Fabulous NDX trade not so fabulous (and an adjustment to strategy); Technical Analysis bye; Small Exchange one more feature

As regular readers of this blog know, the "NDX a.m. settlement" trade works 91.7% of the time (that's 12 of 13)  ...

Unfortunately this past week was one of the losing weeks:

Look at the peak on January 18 ...

To add confusion, the CBOE even now (5 days later) has apparently not released the January number for NDS, the settlement value that the trade value is based on.

But Tastyworks has the formula, I presume, so I got the bad news Saturday a.m.

I've been using this trade this way for over a year, weekly back when it was available every week then every month without fail. I had had trouble getting the trade filled too much later than 10am Pactific, so I had been executing it at 9:45 am ...

This time, though, NDX continued straight up all day; I was short the 6740 calls (80 points wide), but the NDS close was 6782.something. That's over a 50% loss for this trade. Yikes!

But I have been also managing this $2000 account and decided to try a one-lot (10 points wide) just before expiration for that. Executed immediately!

This one was short the 6760 call, so that would have made the trade I put on only about 1/2 the loss: 25% or so. (100% loss for this one, unfortunately, since I was just using 10-wide strikes on this small account. *sigh*)

So from now on I'm going to put this trade on just before 1pm Pacific ...

This really messed up some nice results I was showing: up 38% is now +1% ... up 40% now down 16-20%. Sheesh.

Technical Analysis: Bye!

As for technical analysis: I give up. Tim Knight first said 2603 was the spot where the /ES futures should stop. Then that broke through and said it was really 2626 ... Not useful for the way I trade, even though it's come back sharply since the latest Trump China thing turned out to be fake.

One Other Feature of The Small Exchange I'm Visualizing

I wrote last week about Sosnoff and company's latest organization The Small Exchange.

One other feature that I want: weekly (or better! 3x/week!) on all products. Since Sosnoff and company invented weekly options back in the day (they say), this seems like a sure thing.

This is something I can use: to go along with the still-Fabulous NDX trade once per month, an array of Small Futures spreads every week ... that should work!

More in just a few days ...