07/01 Daily Summary

Early this morning I went ahead and cut out some of my short put spreads and balanced the delta by selling one of the 2 long AUG puts I had. I felt this would relief some of the over-exposure I had to positive vega and as it turns out it was a good move, without making these tweaks I’d be down over 15%, while I’m now down 12% on the position. Going into Tomorrow I’m little inclined to touch the trade and will probably leave it alone to ride over the long weekend.

06/30 Daily Summary

Around 7:20 AM I’ve decided to roll the short put spreads down, locking some of the overnight profits and allowing me to sell one of my AUG puts, this brought some theta back into the trade and reduced my down-side risk at the same time. This was actually a good move as it saved a few bucks once the market continued going down. Right now, the position is at the max loss level and my game plan is to go into risk management, meaning I’ll start peeling off spreads to minimize my exposure and shut down the trade at a lower loss. We have moved almost 200 points in about 8 days, I’ve adjusted the trade 6 times and every time we kept pushing lower without a break to recover the P/L, once again I’m glad this is a paper position and that my money for this month is safe and sound at the bank..

06/29 Daily Summary

Sure am glad the position is a paper trade. I’m getting a taste of managing some action! Today I did the cut and roll by end of day, while this seems to be ok for now, I wonder if it would be better if I did it Tomorrow in the morning. If it wasn’t for the contingent orders the trade would have hit the skids by now.. My plan is to hang in there and see what happens Tomorrow with the trade, if we make a new low I have orders to hedge and if we sky rocket back up I have orders to drop the long AUG put I’ve bought on the way down. I have a feeling Today’s drop was over-done, we’ll see..

06/28 Daily Summary

This morning I’ve continued to cut and roll the remaining short 1875 Puts, the trade is a bit better than Friday and if we stick around this level for a few days it will start to show profits. All and all, it is still running to make the 10% prior to expiration week, which is my goal.
Better news as Brazil 3 x 0 Chile.. One step closer in the World Cup!

Updated Daily Summary Chart

First and foremost, I’d like to thank the fellows from Dan Sheridan’s Florida Trading Group for their weekly meetings. I can’t attend the meetings but have made a point to download the audio and listen to their discussions every week. A few weeks back they presented what I thought was a great idea: A monitoring spreadsheet to monitor daily movement in relationship to volatility, sounds familiar? :)

Well, the difference is that they were tracking the underlying movement from High to Low, instead of just from close to close. I also liked the fact they were capturing historical data to get a sense for trending. The questions their study answers: how often have we moved over 1 standard deviation (from high to low) during the past 30 days? Is this trending up or down?

With that, I’ve made a bit of adjustments on my own daily tracking spreadsheet. While I do not track the implied volatility as the FTG folks do (I track a 20-day historical volatility), the data I have allows me to take the same sort of measuring and plot this in a trend chart. So there we have it, the updated Daily Summary sheet now will tell us how many times (in percent) has the underlying moved over 1 standard deviation for the past 30 days. For trending, all I had to do is to capture this value for every day and display the results for the past 120 days and displays it in a line chart.

This can potentially serve as a great way to measure when the storms are coming.

06/25 Daily Summary

Second down-side adjustment got hit Today, I sure am glad I got out of my live trade and got into this one to practice my trading management skills. So here is the deal: Since Today was a Friday I didn’t want to go full board rolling my puts since they’re usually at lower prices on Fridays.. I plan on moving the remaining spreads next Monday.

06/26 Performance from trade strategies I've used in the past

I've decided to clean up my blog a bit, and noticed I have performance postings that are quite outdated on my main menu navigation. Since a few months ago I've decided to focus all my attention and limited time on one trading strategy instead of trying to manage multiple positions through the cycle.

The selected strategy is the NDX Iron Butterfly, so I created this blog entry to simply gather the other strategies I've used before for future reference if I ever decide to brush them up and trade them again. Here are links to all other strategies I've traded one way or another in the past:


NDX Fast Iron Butterfly

OEX Weekly Condor

RUT Iron Condor

DEC 09 Trades

NOV 09 Trades

OCT 09 Trades

SEP 09 Trades

AUG 09 Trades

JUL 09 Trades

JUN 09 Trades

MAY 09 Trades