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Thursday,
Since my options positions are based on stocks and we all know what happend to the last couple of days,
my positions got killed.. Wiped my gains and into negative territory. Maybe I just don't have what it takes to make it in positional options since I've been losing like this for three years. It just takes one or two days of a market drop to gap all the underlyings. I might survive a week or two of nerve-wracking drawdowns but by expiration the losers almost always outweigh the nice winners.
IWM hit the most. Now it's just a directional loser like a plain stock play. "Wishing" and "hoping" situation, not good. I added another calendar to ADSK in attempt to adjust this loser. ASYS already adjusted but it's contribution to overall p/l is minimal. DIA in danger of becoming a loser. I haven't adjusted it yet.
TBT trade not working out. At the mercy of the overall market. This could just be a "small bar", before another drop. Maybe I should have reacted faster on adjustments. There are only so many adjustments that can be made before expiration and before too many adjustments negate any profit to be made where it just becomes "rolling out" on losing trades.
If there's a bright side, looking at the overall portfolio as a single graph, by August options expiration, the overall could end up positive if the market doesn't continue to slide.
The pain continues..... I stopped out of TBT for about a big loss. That's what I get for listening to another "newsletter recommendation" again, haha. I adjusted IWM, DIA and SPY. IWM was the worst. It really felt like I was just rolling out these spreads. Taking them off and putting them back on. DIA and SPY I adjusted at the right time according to the "rules" just before the p/l's for those went majorly negative. IWM, I'd waited too late. I guess the one thing I learned is to watch the chart for each underlying. Don't be too complacent and be aware of sudden major changes to the daily candle price action. Also better to put on the spreads no longer than 30 days as things can change and too much capital is spent adjusting. What about when there are more than 30 days? Maybe I'll try some gamma scalping (which I'm just learning)..We'll see.
I've attached "before" and "after" graphs of SPY, DIA, and IWM so one can see before adjustments and after.
Then again, the hope of the overall portfolio p/l is that by expiration the losses could be regained and hopefully turning out at least break even for the month.
Thanks for the question. Nope I can only do one or two of the three with my limited live funds. Actually I don't plan to trade stock. Those "stock" trades are singular option calls and puts intraday on stocks which requires less margin than buying thousands of shares of the underlying. I had tried option spreads a few years before but failed and had given up. After going through a cheap option spread video course ($150) earlier this year, I've been giving it another try on practice. Mainly I want to journal this and see if this works or all that education and mentoring on option spreads advertised on the CBOE.com and elsewhere is bunk. A member on another forum told me he makes a living doing option spreads and watching the greeks, so I'm trying to see for myself.
Still at the mercy of the "crisis" markets. Adjusted EEM, IWM, SPY, DIA. Again, I felt like I was just rolling DIA and SPY , iron condors around. Would have been better to put an initial trade starting this week or late last week. But of course we have the recent bout of fear and volatility..
Had a single lucky break on CRUS. I was going to start a regular calendar trying to capture a few days change in vega since I saw a good volatility skew on the options offered. In 20 minutes , I was able to see the calendar for a nice 20% profit! Sometimes option prices can suddenly change.
I had Shadow Trader chat room open at the start. And the host alerted us "heads up!" to OPEN and RIMM pop ups. Why he chose OPEN someone asked? Because OPEN was oversold and he was waiting for shorts to cover and take their profits. Sometimes these TOS chat rooms actually help one make money, hmm..
SPY and EEM was in slightly negative territory before I adjusted. But had lost the previous week's profits already. Took a bunch of calendars off and losing more due to the spread. In a live account on TOS , I would expect to lose more due to the spread and market makers, usually about .1 to .5 cents more.
Overall portfolio shows a nice theta of +$1796 per day estimated. Assuming underlying price for all those ongoing spreads stays the same or close enough. We'll see. Everyone knows the world markets are teetering with fear and uncertainty at the moment...
Too late! Should have gone for an emergency landing yesterday. Ended up a total crash and burn.
All the hedging and spreads in the world couldn't stop the -512 Dow loss along with the Nasdaq and S&P.
Maybe I should have some consolation that the news suspected a lot of the last bout of selling were poorly
performing hedge funds covering their margin calls so I wasn't alone in my demo trading compared to the real world. I've run this paper account for more than 2 years. Once I doubled it, then lost 25%. then up and down in the months of March and April. Now with today, I'm back to the beginning, 100% at the starting paper account.
I felt like throwing in the towel of this option spread thing. I'm tempted to declare it's all bunk. Then I think I could have gone flat earlier and realize the last two weeks isn't the time for spreads and look to trade a different way.
Hi Mike. If I had a track record of doing really well with these option spreads and had 200 to 300k starting, I probably would have tried it live, discounting these current black swan days. If I was starting out live now doing this I probably couldn't do more than 1 to 10 option contracts on each spread as my live account is far smaller, i.e. 1/10th of what I'm doing here. But yes, I probably would have traded this way if I was comfortable enough to go live, and I would still probably be margin called or busted my account if it turned out like this. It seems options trading isn't all that different from stock picking.. I had already tried three years of shorting puts and covered calls which has not worked out either. I actually started doing a few spreads when I first started trading almost four years ago. (an "Optionetics" book). When I lost my initial funding, I gave it up on spreads. Now I'm trying to see what makes adjusting spreads tick on demo. Supposedly CBOE.com and mentoring services there charge $6k to mentor you on how to "adjust" "spreads" for "consistent monthly income". Someone who said he makes a living doing this recommended I spare no expense and do the mentoring as he did. I instead went the cheaper route and paid $179 for a video course: Trade Stocks and Options as a Business Elite trader forum has a few journals by folks who purportedly do live trading on thousands of shares of equities. There is a guy named Neke who did massive single options puts and calls. A few make it and say they start their own funds and disappear from the forum. Others crash and lose tens or hundreds of thousands.
Truly embarrassing. Yesterday's total: -17115 Nothing was working. Only gold and treasury bonds were staying afloat. cnbc reporting suggested the massive continuing downturn was due not just to fear but also hedge funds getting margin called and liquidating positions. Also "long-short" hedge funds. Which in some small way were my option spreads which are somewhat hedged positions, but it only works up to a point..
I can't really adjust them anymore. It's getting closer to August options expiration. What I will do is see these positions through. Then I'll start over with a new account ( call it a busted account and starting over) and try some different option spread strategies. For one, not holding them that long until expiration. Or something else entirely. This has mostly been experimentation and practice.
