Today's Action STC 2 BAC MAY 50p @ 4.30 Year to Date P/L Account Value: $11,116.50 YTD Gross P/L: 1,310.00 YTD Commiss: 193.50 YTD Net P/L: 1,116.50 YTD % P/L: 11.2% Had a trailstop set on BAC that was a bit too close considering the price action. My stop was triggered at $4.30. The original plan was to take profits at $5.00 but the stop did me in. Oh well, a $220 gain is better than a kick in the face with a golf shoe.
Nice trade on AAPL I have a question if you don't mind. Why short 500 sh and buy 5 puts? Why not either short 1000sh or buy 10puts? I can't short in the IRA but I've been wondering what if any advantage in shorting actual shares vs just buying puts or doing the combo. tia donna
Cache, I just had a chance to read the entire journal. You are a good trader! Good luck to you. I will be following your thread. Cheers,
Thanks for the words of encouragement. Comments are welcome, especially if you see something about one of my trades that I don't.
Thanks, things are moving a little slow right now, but I expect them to start to pick up a bit. That's what I get for anticipating a market reversal. I underestimated the bullish sentiment before. Anyway, I don't use any special software because of my swingtrading mentality. I'm usually not making enough trades to confuse myself, so the data/tracking that ToS platform provides is adequate. I've got things further broken down on a spreadsheet. Anyone that's good with a spreadsheet can conjure up something similar to what I use. I just enter a couple data points and it does all the calculations for me. The benefit to making my own spreadsheet is that each open trade has a journal attached to it that includes all the rational behind the trade and stop/adjusmtment points. Throughout the course of the trade I'll jot things down in various columns in the journal section and I end up with a couple numbers at the end of the journal when the position is closed. Those data points are automatically fed into the PnL spreadsheet. It is also nice because the spreadsheet is linked to acct. software that allows me to do my own accounting for my trading business.
You see...before options I was doing a lot with Trade Station, got a lot of EL language, working with a myriads of models, charts, reports etc, etc. Now...I do the same what you do. I use my own spreadsheets, which show me what I need. I have to say, that since I stop using standard trading software, I have done ten times more than before, when working entirely on soft. I know that many people may not like this, but getting rid of trading software was one of the best things I could do. I use it occasionaly though, but I have no more nightmare visions of my trading results dependent onf some applications, bugs and tech support.
only lazy traders would disagree with you ; I wrote my own software four years ago after frustration of dealing with "standard" option's software.
I'm running a money and risk management study using real trades. This is why I open both stock and straight options positions in the same direction. For this study I size my risk to $1,000 per equity position rounded to hundreds of shares, and I open the same number of in-the-money options. In AAPL's case my stop loss was about $2.
For simplicity, in this study I'm using the same number of 100's of shares and options contracts, and: -using shares the absolute risk is higher -using options the profit is smaller.