12/02 Weekly Summary

This week was good for all my positions, first with the NDX iron butterfly, I took it out this week when the market rallied back and it got to my profit goal (around 10%). Now, for the cash-secured puts, they are looking good and I may start trimming them down this week week as some of them are approaching very close to the profit targets (about 90% of the credit, or 1% of the margin value).

I mentioned in a few postings that I have been looking for much more of a no-touch trading strategies, and to be honest the most challenging part of trading is what happens when your position starts to be under water.. Controlling the urge to not look at the market every 10 to 15 minutes is not easy, at least not easy to me. So I have some controlling to do last week and was very glad I was able to keep my cool and only adjust at the time of day and price levels I had originally planned. I think just by being aware of that it helped me to stay on control and manage the anxiety.

Other than that, we are getting ready for the Holidays!
Cheers!
Gustavo

11/25 Weekly Summary

The short week for Thanksgiving holidays was harsh on my positions, we had a lot of down-side pressure and most of the trades took a hit on P/L. I added another Iron Butterfly to the NDX trade, this is the adjustment I have decided to do in order to keep this trade as close to no-touch as possible. On the bright side, the volume was very light and due to this being a Holiday week a lot of the heavy traders were not in this action, so let's see what next week bring.

11/18 Weekly Summary

Looks like the market took a bearish instance this last week, in the past 10 days we had a few 1+ standard deviation days to the negative side and very few positive days to show for on both the daily and the 5-day spike charts. On the portfolio the positions are doing well with no need to adjust anything this week. Only adjustment in sight for the NDX is to add another butterfly if we hit the down-side adjustment level.

11/11 Weekly Update

Last Monday, Nov 7th I have closed the NOV cash secured puts and reloaded with the DEC contracts. I also started a NDX iron butterfly and am planning to trade it with a very simple adjustment strategy: add another butterfly at the top or bottom if the market moves up or down to the outside range of the butterfly, the plan is to go for about 10% of the total position size and so far I have only 1/4th of the position loaded.

Notice NDX trading in wide swings on a daily basis, the key difference is that these swings are not moving on a trend, it has been moving in a zig-zag sideways mode.

10/31 Daily Summary

Did not remove the cash-secured puts just yet, truth is I did not have time to work on it early this morning. I want to see it reach 90% of the max profit, it is not quite there yet, so will hold on for a few more days to let time decay do its job. NDX took a dive Today, as you can see, the past few days have been so active that Today's move is not even 1 standard deviation. In the old days a 40+ points (-1.72%) move was quite an event, not so much these days.

10/30 Weekly Summary

The market seemed to be in a wide range with an upward bias. It seems we had quite a few days with over 1 standard deviation moves last week and the intra-day movement has continued to increase. While the NDX did not move up or down by too much this week it sure did move around. I have a few cash-secured puts that are about to reach their max profit so I may take them out sooner than planned and wait a few days to get back in.

As I have mentioned, I started backtesting a version of the iron butterfly without a lot of adjustments, basically the only adjustment is a consideration at the beginning of the trade about loading all contracts at once or loading contracts in a scaling fashion (start with 1 lot and add others if the first lot gets into trouble). So far the results are looking interesting and I'll do a few more months of testing and am looking to get a small position in December contracts to get back in the iron butterflies.

Cheers,

Gustavo

10/24 Daily Summary

NDX moved higher Today, so did the 3 cash-secured puts I have in my portfolio. So far looking really good. I will be out of town for the rest of the week, may not have time to post updates and even if I do have time I will be away from my home computer so chances are I won't have my daily view.