03/08 Daily Summary

Another week, another weekly cycle begins. I added my OEX position, added a new NDX butterfly and am still managing the NDX butterfly from last week. So far so good.

03/08 NDX Fast Butterfly (from 03/08)

Added a new bearish butterfly for this week. As it turns out I got a very favourable fill this time and the trade is in good shape right off the bat.

03/08 NDX Fast Butterfly (from 03/01)

Every once and a while you slip and make a mistake. This happened to me on this position: In hindsight, adding the call butterfly by end of day Friday violated one of my lessons learned.. Adding an income strategy right before the weekend is usually a losing proposition. I was so focused on the OEX position that didn’t stop to reflect on the NDX. It was hedged and the best approach would be to simply let it be and open the call butterfly on Monday.

Another lesson I learned is not to focus too much on the past, while trading, the present is all that matters. The best you can do is make a few near-future assumptions and learn from the past. So I take notice of the mistake and do not beat myself over it, keep on managing the trade is the best thing I can do at this point.

03/08 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

Started up a new OEX weekly position. I got in mid-morning, and although the call strike was around 13 delta I evaluated the day’s structure and assumed it would continue to be range-bound, so decided it was ok to open the position mid-day. I use the verticalsolutions.com forecast tool to help me determine the day’s structure during the intra-day price action, in addition to $TICK and the 30-min/1-hour candle patterns in the price charts.

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.