Trading Journals I was wanting to put on a RUT weekly trade yesterday. But was not sure they had a weekly type? Still not sure. Will use the OEX today maybe? I´m looking at a sideways market until January 7th, as institutions are now staying out of the market for a month. ( 30 day rule ) Michael is ahead of me. But I´m following in the same path as Michael, more or less. My system is going to be composed of directionals. Buying of straight options in short term plays. Well not as short as you. But more of a week, or two I would think. Still working on that system rules. It is not going well yet. The second part of the system is going to be the montly spread, ANNUAL system that BRAD uses and many others. On an annual basis, the losing 3 months covered by rollover adjustment seem to work and he has back up data for four or five years to verify it. Even through bad 2008. Phil of the SPX trader uses the same thing and there are of course many others not talking on here that also do this. I think as a broad based system and BELIZE ALPS HEDGE FUND it will work okay. Be 2012 on an annual basis before we have the proof of the pudding, so to speak. I´m going to have to trade the RUT, SPY and the MID, the XEO and the IWM ( have no clue what that is yet ) Just started investigating the RUT and I like it better than the SPY. Got a lot of homework to do yet. But yes there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Wheeeew! Took about 9 months to get to this point. I think they call it sweat equity. Hope to be operational by Jan 1st.
The secret of monthly credit spread trading and there are several secrets. Seems to be that you cannot think in terms of monthly successes, but must treat it on a calendar year basis. As sometime you have to take 3 months of losses. The second secret seems to be in minimizing the losses in the losing months you can expect through rollover adjustments.
Falconview, I think that is a great way to l ook at it. Yes you are always at some time going to run into a losing month. The key is to minimize them. There may be a year with no losses in a month, or a year with three losing months. Wonderful idea you have of the fund, just be careful not to promise too much in case you have a poor year. People will also get suspicious if you are advertizing too high a yearly return. If you are thinking of say 20% offer 15 with a bonus if it is over that. Less disappointed people that way. Less headaches. Love to share position ideas with you as this is matching my strategy. Are you going to do both puts and call, or just the call side? All the best, Michael
Michael I signed up for the 30 day demo. No word yet. Essentially I´ll try to follow the monthly action and put spreads at the top, or bottom of the monthly bar. The money is made with the IRON CONDORS, so Anything under VIX 22 will get an Iron Condor. I´ve got some reading to do yet. But I will start next week Monday.
I wasn´t sure if the RUT had a weekly,so I ended up putting on an Iron Condor in the OEX weekly. 50 - 550/55 Calls at .40 cents for a credit of +$1840 50- 520/515 Puts at .35 cents for a credit of +$1590 See what happens between now and tomorrow afternoon.
Michael. Last night it bothered me I did so good in the IRON CONDOR. Another clerical mistake alas! There are two weeklies in TOS. Recently they put back the WEEKLY to start on a Friday before. Then they changed it again and backed it up to Thursday. Consequently yesterday Thursday, there were I presume two weeklies and I entered my IRON CONDOR in the flashing bright red weekly option chain. Turns out, this week, the current weekly has no RED LETTERED WEEKLYsign as it is the last week in the expiration month. So the operating weekly for this week in the expiration month, has no name. I entered in the wrong one again. I´ve thought about it. As this is paper money and recently I discovered how to reset the account amount, I think I shall use the mistake to learn how to ROLL OVER in a weekly and see how it works out. Never having done a ROLLOVER. Do it late this afternoon Friday. Then I shall reset for next week and start with a $100,000 again, as I now have my finished two systems for trading that I want to go into real money, hopefully by January 1st. In the meantime, I´ll use December to practice. C'est la vie!
falconview, For future reference I wanted to clear up the option series issue you had. Weeklys start on the Thursday before the expiration week. TOS lists them as 'Weeklys' except when it is the 3rd week of the month, the monthly expiration, or quarterly expiration. If you take a look at SPX, it is easier to see as the monthly and quarterlies have strikes at every 5 points as opposed to the weeklys having fewer strikes. The reason this occurs is that it is not necessary to have a set of weeklys when there is already a series that it would overlap it. You probably figured this out already but I figured I would throw it out there.
Michael Thanks for the heads up. There are two weeklies on the OEX right now. ( Friday ) One that is expiring today and one that will run through next week. I had inadvertantly done my Iron Condor in the next week one. Anyway, I closed the Iron Condor out and surprised myself as I actually made a net on it of +$1110. Done late Friday afternoon. +$1750 - $640 commissions. = + $1110 So for all my agonizing and fretting over the clerical mistake again, it worked out okay this time. __________________________ I´m still LONG some CALL options. Hate to run into next week on this, but the market looks fine for something I am trying. Want to try pyramiding. Also learned this past few days, I should obey the ruddy indicator signals. Should have SOLD and reversed to buy PUTS. I didn´t, and that is that. But just refreshing old skills that went dormant or something. _______________________ While I was sleeping and trying to figure out what to do with the Iron Condor and was going to experiment with a ROLLOVER, I learned I did not understand the ROLLOVER. Do you? My question is this? There must be an optimum time to do the rollover. What is it? I notice that BRAD is sometimes actually running into his RUT spread before doing it. Other times he rolls over before he gets hit. Do you have any studies or experimenting on what is the optimum place to rollover? From what I can see this year he is doing poorly by his standards, because he allowed the intrinsic value to get too big on a rollover. This year he had a loss of -22% in March. It should have been about 10%. The way I see it working, he expects about 10% a month for six months and around 3% a month for three months and then to lose about 30% for three months. So essentially he is counting over 12 months on making 69% gross and then subtracting his loss,which would be anywhere from12% to 30% thereabouts. Giving a net profit of 39% for the year. I believe this is his worst case scenario. I notice the differences are in two things. 1) Whether he gets to complete Iron Condors for at least six months. 2) In keeping his losses to 10% for the month on losing months, or less. So this makes the adjustment rollover super critical for TIMING. So what I want to know, what is the best time to do a rollover on bad months. How to do it?
I notice on Friday afternoons, the volatility of the market dies down. This shrinks the premiums. Since I lucked out by accident on this reduction in Friday afternoon volatility this week. I´m wondering if one could plan a trade on this phenomena with a credit spread in the weeklies ( next week ) on a steady basis?