Counting with Doug: Financing a trip to Lake Tahoe solely with blackjack winnings?

Trades

Two-month report on the “lazy man’s” options strategy

After two months of trading my market neutral “lazy-man’s” option strategy, my account has shown a profit of $1, 050.00, with starting capital of about $22,000 (not including margin), for a two month return of about 4.7%. Nothing spectacular, but that’s in an enviornment of a constant upward grind, reducing fear and volitility, meaning I […]

Laid low by the (good) jobs report

A whopping number of new jobs resulted in an instant loss for my options strategy last week, as the S&P rose to the 1345 range on the jobs number Friday. That erased the money I had booked by selling weekly options spreads in the 131 SPYs. All told I had a $330 loss on the […]

Threading the needle

The first month of trading with my new options strategy ended with modest success, as I managed to “thread the needle,” and have the SPY stay within 2 points of itself from last Friday to this Friday: All in all, I added $450 to the bank as the weekly SPY 131 option spreads I sold […]

Market rises, Doug falls back a bit

The market’s rise to about 1310 this week meant that I absorbed a small loss on my short term SPY spreads; I sold three January 128 spreads for $2.29 last Friday, and bought them back for $3.08 today, all told a loss of $237.00. I put the position back on with weekly SPY options for […]

So far, so good . . .

In the first week of 2012……

Quickie VIX trade

With the gap down this morning, and VIX shooting past 40, I’m making a “quickie” spur-of-the-moment trade, and buying somewhat reasonably priced September 30 VIX calls for $3.10. Hope to be out of this one by Monday, as vacation looms.

Betting on an end to the summer fireworks

For my late summer trade, I’m going to stick with VIX options, but try a little different tack: put spreads. I’ve put on what amounts to the equivilent of two VIX September put spreads: twenty contracts on a 27.50 – 25 spread and ten more on a 25-20. Essentially, this is a simple bet that […]

The painful buyback

The dream of pain-free easy summer trading has turned out to be just that — a dream. With this being the last day to trade August VIX contracts, I closed out my open positions for a nice hefty loss of almost $2,500.00. I’m going to chalk this up as a live-and-learn experience. And since misery […]

Cape Cod Doug’s Brazilian Bailout!

Every trader worth his salt has at some time or other known the feeling of being trapped in a trade. And once you’ve experienced that feeling, try to burn it in to your brain, and avoid getting trapped again! Making mistakes is unavoidable if you take a directional position in the markets. Learning from mistakes […]

Summer trading: wash, rinse, and repeat, with trepedation

I dodged a bullet again at VIX expiration, and was able to book a nice profit on the July calls I sold last month. Then I turned around and repeated the trade, selling 12 more 25 calls, this time for August 17th, for $0.80 each. July VIX settlement was 19.10. I’m a lot more nervous […]

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