Thanks for saying so. Just super busy, School full time, family full time, trading full time, and some other issues leaving little time for anything else some things have really come together nicely lately so hopefully I will be able to spend more time here as well as on some trading ideas I want to move further with. Have a great week, looks like Monday is going to be one fun show to be a part of Robert
I donât normally trade on Sundays but⦠The 30 yrs bond futs retraced big time and I covered some of my calls I was short. Now only two contracts short and with any luck the price will continue down or at least the time decay will take care of the price staying the same or going up a small amount. One contract is in the money by about a point and one is out by a point. Should be a big day tomorrow ZB 122 Jun calls + 1039 + 1039
Great day today After closing out a couple of the 30 calls at a nice gain last night I closed out the last 122call today at a nice gain. I still have the 119 call that is underwater but not by far and was one tick from going green today so with a little downside pressure and the natural time decay I should be in good shape there. I will be looking to add more further months out hopefully as soon as tomorrow as I feel we have limited upside potential and the slightest negative news on the US debt I think will send rates higher. 30yr Jun 122 call cover +850 (I belive the number is higher but its already off of the IB daily PnL so I am estimating STD + 102 Traded the SPY via options today a lot. With the spoos being up over 50 points it was not hard to imagine it being a volatile day. Today was not a let down. Mostly traded the SPY to the down side and instead of selling options I was a buyer. I was not going to hold a trade overnight and paying a super high IV is not a problem if you believe you can also sell at an equal super high IV which for the SPY on a day trade seemed reasonable and turned out to be reasonable. I traded the puts at the 113 115 and 116 level in combination. The exchanges in order to screw the counter party do not want others to play market makers and have been able to convince the SEC that in a free market a monopoly should exist âfor the benefit of the customerâ which is total crap but somehow it continues to go on. I was really surprised when they didnât get an exception to the uptick rule this time but I would bet either the rule gets removed again or the MMs get an exception to the rule and place the rest of us on second class citizen status again. By using combinations of different close exercise prices one can get near ability to have a bid and ask at the same time and to hedge and scalp. Still not a level playing field but does allow for a lower risk profile. SPY M116P + 211 115P + 94 113P + 16 GS M140P + 45 (covered this one to soon as the end of day rally was stronger than expected) DNDN + 13 left a lot (almost all on the table due to wanting to flatten out for the day) BP Jun 45P â 7 still have a short with these contracts and could have closed the day in the green but covered enough to keep the risk small. I really expect a large jump in share price when the oil leak gets plugged. With any luck we are not looking at more than a week. If this does drag on I am unsure that the price will not fall faster than the time decay. for this trade anyway hopefully oil stays north of 75 a barrel and they get this mess taken care of for under $2 billion. If so I think we have a $55+ stock again in no time. If not maybe a $45-50 stock. When the containment dome did not work today and the price didnât crash it really gave me the impression that absent some other shoe dropping that the price is near its lows over this issue. I would not doubt some bad news to hit but I also expect the leak to be mostly under control within a week to 10 days. If counting late night last night trades to cover it was a +2200 day which would be the best for the month for sure and one of the best if not the best for the year. Absent late night last night it was still a + 1200 day which is good all on its own.
