Stevegee I´ll put in my two cents here. My understanding of what Harold is doing, is not actually rolling in the sense he is getting cheaper commissions when he does it all in one operation. Rather sometimes he gets the POT he wants and will do it in one operation as a roll trade, but that he is closing the trade when he needs to, and win or lose he is going to instigate an offsetting trade, either in the same time period,or another month out, into the 60 day trading period and just counts it as the same trade. The importance being he gets his POT. He is just using the same available cash he generates by buying back. Will be interesting to see how Harold answers your question?
It does look like Haroldwill be over 100% returns this weekend, since starting in cash, after expiration Friday. He has a lot of trades going to expire successfully it looks like. On the other hand he has on his chart three that are showing losses apparently. I´m not sure how this comes about, or will be dealt with?
Harold I´m chasing you mon! Had a couple good shortie trades this morning and now my account is showing 85% growth. With your 94% return now and this expiration week, I expect you to go over a 100%. Be fun trying to chase you and see if I can catch up?
Howard, A few days ago I entered an April 1215/1210 put credit spread on SPX in my paper account to get a feel for how things play out. I've been looking for opportunities to put on an associated call credit spread to make an IC but nothing has presented itself yet. I've found that the available credits from candidate call spreads have been paltry (around 0.10) for a 50+ expiry. Definitely not worth the 5.00 risk. I assume you're looking for a similar credit on the other side to the initial credit spread?
Ha! Ha! Im waiting to hear from Howard his account growth total by the end of today. That will be something. Very curious to see if he goes over the 100% mark.
Your observations are similar to what I have observed for the last several months. I'll get my funds released from the FEB 11 series for trading the APR 11 series today, so I haven't faced the challenge yet. I no longer trade SPX (except for the weeklies sometimes) in favor of the NDX. They are strongly correlated and I prefer the larger strike differences. I pay commissions by the option so larger strike distances reduce the relative cost. I could artificially choose larger distances in the SPX but then the credits drop off to less than similar distances in the NDX.
I noticed this as well regarding increasing the strikes. Seemed like no matter how wide I made it I still couldn't achieve the % return on margin I wanted. I'll have a look at NDX, but what do you think of RUT?
Before market opening I am at 102.6%. I'll be on the road most of the day, so I don't know if I'll be able to open new spreads with quarantined funds released today. This weeks action allowed me to collect quite a bit of extra credit by rolling even in the last week. I lost small on some, but gained on most. I haven't seen "last week before expiration" opportunities like this very often before. I hesitated to roll, but the statistics seemed in my favor so I did it. Of course, there is a small, but finite, chance, that some of my options will go ITM by settlement. Keep fingers and toes crossed.
I do RUT as well. It is not as strongly correlated with NDX but does not have weeklies. Also, some of its components may not open on Friday so settlement is not until Saturday. I can't use the released funds again until Monday. It is part of my time-space-market diversification strategy.
In your real money trading which are you using? You'd implied earlier that you wouldn't use all 3 (SPX, NDX, RUT) but focus on just 1. Seems like NDX would be a good choice if you had to choose one due to the availability of weeklies.