Market high=1187.50 Market low = 1136.25 Not exactly 50 (10X5), but on a noisy, wild day like this, pretty darn close.
Anyone want to take over the R10 thread or at least temporarily? The manipulation of the market by the government basically caused me to give back a decent amount of my profits for the year. While I am still up for the year, I am very unhappy how this happened. I'm so upset I need to take a break. Who knows how long. I'm going to take a vacation. I was short September, October, and November ES calls to help hedge my long term portfolio. These ES contracts were fully covered by my long term portfolio. During the week the market had been moving down and making most of my ES Sept calls worthless. I decided to start selling October, November and December ES calls (I use 3 months worth) to help hedge my long term portfolio. While I bought a lot of ES Sept calls back, I did not buy all of them back. There were many worthless ones (I had some ES Sept 1550 calls expire worthless today) but some of them turned out to not be so worthless. Alot of the Sept ES calls that I thought were worthless eventually would come back to haunt me. When I logged into IB in the morning I have a margin issue and account value far down (I thought I had given back 50-60% of my profits, in reality it was only 20%) I find out later that margin and values are wrong. When I make a trade it is initially rejected (fortunately that gets fixed fairly quickly). I buy some December ES at 1265-1266 (as much as I didn't want to) to fix margin issues (that were wrong). To make matters worse, ES is cash settled on the Quarterlys. So ES september gets a print way higher than it should be. 1279.31 is the final settlement price. Also I've been reading here on ET that they busted a bunch of trades on Nasdaq. I'm going to be looking into final settlement tonight / tomorrow morning on all S&P 500 opening prices used to make settlement. Lessons learned: I'm going to always buy back calls, even if there is no bid and ask of 0.25 (I just let them expire previously when I rolled) I have to be concerned for myself and myself only. I am going to look at the market as a market. The market will take your money and will not skip a heartbeat. I had stopped taking short setups as I thought we were in a death spiral and did not want to participate in putting companies in bankrupties, people out of jobs, ruining the economy. Positive: I'm still up for the year.
Good to hear that blast didn't kick you back to 2007. I was worried about your situation as I appreciate your posts. Never forget that you're NOT a multi-billion dollar institution, so no governmental white knight will appear to save you. I lost most of my week's gains today, and am simply surprised that I didn't lose it all. I'm fairly new to this and can't predict closing prices like you all do on the ES board. Crazy run-up limit and all, quite a baptism-by-fire... As for the Ro10 thread, if I were you I'd just bookmark it and revive it when the markets and yourself are settled in. The way this market is going though, we'd be lucky if we can use this strat anytime soon...
Jagmot: I understand your frustration. I got caught last August on the option expiration date. A surprise cut created a temporary rally that pushed the settlement price over my short rut call. I learned a lesson. This thursday afternoon i had shorted 10 contracts of rut 770 calls (hedged with long Dec calls) , and it was almost 100 points from the low before the news of bailout plan. A strong reversal before the close made me very nervous (even though it was still 50 points below the strike). I bought it back before the close. On Friday I decided not to take overnight position. The wide bid-ask spread made it very difficult for me to close my diagonal. It seems to me that daytrading ES is a lot safer than trading options. All these changes in rules made the option market so illiquid that it is not tradeable. Too bad that you don't want to day trade es anymore. Otherwise, i can continue to learn. Enjoy your vacation and have a good time.
wonder how you would have fared..... if you had stuck to the rule of ten.... .... without the option plays...
....i also had a journal on the rule of ten ... the mods decided to randomly delete it without any warning.... ... i wonder why they saw fit to leave this one intact.....