Great day even if BP canât find a plug big enough No big surprise but it didnât take long for the market to figure out loaning more money to countries that have no plan to repay it doesnât make any sense to anyone that is not seeking reelection. Gold hit a new high today as fiat currencies start to look increasingly like toilet paper. 30yr bonds down again and for the third day. I greatly lowered my short but was looking for a pop higher to short more. As it turns out the open was the HOD and I didnât get a chance to increase. All around a great day and I really pounded on SNDK with trading it back and forth as it moved back and forth on its way down. Was able to take about double the normal gain as a result and lowered for the most part my risk. Of course this kind of trading often leads IB into making a lot of money in fees but I guess I will take what I can get. I had one qualified and one on qualified B8 today so that was great. NAV was one of the B8s and it actually gave off two and I really should have pushed it much harder on the second one but I traded it well for the size both times. Actually I traded really well the whole day and today was a day that just clicked with just about everything going well. I had one losing trade with PCLN and for a $220 stock to be able to lose $60 working with 200 shares I thought was not bad for a trade that didnât go well. I didnât lose more than just the spread plus maybe a little more and I am not actually sure about that. Yesterday was a plus 2K day counting late Sunday night but I can say that today was a plus 2K day all on its own. If I can get some love from GS and BP I will really be styling. I did trade BP some today and made a gain but my longer option holds continue to be underwater but I do enjoy knowing that tomorrow they will have less time value. I am looking forward to GS being discovered as a total money printing press and watching the stock shoot up. I picture any type of settlement with the SEC that is reasonable being worth a 6-12 point pop and I plan to add if it moves under 140. The latest official numbers of short interest with GS is small but I would imagine that the short interest has grown quite a bit. AGEN + 9 ANV B81 unqual + 82 BP jun 45P + 38 LM gapup + 654 Traded a lot of shares to try to maximize gain and went very well. MEE M36P + 18 MFB + 136 NAV B8 two times + 618 PCLN M210C â 59 was trending down but failed to pay attention to daily bar and when I found my mistake I closed it out. SNDK non qual TDline break to upside with an intraday qual break to the downside. Not a normal trade for me but at the point of the breakdown it was slightly over a 43 and appeared to have stalled out as expected. I squeezed this stock over and over and while I never had very many shares short I was able to make an overall gain of about 80+ cents per share based on how many shares I held at any given time. Just about nothing went wrong with this trade. I bought and sold as it moved back and forth and with about 35 mins left in trading knowing that the last half hour is often a reversal I bought to cover at 42.22 near the low of the move off the high of 43ish. Really super pleased with how this trade went even though it was not a huge winner dollar wise. + 620 + 2120
A very very busy day The day started out small with Disney and bidu neither of which went far. My big trade of the day was with ANV. It gave a wonderful gap up after a perfect B8 signal and I worked it and squeezed it for as much as I could. Great trading and the gain vs. risk was about as good as it gets. It was a long lasting trade and we talked about the trade quite a bit in the chat. I rode it until it filled the gap and this is a trade that I never set out to work on. I found this by working out my backtesting manually and this would be a about as good of an example of why I think backand forward testing should be done manually one trade at a time. Automation is fine with trade execution to make sure you stay on the correct plan but a lot is to be learned by manually back testing hundreds of trades including finding things you never thought about. I only get a few of these a year but the timing after Monday and Tuesday was just great. My losing trade today was CREE which I had correct but decided it was a good idea to buy at the top of a move and sell short at the bottom of the next move. Both times I cut my loss and after the second go around with this one I decided that I would let that one go. In the end it did make a new HOD but not by much so I didnât lose out on much of a gain and by using good risk management I did not allow myself to get hurt badly. I had a major scare today. After reading about the horror stories about people adding liquidity to the markets last Thursday only to have their trades busted and to lose lots of money I thought I was going to get beat up today myself. It was announced that SY was in buyout talks and the stock shot up very quickly. I waited until my system gave the short signal and in total sissy mode I waited to see if it would move beyond and above the signal price which it did. I was impressed with the system though as it gave a signal very near the top of the move. I held huge spreads between my offers and only three offers were lifted. The price then fell and fell fast and I believe I heard that the stock was being halted. (I think perhaps it was another stock but I am as of this post still not sure. I was trading on Island and SY I believe is traded on the NYSE). I am unsure because usually when I am trading a stock that is halted I see the halt before it is announced. I see that SY is still trading and decide to cover quickly which I did and it still did not stop trading. I am now sweating bullets worried about my original shorts getting busted and end up owning this stock at a price way above normal if the buyout turns into a false rumor. I once again here the stock (again I believed it was SY at the time of trading but have serious doubts now). I then hear the stock is trading again and I