/ES futures cooperate (so I closed them out); earnings were not the whole thing, it turns out

Just when you think the /ES futures will go up forever, Mr. Trump steps in to knock them down:

Trade wars "good and easy to win?" Not so much

This returned volatility to the /ES futures and the market as a whole:

Back to the earnings discussion ... I was planning to do a lot more earnings trading, but I looked at the ones available two weeks ago and planned out my day on that Monday (April 29, I think it was) ... and even if I'd won them all I'd have made like $170 or so ... while risking at least $500 on every trade. So one loss could kill the whole day.

I went back and watched the "rising star" I had seen talking about this and I had missed 1/2 the discussion ... he said he wasn't trading just earnings but "moving toward indexes" ... sheesh.

I've had good success trading SPX butterflies in the past, so going smaller this time I've been using SPY, IWM and QQQ ... all with one-lot butterflies.

With the pop in volatility we got, this makes a huge difference in the credit we get for this butterfly trade:

              May 24                 June 7

QQQ        $5.12                  $8.46            +65.2%
IWM        $4.15                  $7.18            +73.0%
SPY         $5.70                  $11.37          +99.4%

Total risk on the SPY trade is about $1200, so if we take 1/4 of this credit, that's a 23% return ... in about 8 days (typically ... if we put these on with around 30 DTE, then 1/4 of the credit expires in about 1/4 of that time) ...

I actually closed the first set of these for small losses $100-$200 each, with about 15 days left in them ... Tastytrade's research shows that this is better than hanging on to see if such a trade will come back, and in this case the increased volatility seems to fully justify that.

I also am trading some other volatile underlyings:

More next week ...