If this were the first-ever post I read from you, that bolded bit there above would tell me that you are well-heeled in the intellect/thought department, with no previous input needed. Great analogy! See, that is clever! I like.
Ai-ai-ai. I've been bad again. Badly-timed home stuff and a (fortunately minor/phone resolvable) emergency call at the wrong time, and here I am - behind on my log. Darn it, this is important. Catching up: 10/9/2019 $113.84 ROKU 191115C135/205 $5.15 Sold the 135/205 call - moving my hedge up. Going to try to get out of the previous one as cheaply as I can. 10/9/2019 $114.62 ROKU 191115C125/250 -$8.49 -$200.00 Not great, but OK; Down $200 on old call and some on the spread, but reduced the $1500 inversion by $1000. Cost basis: 122.88+8.49-5.15=126.22 (3.34 higher than before) if call held to exp. ROKU zoomed up to 121.70 today; unfort, my trading skills weren't quite up to scratch for catching it. Almost, but not quite: I had the 145/250 call spread up for sale at $5.70... and the little bastard came up to $5.65, then shied off and ran away from me. I tried to catch it, but fiddlefucking with a pair of strikes while the price is skidding is akin to fencing épée with a wet noodle. Plus, there was a BIG brake on the proceedings. How the hell was I supposed to have a clue about where the damn thing would stop? My voodoo conjuring technical analysis "skills" told me that it was painting a pretty decent "resistance zone" - but the volume was all over the place, and the volatility was insane (half a point swings in one second, at times.) In short, way too much emotion and uncertainty. Poof! 118... 117... say good night, Gracie. Oh well. I do feel miles better with that 135 call instead of the 125, and I'm grabbing huge chunks of experience by actually doing this stuff - which nails down big swaths of what I've learned. I'm also still growing my ability to bite off even bigger chunks of understanding (got a good one today; thanks to @Wheezooo for his patient explanation of the exercise process!) I'm still chewing my lip to shreds because dammit I don't see any good trades right now, but I'm being a good boy and tending my garden. We'll see how long I can take it.
Don't feel so bad. Imagine trying to swing on a future in this quagmire for the last year. That'll put hair on you're ass.
"Character-building", they call it. I'm getting enough of that to start a toupee business - as long as no one finds out where on my body the stuff came from. I've been wanting to jump into futures, but a) I'm still too raw on even the basics for that to be smart on anything but sim, and b) watching the medium-experienced folks ('cause comparing myself to the really sharp ones would be dumb) struggle is reinforcing my take on the current environment. I'll eventually do it anyway if it becomes the norm... but I'll want to be fairly sharp before I do. (Dammit, I want to go back to being 16 and find out about trading then. I'll still be pissed about missing out on it for all these years when my clock runs out.)
I felt the same way when I first started trading. Overwhelmed forever and wanted to jump into every arena. But just focus on options and mastering a certain plan. If you succeed at that keep doing it, and also branch out. E-mini futures now have micro contracts so you can dabble with real money and not lose your arse. Also tastytrade is coming out with "The Small Exchange", not exactly sure what it is but I'm assuming its a micro-style contract for all futures products? Anywho I just wanted to chime in and say I enjoy your journal. Lots of great info in here. I started trading stocks when I was 19, I'm 29 now and trade options. Lately my style has been trading weekly butterflies in AAPL, TSLA, SPX. And also credit/debit spreads in other products (QQQ, C, ROKU, AMD, NVDA etc..) I still haven't grasped the potential that calendar spreads hold, but I know they offer great rewards if done right. And I've also haven't advanced to diagonal spreads, backspreads etc.. but I'll get there one day. For now it seems butterflies offer great R:R and also variations of flies.. Long butterflies (121) and also Iron flies... skip-strike flies, (132/231) and broken wing flies... they all offer great benefits if used right..
Yep, that's exactly the plan. Except I'm still overwhelmed by options alone... I shouldn't say that; "overwhelmed" was two months ago. Now, it's more like Wheezooo said: I've got a full plate. Gotta be careful carrying it so the surströmming doesn't fall off the one side, the bahn xeo off the other, the bowl of ozoni doesn't spill, and the tapas balanced on top don't go flying - but I am managing, which is - not perfect, but miles better than it was. Nope; it's an actual small futures exchange. $100 seats - and they offered a signup deal where they'd give it to you free if you got on board ahead of time. I'm a fan of Sosnoff's views on proper relationships between customers and financial institutions, so I took it. Pretty nifty deal. Thanks! For me, it's a way to keep myself 100% honest - memory is a damn liar, if you let it be. It's turned out to be much more than that - the help I've received here from the amazing [1] people in this community has been both unexpected and utterly wonderful - so I'm very glad to hear that it's also of help or enjoyment to someone. [1] I probably use this word too often here, but it really is accurate in all its shades of meaning. I enjoy helping others - teacher to the core that I am - but this, outside the Open Source community, is the only other time I've experienced so many smart and capable folks willing to help, again and again. Others see conflict, idiocy, arrogance here... to me, that's just noise. My main interactions with the people here have just been gold, and I'll always remember and value them.
$296.70 SPY 191111P285 -$2.13 $92 $123.27 ROKU 191115C145 / 191115C235 5.40 $36.98 GDXJ 191115P36 $1.10 Whew, the market finally turned over and came to life. SPY, which has been red during pretty much the entire trade, went "ORDER FILLED" on my 30% RR breakpoint almost immediately after the open. ROKU, on the other hand... I baby-sat the hell out of that trade. It's my first time working this phase of the wheel, and a large part of it was seeing how it all works, but I was just obsessed with it. You could write a book about the opposing psychological pressures; it's a hall of mirrors, absolutely fascinating. "Will this thing ever stop going up? Wait, no, I don't want it to stop going up - that's the stock value, and it's chewing up the distance between the current price and my break-even! But wait, I need that higher-strike call to come up to a good price so I can grab it and replace the lower one. Damn, now it's going down and taking that credit away! Do I take the next strike down? But at least it's decreasing the price of the earlier call..." Wild. I've paid more for Broadway shows that didn't provide nearly as much drama or as good of a front-row view. (Although Josh Young as Judas in "Jesus Christ Superstar"... holy fuck. Stellar. OK, back to trading.) Managed to sell the 145 call pretty close to the top - trying to chase price is going to cost me big one day, but I don't know what else to do - and because ROKU dropped almost 3 points before close, I almost got out of the 135 (I didn't want to pay over $150 to do it, though.) It's at a delta of 39 right now, which is a bit concerning but not horrible, so I guess we'll just have to see the next installment of this exciting show to find out whether Batman gets sliced to ribbons by The Reciprocating Infindibulator. Note to self: looking at a chart of the specific strike option history, especially with a DOM alongside, can be pretty darn useful. I was able to max out my bid on GDXJ by seeing where the price had been cycling and bidding near the top. Snagged it in the last moments before close. Won't be very useful if there's a lot of price movement, but small indexes are torpid little buggers - and sometimes, other indexes act that way too.