Saturday, February 2, 2019

First week of trading earnings: insights and lessons learned

I traded several earnings announcements this past week, including:

Overall I just about broke even, though my idea of using butterflies didn't work as well as I had hoped.

They just aren't wide enough; I can get much wider with Iron Condors or strangles (should I decide to try this undefined-risk trade ...)

Also their prices didn't seem to collapse as fast as the widely out-of-the-money options ... I had hoped that they would just be at least 15 or 20 percent lower priced on or near the opening, but that was too rare. I wound up just taking whatever small profit was there as soon as the market opened on these butterflies.

Also, the .16 delta Iron Condor for the high-priced AMZN was plenty profitable: I risked $350 to make $150 ... of which I took only $75, 6 minutes after the opening on Thursday ... that's over a 20 per cent return.

And I goofed and traded Paccar (PCAR) even though it doesn't have weekly options! I closed the position I had in my own account for a small loss but let this run in some other accounts I'm trading to see if I can get out for a profit early next week ...

Next week: GOOGL, CMG and CBOE, among others and I'll try applying these lessons to make a profit ...

I'll report back at week's end ...

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