+1 i wanna trade the crack.. am i reading this right.. is there futures directly on crack spreads... ? https://www.theice.com/productguide...d=74658816D5F21B06390B7B0CF6CAC34B?specId=231 http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/ene...ad-calendar-swap_contract_specifications.html
End of month and end of quarter coming right up, just a note to self. Been a big quarter for spoo, lots of back-patting to be expected.
I am not making any money (maybe a tiny amount) on my butterfly spreads because the market seems to have bipolar disorder. Up when the news should send it down. Down when news should send it up. I would have had a great week if I had held my flys. I closed my Mar 28 SPX iron butterfly (1585/1565/1545) on Monday for some profit. I would have made 5x more profit if I had held until today, but I also would have been in the red on some of the days in between. I took a small loss on my NFLX Apr. 5 205/185/165 put butterfly when NFLX looked like it was going to 200 on Wednesday. It then retreated so I should have held. I should have not closed it since it was still 10 days from expiration, I think. I chickened out and pulled my order for a 185/175/170 CRM butterfly which would have worked because I was not sure about moving my normal mid point up from my previously good 180/170/160 flies. I did make some profit on a GLD 158/155/152 March 28 put fly because it just sat around at 155 but posiition was way to small. My thinking is that I do not dare hold butterflys when they hit the wings or into expiration day because spread turns into basically a +/-1.0 delta bet. Anyone have some rules to use?
This thread has been helpful, and I now have some experience with different one and two week out butterflys. I have been holding usually to either the expiration data or the day before and run into no spread quote from IB. It seems to me I should just always trade iron butterflys because the veriticals do have quotes. Also, seemingly there is only a tiny extra commission part from IB. Am I missing something, i.e. do regular butterflys have advantages? I think current IVs are coming down, but if that changes, I think iron butterflys are a lot easier to change into calendars. Also my profit from my GLD 158/155/152 put spread was much worse than I thought because it turns out IB defaults GLD options to the 10x multiplier GLD7 options unless in the combo order I explicitly select the 100x multiplier at the top. I thought I would mention this in case any other newbies are thinking of trading the GLD butterflys.