11/17 Daily Summary

I have not yet fully allocated my trade for DEC contracts. Market makers wouldn't fill my position this morning and I had to go to work, I left the order there but to no avail. I want to get it filled Tomorrow, so will have some time in the morning to work it. Otherwise will just have to trade smaller size this month.

I might start adding some price charts to my postings, these are the 4 hour charts on /NQ. I follow the 4-Hours on futures simply because I'm used to continued prices as my technical analysis background comes from Forex trading, so I'm not sure about what to do with all those gaps. :) In any event, notice we broke the short-term trend lines to the up-side, so I'll be interested to see how far we pull back. I've noted a few very near resistance points.

11/16 Daily Summary

I shut down the position Today, the market rolled down and triggered all my contingent orders to the down-side, as I wanted to start loading up the next month's position I continued to peel off the spreads and exited the trade with -5.85% ROI. Ohh, well, I did my very best to stay on the game and rode this one as far as I could, was able to recover well from Friday's blow up and given Today was another large down-day and I only lost a few percentage points, that's really good in my mind. Tomorrow I start posting on the new trade, as I only entered it a few contracts (less than 1/3), will try loading the rest of the position as we open in the morning or leave as pending orders through the day. Cheers! Gustavo

11/15 Daily Summary

If anything, these past two days have been a trial of my ability to manage the position and land it despite the turbulence! I am very grateful we didn't move much Today, this allowed the position to recover a bit. I closed 1 put spread at the end of day as it seemed wise to clean up the bearish exposure a bit. Now depending on where we go Tomorrow I may continue to exit slowly (if down-side) or simply pull the plug (up-side). I also need to remove most of the capital off the position as I want to add or start adding the next month's position. This has been the first time where I have an overlap between months.

I might be starting these trades too late in the cycle, I'll review to see if this may be causing me to come in to close to expiration and if it is forcing me to adjust without a lot more time to recover, as it certainly seems something is odd about the past few months being quite a workout to get some profits out of the position.

11/12 Daily Summary

My Internet was down last Friday, yet I captured my thoughts to make sure I'd share with you my exact state of mind on Friday (I was highly upset and frustrated), now that I'm looking forward to Monday and starting to plan what should I do with the trade in its last week.
----- Excerpt from my notes on Friday:

My Internet connection is down, so I’ll capture my thoughts off-line and post them this weekend or whenever it comes back up. Bottom line is that Today was a lousy day for me and my trade, I felt frustrated with myself for not taking better precautions against a large move, this is especially dangerous in the last final weeks of the trade. All in all, I kept it under the max loss, yet this needed to be condorized and perhaps closed down when it was taking a small loss. This is something I need to work on, or perhaps improve upon next year: learning when to take a small loss given the market conditions and environment. I pushed and the market pushed back.

On the bright side: I have some lessons to learn from this month’s trade, will spend some time and capture those. Also have learned about the debit spreads, Today’s adjustments included a debit spread which gave a nice pump to the down-side, this seems like a promising way to adjust, I was also able to get the contingent order executed using a spread order instead of single orders, so these can also be used in my options for adjusting.

All and all, I’m still in the game, especially if we take a break on Monday then a lot of Today’s loss will be erased, otherwise, well, live and learn. Cheers!

11/11 Daily Summary

I'm very glad all my contingent orders are set to trigger 30 min. after the market opens, Today this paid off, as we were trading beyond my second down-side adjustment and traded back up. Only one of my adjustments was hit, and I rolled the put vertical down. I've set myself to use debit spreads to control my trade Tomorrow if we hit the next adjustment levels, my expectation is that we sit tight and trade in a narrow range so I can collect theta over the weekend. If we stay put I might further condorize the position by end of day, as next week is a theta-collection week and gamma explodes, so I can't leave my short contracts too close to the money. This trade has been quite a ride, that's for sure! Cheers!

11/10 Daily Summary

Got a great break Today, am very grateful the market backed off from Today's lows. I continued to condorize the position by rolling additional call spreads up. So far looking good, we'll see what Tomorrow brings, my plan for adjusting is loaded and I'm basically down to removing spreads if we keep moving against me, at this point with only a few days left it is all about risk management and staying on top of the gamma exposure. Cheers!
Gustavo

11/09 Daily Summary

Ok, needless to say my plan to condorize back-fired on me Today. I rolled the call side up and the market rolled over on its back and took some of my recovery back because of it. Now, on the bright side the call side is further out of the money and there is a lot of Theta going into these last few days of the week. I plan on keeping it steady for now unless we keep rolling down Tomorrow, at which point I may further adjust the down-side.

Sometimes it just happens that way, you have your plan, execute it, and the market does whatever it needs to do.. Part of the game I guess, it is time to condorize anyway, so I rather get hit by doing the right thing than get hit by not doing it and having the market fire up taking me out of the game.