02/10 Daily Summary

I’ve noticed that things might be settling down lately. See the highlighted area in green, while we still have a few days of over 1 st. Deviation they are not as often as the period right before it. Is the storm passing? Sure hope so, as it will allow for a sweet ride for the MAR contracts.

02/10 NDX Fast Butterfly

I am monitoring here what this position would look like. I’ve also estimated the stop points to the up-side and down-side. What I’ve done to estimate is using TOS and tweaking the price level and the volatility with a few basic assumptions:
For up-side swing: reduced volatility by -3% in the TOS analyzer
For down-side swing: increased volatility by +5% in the TOS analyzer
These are not perfect estimates, but I know they’ll get me around the ballpark of where I may need to stop/fully hedge the position. I plan on using that for next week’s trade.

Title: 02/10 MNX Iron Butterfly

Basically took almost 99% of the risk out of the table Today, the trade did not recover in the past few weeks and I don’t want to continue holding the risk. Not to mention Tomorrow is my 35 days and I plan on entering a new position (if time allows during work).

02/10 NDX Iron Butterfly

I’m in the process of condorizing the trade, getting my short strikes further away from the money, this will reduce my gamma exposure and still keep some theta flowing. Depending on market conditions Tomorrow and Friday I may decide to roll it through the weekend. Let’s see..

02/10 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

Probabilities are greater Today, the position is looking really good so far! Go on time, PASS along :)

02/09 Daily Summary

Markets pushed higher Today but faded during intra-day price action, most of the indexes stopped at their 5 SMAs on the daily chart. We may be getting into a consolidation stage. As far as the price action charts are concerned, there is not much pressure on the down-side movement, which is a good signal of consolidation.

02/09 NDX Fast Butterfly

I got whipped out of the Fast Butterfly, let me talk a bit more about that:

I had a contingent order to stop the trade if down 8%, this was done with a stop order on the butterfly, but I think this was mostly my mistake in doing so. As the price moves around, the P/L on the butterflies tend to oscilate quite widelly, so I've kept the lesson and will think of better ways to hedge/halt a position based on price levels and not so much on the stop limits. I'm keeping track of the trade despite the loss episode as I'm 90% sure it was a factor of the technical way the stop limit was triggered based on intra-day oscilation and not so much actual P/L risk management.

Title: 02/09 MNX Iron Butterfly

Not much left on the position to recover, the biggest drawback was not having enough theta, as I got stopped out of most of my Put spreads towards the last week, that didn’t help. Time to condorize it and navigate the last days of the position.

02/09 NDX Iron Butterfly

The position posted more recovery, we’re almost at a break-even level, and the odds of landing this one without major damage to the aircraft are very good. It navigated the storm early on, and as the market stabilized it is getting back on track. I plan on condorizing the position Tomorrow.

02/09 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

OEX moved by quite a bit Today, and the position is still posting 81% probability of success, this is the biggest benefit of this trading strategy: making time decay work in your favor FAST.