01/25 Daily Summary

Today the market took a break. My Iron Butterflies enjoyed the day of recovery and rest :) I decided against touching the trades, as I want the market to give further indication of what it wants to do before I start acting on it.

Entered the weekly OEX Iron Condor, had a harder than usual time to get fills, hopefully it doesn't become an issue for this strategy.

Position's details and Price action:
01/25 MNX Iron Butterfly
01/25 NDX Iron Butterfly
01/25 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

01/25 MNX Iron Butterfly

Got a bit of P/L recovery, mostly due to volatility, since we're in a decision point in the market, I decided to roll one more day without adjusting the trade any further. I want the market to show its hands before I do anything drastic on the down-side. Looking at the charts, if we break Friday's low I'll spur into action.

01/25 NDX Iron Butterfly

Today the market took a breath and retraced a little bit from the past 2 days of sell off. This brought up great life to the NDX Iron Butterfly, it recored nicely. I decided not to touch the position, I've been adjusting pretty much every day since entry, so Today I gave it a break.

01/25 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

Today I had harder than usual time getting fills for the OEX weekly Iron Condor. I had to enter one single order at a time, and it seemed I was the only contract out there at certain times in the day. Here is the position, the contingent orders are in place, now it is only a matter of monitoring.

01/23 A Must read

This collection of Postings from Brett Steenbarger is a must read:

http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2010/01/trading-psychology-best-of-traderfeed_23.html

01/22 Daily Summary *SHARKS*

Sharks in the water! Let's watch out! Notice two things on the price action charts, in the past 10 trading sessions, we had about 7 or 8 days with over 1 standard deviation. The 5-Day volatility chart is no longer sideways, it started a descending wave.

The only positions I have left on my portfolio are the WOLVERINES of non-directional strategies: Iron Butterflies! :) These little trades seem very fragile, but do not let that short coverage area fool you, they take a punch or two, or four and stand to fight and make money. See the MNX profile, I entered the same day as the RUT Iron Condor, I'm out of the condor with -13% and I'm still in the Iron Butterfly and down only -5%.... You do the math :)

Position's details and price chart:
01/22 MNX Iron Butterfly
01/22 NDX Iron Butterfly
01/22 RUT Iron Condor

01/22 MNX Iron Butterfly

the extra puts I have bought did a good job keeping the trade under control. Then again, we had over 2 st. deviations drop on the MNX and NDX, so this caused the position to lose some more money than it would under normal conditions (read, volatility POP). By end of day I rolled half of my short puts as they’re delta hogs and plan on keep on rolling the other rest if we keep on going down next week. So far the position is hedged, but it needs more theta.