8/13 Daily Summary

I took a few days off from trading after closing down my AUG position at a small profit. As it turns out, I’m glad I did. I think if the trade was still on I’d have to be dealing with this down-side move and with just a few days prior to expiration these could be hard to recover from. I’m now looking forward to jumping into the SEP contracts, likely to happen next week. I just want to see how we behave and if we break into lower lows on Monday.

AUG NDX Iron Butterfly Day-by-day Review

The AUG trade worked out ok, it started out rough and I handled a constant up-side swing that never seemed to end. We got out to being almost at a max loss level, and when I did the up-side cut and roll I did not add the extra butterfly, for the next cycle the extra butterfly will automatically be part of the cut and roll as I feel this would have made a great positive difference on the trade.

Also, I've made a mistake tracking my P/L with my log spreadsheet, as it turns out I caugt up with it sooner rather than later and it worked out ok. In the past 2 years this is probably the second time this happens, so not a big deal at this time.

Final count: +2.5% ROI, here is the position day-by-day:
8/9 Daily Summary
8/6 Daily Summary
8/5 Daily Summary
8/3 Daily Summary
8/2 Daily Summary
07/30 Daily Summary
07/29 Daily Summary
07/28 Daily Summary
07/27 Daily Summary
07/26 Daily Summary
07/23 Daily Summary
07/22 Daily Summary
07/21 Daily Summary
07/20 Daily Summary
07/19 Daily Summary

8/9 Daily Summary

Closed down the position this morning. I’ve decided that after 3 weeks dealing with this trade it was better to shut it down, wait a few days, let the FMOC meeting go by and re-load with the SEP contracts. I’ve got myself out of a deep hole on this trade, and in hindsight, one thing I’d do differently next time is to immediately add the extra butterfly to help pay for the cut and roll transaction, this will increase the theta and therefore help the position to recover a lot faster. Then again, not too shabby considering I was down by almost the stop loss level and was able to recover and land some profits for AUG.

8/6 Daily Summary

This morning as we were trading Lower I saw profits on the trade and took the opportunity to exit most of my calls, I closed a few spreads and rolled a couple out of the money, also got rid of my long SEP contracts and ended up closing one of the put spreads. As it turns out the market reverted hard by the afternoon, I had already locked in my profits and protected the call side.. Time to look for an exit, will do it soon, probably early monday, bottom line is that this position has been on for almost 3 weeks now, so I want to grab the little bit of profits it is showing.

8/5 Daily Summary

Volatility is crushing my P/L potential, I have too many long calls at this point, if I have some time Tomorrow will consider replacing at least one them with a cut and roll... The only thing preventing me from doing it now is that we can go lower from here (looking toppish on the daily chart), so I'm hanging on to the vega in case vols pop a bit.. In any event, I can replace and keep the vega exposure small, but not positive.. Will look into it. So far I'm around the zero line if we do pull back then I'll be in great shape.

8/3 Daily Summary

The position posted a small recovery Today, I have limited time to blog, so have focused my attention on the game plan for Tomorrow, so far so good, looking forward to a few quiet days between now and next week so this position can go back to the green.

8/2 Daily Summary

Here is the good news: I’m still in the trade, now, for the bad news: I made a mistake on my PL tracking spreadsheet, it was reporting more profits and a bigger recovery than it should. Back on the 23rd I did a butterfly roll to move my short contracts, as it turned out, I logged one of the trades twice. This did not affect my greeks and future adjustments, but it created a skew on my P/L reporting, it was almost as if I was trading with one gauge on my dashboard.. I need to expand how this happen, but Today was a big day and I’m looking forward to a bit of rest before Tomorrow, so it will have to wait. Bottom line, I’ve adjusted my P/L to report the current P/L, I’m still down on the trade, was up a bit last week instead of being up a lot as I thought I was.. Will have to stay longer on the trade.