Wednesday, February 10, 2010

02/10 NDX Iron Butterfly



I’m in the process of condorizing the trade, getting my short strikes further away from the money, this will reduce my gamma exposure and still keep some theta flowing. Depending on market conditions Tomorrow and Friday I may decide to roll it through the weekend. Let’s see..

02/10 OEX Weekly Iron Condor


Probabilities are greater Today, the position is looking really good so far! Go on time, PASS along :)

02/09 Daily Summary

Markets pushed higher Today but faded during intra-day price action, most of the indexes stopped at their 5 SMAs on the daily chart. We may be getting into a consolidation stage. As far as the price action charts are concerned, there is not much pressure on the down-side movement, which is a good signal of consolidation.

02/09 NDX Fast Butterfly

I got whipped out of the Fast Butterfly, let me talk a bit more about that:

I had a contingent order to stop the trade if down 8%, this was done with a stop order on the butterfly, but I think this was mostly my mistake in doing so. As the price moves around, the P/L on the butterflies tend to oscilate quite widelly, so I've kept the lesson and will think of better ways to hedge/halt a position based on price levels and not so much on the stop limits. I'm keeping track of the trade despite the loss episode as I'm 90% sure it was a factor of the technical way the stop limit was triggered based on intra-day oscilation and not so much actual P/L risk management.

Title: 02/09 MNX Iron Butterfly


Not much left on the position to recover, the biggest drawback was not having enough theta, as I got stopped out of most of my Put spreads towards the last week, that didn’t help. Time to condorize it and navigate the last days of the position.

02/09 NDX Iron Butterfly


The position posted more recovery, we’re almost at a break-even level, and the odds of landing this one without major damage to the aircraft are very good. It navigated the storm early on, and as the market stabilized it is getting back on track. I plan on condorizing the position Tomorrow.

02/09 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

OEX moved by quite a bit Today, and the position is still posting 81% probability of success, this is the biggest benefit of this trading strategy: making time decay work in your favor FAST.