10/5 Daily Summary

We’re acting like a bull in the china shop, -1.25 st deviation Yesterday, over 3 standard deviation Today on the opposite direction, ouch! I’m glad I started moving my short calls away Yesterday, now, I certainly can’t afford to leave these other short calls too close to the fire, if we keep trading higher Tomorrow I must hedge and get out of the way, last thing I need is a fast moving train flying higher with just a few days before expiration. So, I’m back underwater, not by a lot, yet underwater, this has been a rough month for sure.

10/4 Daily Summary

As the market took a dive Today my position self-adjusted with the contingent orders. By end of day I’ve rolled a few of my short strikes out with vertical rolls. At this point I’m back in the green and looking forward to start exiting the trade or condorizing. If I have more time Tomorrow at closing I might just peel off most of the position. Looking good and I’m super grateful for the awesome recovery. I had my contingent order to the down-side triggered this morning, if it wasn’t for that I’d be out of the trade right now with +5% (my revised goal), now here comes the lesson-learned: Did I feel bad about it? Of course not! The adjustment was based on my plan, and instead of focusing on “could haves”, I’m focused on the fact the contingent order did its job (protect my position while I’m working my job) and now I’m looking forward to the next move I must make.. What is past is past, need to focus on the present and near future.

e-Book project

If you were to ask me for writing an eBook what should it be about? I have a few suggestions, but would like your feedback since you are, after all, the people I care about. Yes, I care about my family, but as my blog reader you kind of are my extended team.. Through good times and bad times I always felt I had people working with me through the blog.. So, here are a few ideas in my head:

1) My Trading plan: Everything I do with my iron butterflies, what, when, where and how to trade, adjust, etc.

2) 101 Lessons learned: Yes, I’ve been counting and am up to close to 101 lessons, each lesson I’ve learned over the years came to me with some “attached cost” to them, I’d love to have you guys avoid these pitfalls I fell into, as well as learn some tricks I’ve captured in the process.

3) I Quit my job! I’m now a full-time trader! Then… 2008 Market crash happens: Tale of what went on in my life during this period, it was prior from writing the blog, but I’ve kept paper journals on the story. Yes, I’m back to a full time job and trading, this eBook would help explain why, and perhaps serve as a “read before you quit your job to trade full time” kind of thing..

Ok, there you have it, 3 options, which one would be more useful for you? It would probably take me some time to write #2, and I might start with 10 or 20 lessons and go from there, my goal is to have something done by the end of October and make it available on the blog for a small fee *(yes, I’m selling the eBook, after all, it has value, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, I think you can afford $10 bucks or so, and it will be worth it.)

I’ve been mulling over this topic for a while now, the truth of the matter is I’ve gotten way too busy for my own good and never put this into action, but the pieces have been rolling around in my head for too long now and it is time to act.

Cheers!
Gustavo

10/1 Daily Summary

AWESOME! I am very grateful for being able to stay in the game and continue managing this position, once the market settled down for the past few days it was only a matter of time to see the volatility evaporate out of the short contracts and the recovery come up. I'm impressed as to how fast this was, and needless to say, super glad I was able to stay in the game and benefit from the recovery.

09/30 Daily Summary

Looks like Market makers finally came to their good sense in pricing these option contracts, all of a sudden the volatility dropped as I was expecting it to do, since we’re approaching the last two weeks of the OCT cycle. I’ve started looking at my condorizing options, and it seems that if we don’t move much Tomorrow I’m better off not touching the trade and waiting a few extra days next week to condorize the position and protect my short strikes. If everything goes well and NDX stays quiet for Friday and Monday I should be in a very good position to reach my goal early next week.

9/29 Daily Summary

Volatility kept my recovery on stand-by Today, the good news is that we're approaching max time decay time, as next week rolls in market makers will have to let go off the volatility and prices on the front-month options. I'm still in the game and am keeping my game plan the same as Yesterday.

9/28 Daily Summary

Still in the trade and working my way back up, I’ve added some theta to the position and am looking to stay in the trade, with the expanded time decay working in my favor, if we find a few days of hesitation in the market then we can get this trade recovered quite fast. So far so good, working on it with full attention and intention to turn it around.