started to short with a scalping attitude and try to squeeze more out of SY. The in after hours trading I was trading both long and short and then the strangest thing happened. I am net long SY and over the squawk it is announced that the buyout is confirmed and the price is at 65 and I am net long a little higher than 63 but the price did NOT move higher and actually started moving down. My reaction went from buying up a few more hundred to being worried that I was somehow making a mistake. SY traded around the low 63s for a while and I really wanted to just buy buy buy thinking it should go to 64.50ish for a buyout price of 65. After sitting in a range of about 63 to about 63.50 I started to get worried that I was missing something and I closed out for a gain of about 150 but just below 64. as the price moved to lift my offers it then shot up to way above 64 again and it turned out I was correct about the price moving higher but I have no idea why it didnât shoot up quickly and before or at the time I heard the confirmation. What I should have done was buy up as much as I could without taking on to much risk and basically load the boat but I âsissyedâ out on that one too. Just no doubt about it that reading all the money lost from Thursday had me spooked (maybe others too and thatâs why it acted the way it did) Overall the day was great and beating yesterday means today was either the best day of the year or very near the best day. This is shaping up to be the best week of the year. Still short BP puts, GS put and covered C stock as well as short one 30yr bond futs 119 option that in close to being even after being green for the first time today in about a week. Love time decay. Another day of being on my A game even with leaving a lot on the table with SY. SY B8, plus after hours trading + 816 SPY + 2 RIG via options trendline break stopped out + 3 NAV + 4 MS + 3 stopped out DIS +45 trend following trade CSTR B8 + 639 I think a bunch of us in the chat made some coin on this one CREE â 83 CREE â 77 one trade was long and one was short via buying options both ways CAGC + 28 BP + 22 still have the naked puts that keep my head held under water. I will be very glad when some good news comes out and this stock makes it pop higher BIDU gapup + 27 ANV gapup after B8+ + 1086 + 2519
Another great day to add to a great week so far Lots of trades and the one that was a loser I didnât allow to turn into a big loser. NFLX was crazy and I tried to trade it but I refused to trade the stock because I knew that the price would limit what I could do in terms of buying power so I stuck with options which lowered my risk (I was buying and shorting) but the spreads are wide and the lack of being able to make a market along with the cancel fees really puts a person at a disadvantage so I have to mitigate that with being highly selective. AFAM + 9 AGQ + 127 BAX + 12 BP + 14 CRUS + 303 CSTR + 561 GERN â 118 HAUP + This was my first pump and dump short. It will be interesting to see how this one goes. I reshorted it at the end of extended trading. TDC + 65 WFMI + 63 MED + 92 no shares to short so I used options The gain was pretty good considering I was working with 70 cent options and small size NFLX May 125C + 337 NFLX May 115P + 265 + 1993
Bob, Congrats. But you may want to put the original dates of the posts at the top or something. Some may have a hard time thinking you did that well in those stocks on a Sunday night. Very nicely done though. Congrats again.
Hi Badger and thanks. You have a good point and I will try to do that. To be clear I was trading the 30yr bond fut options Sunday night. Thanks and have a great weekend Robert
Tough day today 5/14/10 I forgot the rule about it is not enough to be right you also have to have timing. I was in great shape with HAUP and the pump and dump with that until IB ran out of shares (in fairness I did not check it again today before shorting because had I noticed that the shares available was small I would have had to pass on it). Then I traded TIVO and started out great but some how had put it in my head that the price would come back to or near the daily 200MA as âusuallyâ a stock will not punch through on the first try and with as far as TIVO went I was feeling pretty good about a retracement to the 11.90ish price. I was somewhat right as I traded it and had a very nice gain but as it moved down further I started shorting more and fading it until I gave back my gain and took a big hit. I then went to plan B and started trading around the NBBO and that brought my average down but rather slow as I was not putting on a lot of size in the trades again with the thought that it would bounce back hard which of course it never did. I am still short HAUP as that is a total dog and there was confirmation with the selling pressure being larger than the buying pressure today and still very short with TIVO. I added a little to my C and cut loose one of the BP put options that I wrote and was planning on rolling over until my focus went to TIVO. I will most likely cover the other May option put and rollover it to a June put on Monday. In the same process I did also buy small BP and wrote a call against it as the volume of puts being traded along with the spread made the covered call a better choice than just a naked put. So all around a tough day as I am having to hold HAUP longer than I would otherwise have to if I had been able to fade the open as it was a perfect opening fade for me. Had I not done the research on it and figured out there is nothing behind the curtain I would have had to cover at a loss (of course I would not have traded it to begin with also) but at least all I need is to wait it out (along with the pain in the process) and this should see sub $3 shortly. Maybe IB will get some shares to short for Monday and if there is another chance I will short more. Today took a lot of this weeks gain away but some education gains are with me for the future as well so it is not all bad. BP May 52.50P â 479 HAUP â 419 TIVO â 2966 - 3855