NDX trade wins AGAIN ... unfortunately now only available once per month

I exaggerated in my post from a couple of weeks ago: Nasdaq hasn't completely killed the golden goose, just 3/4 or 4/5 of it ...

The a.m. settlelment is still available Expiration Weeks (for the monthly options only) and Tastyworks even has a lovely UI clue available on this now:

So I put this on just before 10a.m. Thursday as normal and got from $1.35 to $1.77 in credit,
which is 15.6% to 21.5% ... I have been refusing to watch the /NQ futures to keep from being agitated when there's nothing whatever to be done about this trade once the Thursday session closes. (Assuming you don't want to try and buy or sell enough /NQ futures to cover the potential loss ... I considered this in a previous post, but I decided the trade was profitable enough without messing with this.)

But I couldn't resist peeking as I had the biggest trade of this type I've had on since I started using the Kelly Criterion: 25% of the account was at risk. The /NQ futures were above the NDX short call strike all night and into the morning and I thought the trade was dead, dead, dead ... but not so. The NDS (settlement price) was 6779.91. Whew.

So that's it for snooping /NQ ... This is 14 for 15 that I watched this or traded it, which is a 93.33% win rate ...

I need to find another one of these for the other 3 or 4 weeks of the month, so with that in mind I signed up for 6 more months of Quantgo, the data provider that provides access to a reasonable timeframe of data access for a not-awful price ($150/month for the 1-minute trade data that should be all I need to do research on other trades.)

One top candidate I'm going to be looking at: UVXY, a leveraged volativity ETF.

The Dumb Way of using Volatility one came out during the little down move we had early this month:

                RIP XIV and SVXY

These two (XIV was an ETN and SVXY an ETF) were short the front month /VX futures while being long the back month, which in some situations (like early this month) ... can cause the front month to skyrocket while the back month stays put. This is what apparently happened, because XIV went completely under (plug pulled by Credit Suisse, its underwriter for this ETN) ... and SVXY stayed in supposedly just because they didn't "rebalance" when they were supposed to be instead waited for the market to calm down.

That's the dumb way; the reasonable way that would have worked fabulously the last few years would have been just to sell a limited-risk call spread on UVXY (or buy one of the short ones) ... this certainly won the majority of the time the last 5 years, but I want to see exactly how often and how it behaves through weird periods like early this month and January 2016 ... does it lose 2 weeks in a row or more?

I'll have answers on this shortly .... more next week!