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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the first week of 2012……
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.
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 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 […]
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 […]
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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