Monthly P/L: +0.28% (on account) Month started ok and ended horribly. On the 8th of March many stocks started an upswing. Should have played that more. Intentions for next month: Choose more wisely between different candidates that move more or less the same. Perhaps more allocation of capital. (was always 80% or more cash). And keep doing that homework. My system works. Although I want to spend as less time as possible on trading, some things just have to be done. Open positions are GS & MMM JP
Sold MMM @7.30 (stock price was ~213.79) P/L on this position +82% Broke out of it's triangle. Monthly is still up for me. But since it's running into resistance and also the option is running out of time, better to sell at this time. JP
I've put in a stop order on GS @2.85. It's not my habit with options, in fact it's the first time I do this in this journal. But I have to go for a while and don't want any ugly surprise after all this trade has gone through. GS seems on fire today I plan on selling it at close or maybe tomorrow. JP
Sold GS @$3.60 (stock price was ~202.57) P/L on this position +28% I was hoping that this would break out of the sideways zone to the upside. Which initially seemed to be happening (19th of March) until … it didn't anymore. I had a good monthly upswing with still some power in it so I waited. It seems we reached top level again today and that might be it for a while. Expiration date is coming nearby so can't wait for a new upswing. The better option seems to liquidate the position. The actual option price chart is also posted above. I took quite a setback during the trade on that. Anyway, I stuck to the plan and it worked. I'm starting to like "options" as an instrument. Much more forgiving for timing issues compared to futures. And I can sleep with overnight positions too. Definitly a plus. No current open positions. Despite the crappy end of last month, the portfolio made a new high today. JP
Monthly P/L: +15.96% (on account) No new trades were initialised in April. So this is all the result of the seeds that were planted in March. I'm just posting this for continuity reasons. But I'll probably stop posting this graph since I don't think it's very usefull. The P/L starts to look weird due to inactivity. I will however continue to post trades entries & exits. Flat since early April JP
To elaborate a bit on the inactivity: I'm a great fan and user of cycles in stock charts. Some years ago I did some testing with Fourier analysis. It's supposed to be a possible way to find (dominant) cycles in stock prices. But I got a bit stuck in my research since I didn't had good tools at that time to deal with this Fourier stuff. Now imagine my surprise when I recently find out that Excel can do all those calculations with the push of a button so to speak. Excel can do that since several years actually, I just wasn't aware. And on top of that, in Sierra Chart you can just copy/paste all your stock data very easily into excel. It took me a couple of weeks to test and play with this. And in my enthousiasm I dropped the ball somewhat on my live research. Hence no more trades. The result was a bit of a dead end, or at least not better than the stuff I'm using right now. But I don't consider it a waste of time. Gained some insight on why it's not working the way I thought it might work. Oh well... Time to get back on track. Might take another week or two before I initiate a new position but I will certainly post it here. JP
DIA - long Jun21'19 262 CALL @3.70 (ETF price was ~258.80) Seems like an interesting place for a push up on the daily chart with the double tails (unclosed bar at the moment). The weekly graph looks a bit ugly and might start a downswing. We'll see how that works out next week. I would have rather bought DIA directly but due to EU regulations this is not possible anymore for a while, and I don't see this changing in the recent future. So hence options it are. JP
Throwing this out. Not going as expected. Sold DIA @$2.43 (ETF price was ~254.80) P/L on this position -35% JP
Facebook (FB) - long Jun21'19 190 CALL @4.60 (stock price was ~186.76) Not exactly a bargain right now. But... this signalled yesterday. Should have bought it yesterday near close but was unfortunately not able to at that time. Still looks like it has potential. JP