Excellent week ... with one glaring exception

Butterflies are beautiful ...

and profitable!

I closed profitable trades on in LYFT (again), AMZN and TSLA ...

I put on small butterfly trades in each of SPY, IWM and QQQ ... SPY and IWM each were closed out for their expected 25% of the initial credit profit within 7 days of entry of the trade. QQQ didn't quite make that, but I closed it out for a smaller profit to free up buying power for the "fabulous NDX trade" I've written about so often here.

And that turned out to be the glaring exception ... I was short the 7530 put (long the 7450 -- 80 points wide) and the NDX settlement this morning was 7511.94, damn it ... I got a $750 credit but lost then $1806 ... so net loss $1056 ... but since the possible loss was $7250, not too bad (only 14.56% of the amount I could have lost).

Two nuances of the NDX trade:

• At low volatility (like today) the short strikes aren't nearly as wide as they are as when volatility is higher.
• I put this one on just before 10am again, the way I had done consistently until the big loss several months ago. This one wasn't all the same: no monotonic up move all day, in fact down from 7600 or so when I put the trade on to 7580 at Thursday's close ...  and if I'd waited until then I'd probably been short the 7510 puts and made full profit.  I guess I'll have to move the trade time up nearer the close for next time ...

The 7511 settlement value was a shock, but showed weakness that further erupted Friday in the Nasdaq:

I'm going to put on the 3 butterflies again Monday a.m. ... More next week!