2/3 IBM Calendar - Weekly Summary

2/3 Update: I find it hard to follow the P/L on calendars, tracking and estimating volatility on front-month and back-month is very tricky, so the P/L chart gets quite a bit of variation, as of Today it looks to be down again. This tends to be amplified on Fridays.

2/2 Update: I bit of improvement on the position Today, IBM moved back down and it helped the trade

2/1 Update: IBM Moved higher intra-day Today, almost at the 195 level, then it faded in the afternoon. This shows some resistance at those levels and I'm looking for a pull back to benefit the position.

1/31 Update: No major change on this trade when compared with Yesterday.

1/30 Update: IBM moved higher Today and it seems volatility on the IBM Calendar didn't drop as much, trading showing very good improvement from last week.

1/27 NDX Iron Butterfly - Weekly Summary

Weekly Summary: I had to close the trade this week, made the mistake of not having contingent orders to stop or hedge the trade and ended up taking a bigger than expected loss (-22% instead of -15%). This impacts my running status and quite a punch to the face. I have since then decided to regroup my efforts and be a lot more diligent moving forward. More on that as I post later on during the weekend.

1/26: Took a 22% Loss instead of a 15% loss by not closing the trade with a contingent order at the right stop point. This is the lesson to be learned during this cycle. Back to the drawing board.

1/27 IBM Calendar Weekly Summary

Weekly Summary: I had to do another adjustment this week when IBM went through the roof after earnings. The trade took a 3 st. deviation move and still showing possibility of profits.

On 1/27: IBM retreated a bit more and vols have increased a bit, which helped the trade, note it is showing slight better numbers than Yesterday

On 1/26: After performing 2 adjustments on this trade, it still shows possibility for small profits 2 to 3 weeks away

1/20 Weekly Summary

This was a very rough week for my positions. The JAN/APR IBM Tripple calendar hit max loss and as much as I hated, I had to pull the plug on it. NDX Iron Butterfly in trouble as well, it seems the market moved up but vols didn't come back down as much as I expected so I need to enter the 3rd set of contracts to make a slight adjustment (at least bring in theta). Last but not least, the IBM had a big jump on Friday and I had to go in and adjust the FEB/APR tripple calendar.


All and all, a rough week. I'm still on the FEB positions and am looking forward to some retracement/pull back so I they can recover. Needless to say, this was one of the difficult weeks. For now there is not much else to do rather than entering the NDX adjustment on Monday and keeping a close eye on the trades.

FEB/12 Entry Study Sheets

These are the two Pre-Entry study sheets I developed, I used these to check both NDX and IBM prior to entering my positions for FEB/12 contracts. What I'm looking for is any sort of indication that things might be out of wack. I've noticed that using this sort of perspective while backtesting gave me good insights as to when I'd be entering a position in normal vs. stormy market conditions, this allowed me to thing about entering all at once or scaling into the position as a strategy.

Like I said, this is just an indication, at least a way to "check the temperature" before going into the trade. Won't predict the future or anything, just give us an indication of how is the market before jumping in.

Cheers!

Gustavo

1/13 Weekly Summary

This week I entered the FEB positions, both the NDX Iron butterfly and the IBM Tripple calendars. I was traveling Monday and was only able to put the trades on Wednesday. Notice I entered the NDX iron butterfly with 2 thirds of my total capital, leaving space for adjusting. I also entered only 1/2 of the IBM calendars, this was mostly due to time constraints to be honest I got busy and didn't follow through to complete the position. The JAN IBM tripple calendar is still on, I will exit it next week, my plan is to take it off by expiration Friday.

I also used a different spreadsheet to evaluate how much to allocate on the trades, I will post a separate blog entry for you to review the study I'm looking at before entering my trades in 2012.

01/06 Weekly update

This week's update will not have any of the charts, we just moved to South Florida and have no Internet connection as of yet. The IBM calendar seems to have moved very little, I have a feeling a lot of the volatility was taken out of the position Friday. I'm still learning how the calendars work, most of the P/L is driven by volatility on the back and front month option contracts, so it is still a learning process for me, that being said, my guess is that if one had entered a calendar during the last minutes of trading on Friday, he/she would be likely to see profits on Monday, I'll study to see how this works out.

For now, the first week of the year was not very active, the market seems to have moved very little, let's see if we find some stability for a change.

Cheers!
Gustavo