8/18 Daily Summary

It looks like the position is giving me a volatility gift! I love when that happens, and I am ready to cash in this gift Tomorrow if things develop as I think they will. Should we trade early AM Tomorrow and shows about 7 to 8% ROI I’ll seriously consider taking a portion of the trade off, I might actually remove the entire position given the fact this will be a busy month for me at work (traveling, long hours, etc).. We’ll see, either way I am very grateful for the gift!

8/17 Daily Summary

I started my SEP position Today. As we were trading at 1835 I got the first portion of the trade, then NDX moved higher and higher, so I kept adding to the position and got a slightly better premium for it, ultimately I had to add the extra long call. In the end I have the entire position, including a long call which I don’t usually start with but got triggered as we traded around 1852 in the morning. I’ll publish the dashboard and additional information Tomorrow as I have had a long day at work Today, for now the position is in!

8/16 Daily Summary

I’ll be looking to get in Tomorrow morning, Wednesday at the latest. While this pull back deflates the volatility, it gives me a chance to get in with a bearish bias and hedge the up-side if I’m wrong. That being said, if we pull back even further Tomorrow it will provide me with what I think is a good entry point, as I believe we’ll see a bit more down-side than this. Either way, it is time for me to get in, so I’ll just go for it.

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.