Nothing like that, hold for multi week swing trades, but very little leverage. At the present moment rebalancing a short trade, I keep repositioning it at higher levels, trying to capture 200 point oscillation. This is my 'edge' ..
I saw Dest liked your post,but I don't see how a 2/3/1 fly benefits from a spike in vol as it approaches the short strike..Does not compute..ATM flys get cheaper woth spikes in vol..OTM increase. Imho,his bet had zero to to with Vega and everything to do with a delta move to his sweet spot,which was down,not up.. .
I had a lot of deep OTM calendars and debit diagonals on the downside. I was net-short 220D on the diagonals alone (ITM strikes on diags). Those were bear/unimodal. That's essentially what killed the day as they were approaching a valuation = the strike diff and I typically cover at terminal value (strike diff). IOW, I was up $5,600 on the day before the 30-point spike primarily due to the diagonals. I had covered all but two of my bear flies the previous day when it was clear that neutrality was not in the cards. Made $660 per on the fly cover. A 30 point move to the downside (3110-15) would have result in a gain of 20K (before futures hedge). I had no intention of holding the bear trade as we didn't open below 3130. I had no intention of holding futures as they were there to give me time to cover into a perceived bull threat. I just didn't account for the $15K coffee break. I had a ton of vanna in the 5-wide SPX diagonals (OTM) and none in the ITM diagonals, but both would have knocked it out of the park on a 50pt lower SPX on a net zero gamma figure.
I don't mean to diminish it or to sound glib, but I went into this with the understanding that I would risk the entire net liq on the two accounts. The only trade that had the potential for (better than) a double was the large asym-fly position which simply got too big (gamma) and the SPX never broke 3130 on a closing basis. There was no way to gear it up efficiently, so I knew from the outset that vol was simply too low to make any significant money on index this week. The $15K is meaningless and/as the process was total degen. The take-away for me is that I should have been up A LOT more than $18K while risking $15K. I model the index "edge" in realtime and the figures were the lowest I've seen in the last three months.
Nothing of real concern on the horizon to boost vols and even the market sees the impeachment as pushed out to 2020 or not affecting good holiday season for consumers so I assume vols will be quite tame next two weeks. Probably make more money simply being long than trading any vol structure....
The irony of this is that the winner of that CME challenge will make something like $2,500 in first place, for risking nothing. You can make much more than that in a day risking your own blood.
Wow...that's a high percentage of winners on a trade execution platform that's not easy to use and you've had > 130 trades too. You're obviously cutting your losers fast without allowing them to become big losing trades. wrbtrader
YT clowns predicting Trump trade tweets? It's not predictive if you're assigning conditions after the fact. It just looks stupid. I predicted it last night... but unfortunately didn't act quickly enough today.