Swing and a miss this week. I was hoping to get out of some positions but it didn’t happen. I also traded off my phone today so I didn’t have any cost basis numbers in front of me. But I didn’t just wing it, that's for amateurs. I relied on the philosophy of the great Robert Boucher Jr. who once said; “ ..I like school. And I like football. And I’m going to keep doing them both because they make me feel good.” Okay, that might be a line from The Waterboy, but I still think it's a valid argument. Sure, I may have undercut HIMS and its strike is a few hundred dollars underwater. But I’ll sort that out later. $448.24 in Premium today. SQ currently ITM $1242.56 (15.01%) return locked in, probably can get that up to 20% if the price holds out. DG and BP are slightly positive around 0.5%, HIMS -$418.03 (-19%) strike is -$226.51 (-9.5%). I could try to adjust it Monday, but I’m just going to see what happens. Receipts are below. These four day work weeks are rough, so this is all I got for ya.
Okay, I made up another chart for you guys. Let's look at my HIMS position and how it's shaking out. Purple is Cost Basis, White is Strike Price, Green is Total Cost. Cost basis was determined by going week to week and getting P/L on Fridays and not after each option roll to make it easy for me. The trade is in a Schwab account so it's simple to pull information this way. There is a lot going on in this trade so I’ll break down what's going on. I started this trade on 6/24 with 2 Put Options. On 7/19 I let one Option get assigned at $21.50 and rolled the other and had an option on both sides. I’m not going to do this in the future, it just made things more complicated on the spreadsheet side. After I was partly assigned I had a chunk of Equity built up for my cost basis. You can see I was also buying shares when it was low, and if you think that doesn’t make any sense, or “Losers average losers” flashes in your mind, then I feel you. It doesn’t add anything to the HIMS trade but it is a strategy I’ll employ on my dividend positions. I just didn’t have any dividend position to play with in August. The only change I will make is waiting for a turn around and placing a buy order just below my cost basis. As it sits the average of the 14 extra shares was $16.20 and I don’t think it would have been that much of a difference to put buy orders under my cost basis. So that's a good thing out of this trade. The Call position actually was set for January in Sept. the Put position was set for January in Oct. so it was locked up and I just sat on it for a few weeks until I closed out of the Put side. Instead of trying to square the circle on my spreadsheet I decided to focus on Calls more. The math is better, I don’t have to worry about putting money on the trade as prices rise. I just like it better when my position size isn’t variable. So that brings everything up to date, I rolled back the call side to try and get an exit on the jump last week but it fizzled and now it's underwater. So that brings up the question of whether it was a good idea to give back all my premium plus another $300 something to try and catch the spike in price. I’m going to say yes, the math work. I would have exited with over 20% profit, which is my target for a year from a position I’ve had for 5 months. I don't have a reason not to try and do that. I’m going to label this one Good Trade, Bad Result. It is the most interesting trade I got right now, so at least it gives me something to talk about. Below is everything else going on. Schwab doesn't give me a nice weekly graph so I pulled from my performance page.
This is what I was looking like premarket, about $65 down from the last time I posted it. $11,496 (16.62%). The numbers from the Robinhood IRA are included, just not pictured. That account doesn’t have a position right now, I’m doing something different with it that I’ll talk about in a bit. I don’t have much going on today. I rolled SQ to the 12/27 $84 for $137.94. At $84 my profit is $1483.53 (17.92%) not bad, but I won’t be getting to 20% by the end of the year. I also rolled out HOOD to 1/17 $29 for $33.65. At $29 I’m sitting on $305.01 (12.70%). Only being 5 or 6 weeks into this HOOD trade it’s looking good, I’ll work on getting the chart drawn up when I have time. Good news though, I started day trading. I heard it's all the rage, all the kids are talking about it. I went with a simple MACD strategy. I’m going long on crosses below the zero line. Super simple, I can trade it off my phone if I wanted to, which was something I wanted to be able to do. It works well enough to do what I want to do, and Tradingview has a nice little MACD strategy that will mark the crosses on the chart. It's all crosses, and I have no idea how to adjust it, but it saves me from having to watch the MACD lines when I know my setup is coming up; sometimes those numbers are hard to read. Anyway, I took a trade right at the market open on CLSK. I bought 10 shares at $14.83. This didn’t follow the MACD strategy at all, it was already above the zero line, but I thought it might run. It didn’t so I set a Limit Sell for $15 and moved on. I went through and made my trades on SQ and HOOD and completely missed the middle trade. Bought 10 more shares at $13.90 and sold them at $14.25. I set that based on a trend line guesstimate that it wasn’t going to get much higher than $14.30 and I'm not even sure it made it back that far before it pulled back again. In and out in a few minutes and I made $3.54 (2.54%). The pullbacks below the zero line were getting smaller so I stopped for the day. Below are the Receipts . So what’s going on? I am legitimately working on my day trading; got to fit in around here. But I still think it's gambling so I plan on rescuing the account with my option strategy should day trading not work out. So I’m not going to run a stop loss and I picked CLSK just because it was priced low enough that I could do this in the small Robinhood IRA, which is about $1900. I thought 10 shares was a good balance of trying to day trade and not being too far away from being able to rescue it. 10 bad trades and its options time. I have to work around PDT rules, but that’s just going to keep me from over trading. I do have a Take Profit in at $15 which would be 1% on that bad trade just in case it rises before I come back to trade again.
