The other advantage to SIM trades is they are FREE The other cost of complex spreads...IC's and B-flys is the commission....not so much of an issue if your winning but REALLY sucks on losing trades. When you open and close those 4 legged trades ALL the time at the EOY you could have taken a VERY nice vacation for the same $$. Eats into your take home profit and adds salt to the wounds of the losses. Again (for me) I've cut my cost of commission by trading the options on ES by at least 40% over what it was costing me to trade the SPX.....not insignificant.
Yes I agree with you about the costs on such a position. And yes it is free when simulated but I do factor in commission costs when I test out a trade so that it can be as real as possible. I have been trading options for a long time (mostly strangles and ratio spreads on far out months) so I am more than aware of commission costs and slippage. Before online trading, the commission was $40 per option back in the days of Lind-Waldock and Jack Carl. I had to phone in a trade and not know where I was filled until they got back to me an hour later.
.....blind-sided, why i dont like using individual stocks, feds say china dumping solar stuff and FSLR gets happy.....
Not my best month selling premium in hindsite I should have sold a lot more calls than what I did. Only had 3 postions this month where I sold call premium AKAM, HES, & HCA which I sold covered. Everything else was on the put side. Really was not expecting to be in this steep of a downtrend going into expiration and many of the strikes I had though far away from the money when I entered have come close and forced me to close. The lesson learned for me is to be for in tune with the overall market trend had I been paying closer attention to the SPY I would have recognized the break of the uptrend and repostioned to capture more call premium. Won't be my best month but far from my worst. I believe there is going to be some great premium to be had in June as some of these big names look to recover some ground once they find support.
Not in index. There were some single stocks that performed well. It's interesting that correlation isn't a lot higher.
Phil you can not second guess yourself or the market! (or you will over trade and drive yourself nuts) I said bye bye to 1420 knowing that would be the high for awhile but even though I "knew"....... it didn't stop me from selling puts......just kept me from being too aggressive and kept me disciplined in my trades. That is the only way to stay in the game .
Thanks Richard been in the game for a while that's why I get a little annoyed at myself. Really should of been more cognizant of the overall market conditions and maybe as you said got a little to aggressive selling into the 50 day ema. We were in that nice uptrend since December and i guess I got a little to comfortable in my overall view of the market. Like I said I thought I had plenty of cushion on many postions not all but many and I do have 5 postions remaining that look to expire worthless. But believe June is going to provide many good opportunitys for selling with the higher volitility Thanks again Richard
Always some naughty ones getting out of line, but for the most part it's been a down market. Not sure how high overall correlation is right now but doom and gloomers were screaming correlation bubble some time back.