Today was another fun day, and an excuse to start a journal as was mentioned in my previous AMC thread. The goal here is to post occasionally and answer any questions you guys have. I'm not at risk of giving away secrets because mostly everything I trade is plenty liquid. Trading style: I love short-dated options as a way to play my hunches in an extremely leveraged fashion. My trades can last hours or days depending on the setup and day of the week when the setup presents itself. My top 20 trades this year account for >70% of my year. I don't make money every day, in fact only around 50% of days. But, it's the 2-5 big days that pay the bills. This means sitting at the desk for 7 hours every day, constantly looking for opportunities and adjusting positions to minimize risk, or adding to winners as they start to go. I trade a LOT, today was 13k contracts. An extremely busy day, but there was a lot of sitting on my hands with large positions. Today required patience, but I had conviction and it paid. As for today, I've been leaning short every day this week. With the delta variant+inflation it makes little sense for the market to be at all-time highs, and the stars lined up nicely to finally have a down day on Friday. I believe this will spill over into next week, we'll see. My main instruments today were AAPL and MSFT because they were basically the last holdouts for this bull run. AAPL cracked better than MSFT (still green on the day WTF?!). I'm holding some 280p into the close but it's not likely to pay at this point.
You got brass to go with that skill! I was happy making $15 until seeing that Its getting choppy, I cut my size down a lot. Enjoy your weekend, you deserve it!
Nicely done, Dustin. It's nice to see a fellow trader who posted regularly 15 years ago still hanging around and doing well. I know they got tired of the site, but I wish Lescor and Szeven would drop in more often. One quick question. You stated above that you love short dated options. Is that all you are doing lately? Also, do you have stops on your options positions, or are you trading strikes that are far enough out of the money that they are cheap enough, and you can just let them expire worthless if need be? Thanks for the thread. JNB
Thanks, I still chat with Szeven and Corey every day, they are doing well. Yes, this style of trading is 90% of what I do these days. I don't have stops, but if it looks like the stock is acting wrong then I will take the loss and move on, and/or move to the next strike.
Sure, there were two with the 147 and 148's. This is more about the how than the why. 148p: I came into the day with no position for this strike, but it was the first that I bought at the open. From 9:32 to 10:12 I bought 589 contracts at an avg of .21c. I was targeting a 5x and started selling a little early at .74c (11:31) and when it bid $1 (11:46) I hit them with everything I had left. Around 4x avg. 147p: I had 250 puts leftover from Thurs that were dead on the open but when QQQ and multiple big techs started reversing around 9:58, I added up to a total of 850 contracts at .18c avg. The adds were at 9c, but the avg was not great from the overnight. I added another 150 puts at 10:58 at .8c. I held onto these for most of the day, until 11:47-12:04 when I scaled out of everything. I started selling at .39c (a bit early but I was afraid the market was bottoming), up to the last sales at .89c. In both of these situations, I started selling a bit early which cost me $$. I had targets and didn't stick to them very well.
Beauty! Man if you get the urge to post a msft or aapl chart like amc one on your other thread where you labeled your trades? - https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/anatomy-of-a-fun-2-day-trade-amc-60k.359907/ That's asking too much, but what the hell...i'll axe anyway