02/19 NDX Iron Butterfly

Got through the first week without having to adjust the position, it seems to me that getting off to a good start is usually half of the battle on any of those income strategies, so this is a good one!

02/19 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

The PUT side expired Today, so this week was a losing week for the trade, I captured a few lessons learned after discussing with fellow traders here in California who trade this strategy:
1) Enter the position mid-day instead of early morning;
2) Be suspicious if you’re getting over .40c for 80% probability of profit (I was getting .70c for the position I got in this week)
3) Enter the trade as a full condor, no reason to force with single contract orders. In other words, do not force execution unless you have an extremely good reason why.

02/17 Daily Summary

I missed a day in blogging Yesterday, this long weekend has been rough around our house, all household members (including the dog) got sick over the weekend, and we were still recovering Yesterday, we’re doing much better now, so I’m able to catch up and not let the blog and trade journal slip.
Yesterday I’ve started most of my positions for the MAR cycle. Have been playing catch up with some of my tracking spreadsheet and got hit on the OEX weekly this time quite early in the trade, read more to see the details.

02/17 MNX Fast Butterfly

This is an experiment I’m running, loading a slightly bearish butterfly on a weekly basis with the goal of capturing a pull back and getting out fast. My stop is to the up-side and if we pull back between Tomorrow and Friday the position will bring in the profit goals (8 or more ROI).

02/17 MNX Iron Butterfly

Started the MAR contracts for the MNX Iron Butterfly, the trade got started Yesterday and I still have to find some time to compile the dashboard.

02/17 NDX Iron Butterfly

I am leaving the remaining FEB contracts to expire and have started the MAR position. I’ve entered the trade Yesterday and there has been little change. I have not yet created my tracking and dashboard view, am a bit behind myself this week.

02/17 OEX Weekly Iron Condor

This was not a good week for me on the OEX Weekly Iron Condor. I got stopped out of my call spread this morning as the OEX traded around 506. In hindsight I believe my entry was a big part of this issue, as you see, I enter this position early in the morning, and when I got in, the OEX was trading below 500, then it proceed to rally through the day and got my trade in trouble right off the gate. I will reach out to fellow OEX weekly traders to find out if they had the same problem and if they enter at the end of the day to avoid such an issue. In my backtesting for this model all assumptions were based on a end of day entry, but in reality I’ve noticed little difference between the early morning prices and end of day, except for Yesterday. So I need to further research and evaluate the model I using for testing and live trading execution to make they as close to a match as possible.