Friday, June 7, 2019

A deeply annoying week made worse by a couple of mistakes I made

The only good thing I can say about this past week is that I wasn't short S&P futures:

Although this move wasn't kind to my neutral trades, of course ... I am short the 2870 SPX call expiring July 3, so I have hope of that trade coming back into profitability and bringing my butterflies (in SPY and QQQ -- IWM is OK) back with it ..

The two mistakes I made this week to exacerbate things were both earnings-related. First:

I meant to trade Salesforce (CRM) for its earnings after the Tuesday close, but instead I traded Chipotle (CMG) ... expiring today, June 7.

I noticed this the next morning, of course, and figured: what the heck, even though I gave up 4-day trades it should still work, right? Wrong:

Finally, Beyond Meat had earnings and I made two mistakes on this one. I forgot again that anything can happen any time and made the mistake I've been most prone to "it couldn't go up from here, right?" In this case, the money-losing stock market darling of late.

It turns out nothing I did would have worked, but I didn't even sell both sides ... just the short call spread, just outside the $12 expected move. Instead it went up $20 and then $30 ... And I was taking too much risk, almost $900 ... actually got out for about a $730 loss on this one:



Anyway, Trump announced late today what the market already figured out: no extra Mexican tariffs on Monday. But I hope that's a "sell the news" indicator:

More next week ...

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