A tough week ... Sosnoff proved right again and rolling clarified

I tried Amazon for the Monday-Friday trade, and by Wednesday it looked dead:

But I was short the 1697.5 calls, and it settled back between 1683 (where it closed on Friday) and 1690 after Thursday. So it paid off for full profit.

SPX wasn't so good:

It went straight up 40 points ... pulling back a little on Thursday before bouncing back up to the top on Friday.

I'm short the 2785 calls for Monday expiration, so right now it looks a little too exciting ...

As for the question I had last week about rolling: Tom Sosnoff recommended in email that I stick with wider strikes, but I thought I could narrow the strikes if I intended to roll losing trades.

Wrong! It's much easier to roll for a credit with wider strikes, and much easier to get further away from the money on the roll.

I'm actually wondering about the value of rolling at all with wide strikes ... Shouldn't I just take the (small) losses and move on? I can still roll anything that looks like it's going to lose big, and will have to roll anything that isn't cash-settled (as AMZN this past week was looking to lose I got a bunch of emails from Tastyworks saying they might have to take action to close the trade ... I assured them I was watching! and it worked out anyway ...)

But let's look at the profitability of the SPX trade without rolling (and with 30-wide wings) ... currently it's something like 20 wins, 4 losses: 83.33% ... and the wins average probably 6% of the amount risked, losses average maybe 25% ... Monte carlo results with these parameters & risking 20% of the account on each trade ... is not good enough (mean up not quite 100% over about 3 years) ...

But: (1) volatility is back to the bottom so I should be making more than 6% when it returns and (2) I've only been running this system for several weeks and still easily could be better than 90% win and (3) there are some other trades that are part of the deal, notably the Fabulous Almost Always works NDX a.m. settled one, coming up again this coming week ...

And finally: I tried scalping /ES futures for the first time starting Friday, and so far so good ... up several hundred dollars on a 1-lot of several little scalps.

Tomorrow I'm going to try the Amazon trade again ... fingers crossed!