03/05 Daily Summary

Today the market did exactly the opposite to what I needed. Yet, it did not trigger my stop loss on the OEX position, came within a hairline of it. I’m also glad the the contingent order was there to control the NDX Butterfly. All and all, those were to great reasons for me to be happy for!! Now is sit back, relax and enjoy the weekend! Cheers!

03/05 NDX Fast Butterfly

NDX hit my up-side hedge-recover zone, so I had contingent orders to flatten the deltas and by end of day I added a new bullish butterfly. My goal: to get out of the trade with a small profit next week. The pros of using the hedge-recover: Turning a loss into a win; the cons: deploying more capital and having a bit wider loss (~14% instead of ~8%).
Note: Whenever I add capital to a position, I do not add this new capital to the amount of money I used to define the original stop levels. The capital is deployed, but the idea is to maintain the risk per position consistent.

03/05 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

OEX got within exactly 0.1 of striking my stop loss. I’m very glad it came back down and got within my break-even. This was a losing week, but not a major hit. After it was all said and done I learned a major lesson in controlling my anxiety and letting the trade’s positive edge work. Let me further explain:
Early in the morning I wondered about closing the position. I had a feeling it was going to push higher, after going back and forth I decided not to touch it. After all, this could work better this time, but would mess me up in terms of being able to set and forget. Say next week I get the same feeling but end up cutting myself short. Once you start adding extra variables into the equation, you end up messing up the trade’s edge. It is similar to skipping one month after a losing month, you may simply skip a winner..
Bottom line: keep it consistent. If you have a stop, leave it alone, that’s why it is there in the first place.

03/04 Daily Summary

No bear action Today, very light up-side movement as well, we’re trading in a range and that is a good thing for my option trades, specially for the OEX weekly position, where time decay is accelerated every week. NDX Fast Butterfly needs only a small pull back to close profitable Tomorrow.

03/04 NDX Fast Butterfly

Certainly a major difference on this week NDX fast butterfly, the time decay has yet to begin, so far the NDX has pressed slightly higher and that is enough to erase any theta gains overnight.. Will re-visit my backtest data and take another hard look at the trades initiated with 49 days, I wonder if that will give me any more insight..

03/04 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

OEX keeps pressing higher, let’s see if what it does on Friday, probabilities are still around the 80% level that the position will be fine Tomorrow. Tomorrow it will all come down to the Time vs. Market speed decision :)

03/03 Daily Summary

We’re spinning around the top without any major direction. My feeling is that bears are starting to salivate over this type of action. Let’s see what happens next.