Jay Powell rescues my long /ES position

I've been trading for almost 10 years now, and the extreme overreaction of the market to statements by the Federal Reserve (both up and down) ... has continually amazed me.

Today it was this guy again:

"Maybe we don't have to raise interest rates quite that quickly if the market is in the tank ..."

And so today:

This worked out for me, this time ... I was kind of expecting such a move based on settlement of the ongoing government shutdown, but no such luck on that:

Trump blames Democrats for shutdown: blah, blah, blah

I made the expected 50% on an /ES strangle, and I cashed out my long /ES position (20 points too early, it turned out) ... but that's OK.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I've been looking for an alternative to the "fabulous NDX trade" that was available every week but now occurs only once per month. I was relying on it exclusively until this change ...

But looking at the results of three different accounts I'm trading makes me think I don't need much to go with the NDX:

• My personal account since 5/17/2018: down 5% (due to experiments and stupid mistakes)
• Another account I'm trading for a guy, doing less experimenting with: +37% since 2/26/2018
• a couple of small accounts (starting with $5500 each or so 7/24/2018 and 8/10/2018: up 40% or so on average

So: can I just rely on the NDX trade and do just a few one-lot trades of miscellaneous types and get these kinds of results going straight on up?

One small test I'm running while waiting for the next NDX in a couple of weeks is with the "tastytrade method": at 45 DTE (Days Til' Expiration) put on your particular trade (Iron condor or Strangle) and hold until you are up 50% of the credit you got at the beginning. This worked great over this past crazily volatile few weeks, with CMG and TSLA dipping way low past the max loss point then coming back to 50% profit for TSLA and almost there for CMG... I reloaded TSLA for a shorter trade, just ahead of earnings ...

I think next week at least on my own account, I'm going to try the 4-day QQQ again (taking 40% if I can get it) ... but just a one-lot max loss of less than $900.

We'll see what next week brings ...