You’re not gambling. If you walk into Cosmo and drop a buck in the dollar slots you’re amusing yourself. Same here. You’re not risking anything so you’re content to HUP. Develop an edge or remain a hobbyist/beta boy (index beta in shares) and live and die by ETF performance + 300 beeps better than SPX in a declining market.
Slots is a bad example, what about blackjack? You can have a edge by knowing the statistical advantage of your pair vs what the dealer is showing. you can even be a professional blackjack player if you can consistently maintain your edge. That doesn't mean its not gambling. And you can't convince me blackjack and day trading are that much different. And while your here did you know only 13% of traders are profitable after 5 years? I don't know if that's just day trading or all traders, but the numbers for all traders can't be that much different. If that's true I'm 12 months away from being a top 10% trader. I'm going to take some liberty with the 10% but I'm better than break even so that's got to be worth a couple percent. Isn't that fun? We're both in the top 10% of traders. I saw a little graphic somewhere, I couldn't find it with a quick google. So maybe I made that up, I got 13% from somewhere though.
"You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run"
Well…at least I have that going for me. I thought I was just getting by with charm and good looks, but turns out there’s an edge in there somewhere.I really dodged a bullet there; I don’t have time to develop one to be honest. I rolled HIMS for $50.64 and at a $22 strike I’m still down $66.84 (2.81%) but that’s better than -9.5% it was sitting at so I’ll keep bumping it in that direction. I also rolled DG for $59.94. I kept at $77 instead of being more aggressive because earnings are in 2 weeks and I’d like to not have an option on in case it jumps. The $77 strike would give me a profit of $217.17 (2.69%) My open trade in CLSK from Wednesday hit its target on Thursday morning. That was $0.17 a share 1.1% Adding that to Wednesday’s total would be $5.24. In my mind I wanted a $4 a day strategy and it worked out. Today I’ve been watching but mostly sitting on my hands. The signal line was above 0 except for the first signal which was from yesterday and I didn’t want to jump in like Wednesday. It would’ve worked out., and the subsequent trades also would have gotten $0.20. If that keeps happening I’ll adjust my strategy to take those. I took the 3rd signal of the day (4th on chart) since the signal line did drop below the 0 line and set Sell Limit for $0.20. I don’t have high hopes for that one, but I can work on other aspects of the strategy if I get another signal. So I’ll watch it for a bit, but I want to do other stuff today too so that might be all for me today.
And I am out. $2.10 (1.5%) I’m done for today. I’m not waiting around for the signal line to drop below 0 and I’m not going to adjust my strategy to take trades above the zero line yet. Day Trading Week 1: 3 trades, $7.34 profit. Average: $2.44/trade Target: 4 trades, $8 profit Target Avg. $2/trade
Okay, I’m really done this time. I lost my pencil in the garage and came in to grab one off my desk. It posted a signal a few minutes before that but the price hadn’t moved. I didn’t think it was a strong signal, but the other trade was worse so I didn’t have a good reason not to take it. That gave me my 4 trades, $9.34 in profit, and an average of $2.33/trade