Do you guys come to Dallas much? We have a monthly meeting on the Tuesday of expiration week where each of us discusses various strategies.
Me personally? No. I visit Chicago, and London frequently but not Dallas. It’s not far, I just don’t trade commodities very often so I have no need to visit Dallas or Houston. Maverick I believe lives in Houston, he’s the absolute best trader I’ve seen here, but I don’t personally know him. You’ll have to message him yourself.
No angle! As a very "lite" ET user with less than 50 posts on this forum, I exhausted most of my time trading than in cerebral dialogue. I'm sure there are similar traders with quiet-ET profiles who may have had better performances than mine. Hopefully one of these guys might see this post a few months from now and PM me. Hoping some magic might happen then. In fact, most of my strategies were refined from discussions with other option traders that I met through coffee meetups and back-of-the-napkin scribbles of option greeks and stock technicals. The "parabolic" return that you succinctly put, the idea for the strategy actually from a posting on this forum from 10 years ago. Its just that strategy never work in the market in 2008 but appears to be performing in 2017. But as a trader, we know that too much of a good thing is not going to last! The market will not allow it!
one thing about your results are that you have a positive delta bias in your trades , when the market went down a bit your strategy took a bigger hit than the indices. Nothing wrong with that but just something to keep in mind
Lawrence Loogie does not trade. He is a paper trader at best who continuously criticizes and condemns my real life trading strategies. He k owe nothing!
Actually, all of my positions were hedged with large negative delta from SPX and NDX. When SPX and NDX started rallying, I constantly closed my shorts within the first 15 minutes of market open and re-opened new hedges. Infact, I probably took major losses (over 25%) on my SPX hedges. The NDX hedges, since they were larger (and wider) instruments, I had more time to refine them so losses were smaller. But you're right, overall portfolio was slightly biased towards positive delta, and deliberately done so as it was a series of position to take advantage of a bull-market rally. I was probably 5 to 10% positive SPX $ delta for my overall portfolio. ie. when the portfolio was a 1M, my SPX $ delta was at $50k to $100k. I would be 1.1m positive delta with my Netflix, AMZN, AAPL and FB positions but NDX, SPX and RUT would be at negative 1m, thereby net position would be +$50k positive $ delta. What I learned in the last 3 months was that my SPX hedges completely failed to protect me from the downside moves in my equity positions. Because of massive indexing going on with ETF funds, SPX doesn't give you the short exposure one needs. NDX on the other hand gives better short exposure as it has more frequent pullbacks. But there's a way to make money on staying delta-neutral on a market that's (predictabily) moving up. Its the slingshot move up that hurts option traders.
I don't trade options at all so might be badly out of the knowledge loop............ but 10K trades a month sound like too much for human brain to handle. Can you elaborate a little. Is it 1K or 10K?
I'm a smaller fish when comparing my account to yours. I've been trading options in DIA, SPY, and QQQ, since their inception, plus I'm holding 12 Mega Caps positions, I haven't touch a potion since January 2nd, I've traded option for 30+ years and also don't understand the 10,000 trades per month.
Sorry, i meant 10k contracts a month. It's probably spread across 500 to 700 trades a month, 20 trades a day. Each trade may scale up to 20 contracts. I don't go 20 contracts all at once. I usually let it come to me as lots of 2, 4, 6, 8 at lower and lower prices. Saw this technique on a YouTube video
Is this accomplished through discretionary trading as you watch live price action on your 40 underlyings or are trades executed through algos?