Quiet week as market reaches new highs .... more on your $150000 account

The market went up to record highs again this week, but slowly enough in most cases to not mess up the neutral trades I have on.

The one exception is Netflix, which bounced back too strongly from its earnings miss:

My short call strike for NFLX is 335, so I also put on a debit call spread this a.m.:

Long the 330 call and short the 335, for $265 ... meaning that if NFLX is at or above $335 on August 2 when this expires, I make $235.

This covers most of what I can lose on the NFLX Iron Condor I have going, and I can actually do this again the following week if conditions seem favorable (i.e. if NFLX continues up ...)

Now, back your $150000 retirement account ... since you didn't pull the trigger on this immediately you didn't suffer the $5000 (for you $50000!) loss from last week ... instead you'd have had a much smaller loss, as I would have taken 1/2 the risk and diversified over 3 trades:

• NDX would lose 100% of what was risked, as last week's trade lost about 80% because of its very wide strikes
• SPX would break even or lose small, maybe 15% of the amount at risk at most
• RUT does what it's supposed to do: expires worthless for full profit, probably 10% or so

So your loss would have been maybe $7000 .. probably just $6000 for the week because of other profitable trades that week. So you'd have gone from $158000 to $152000.

Once again, this offer is just for one lucky individual willing to try this ... let me know if you're interested and we can get going this week ... or you can wait and watch for a few more weeks, understandably ... More next week!

I'm demoting the "fabulous NDX trade" after this week ...

I had a great run with the NDX a.m. settlement over the last 15 months or so, but after yesterday:

I put the trade on (just slightly wider than 1 standard deviation) just before 10a.m. when it seemed to be going nowhere, but then:

The market went up like a rocket after this Federal Reserve vice chairman Richard Clarida said something that looked "dovish" to the markets about an interest rate cut the end of July ...

Other officials tried to "walk back" the remarks saying that this stuff was based on 20 years of research and not pointing toward the July 30/31 next Fed meeting ... but too late for me!

The NDX a.m. settlement is marked when all 103 underlying Nasdaq 100 stocks open on Friday a.m. ... I knew it looked pretty bad looking at the /NQ futures price, but I have seen anomalously low settlement prices (the symbol for this is XQO these days) sometimes and so had my fingers crossed ... 

No good. XQO price Friday was 7955.76, so since I was short the 7900 call and got $542 of credit .... that's a $5007.24 loss ... out of a possible $7420 or so .... harrumph.

I won at least 12 or 13 of these in a row of these last year, just mechanically putting them on at 9:45 a.m. ... but I can't stand it any more.

The "trade small, trade often" technique I've been using for everything else has been working so well, I'm going to keep this trade but with the following restrictions:

• I'm going to put on not just NDX but also SPX and RUT a.m. settlements
• I'm going to risk a max of 25% of the account on all 3 combined

I had been risking up to 50% on just the NDX trade ... while it was working this was great, but this was beyond terrible timing ...

One little good thing that happened: BIDU came off on Friday for its 50% profit. Wheeeee! :-)

Back on the horse Monday with more trade small ... including a few earnings, I guess ...

Can you retire on $150,000? Here's an example to consider

One good thing this week: I closed out the SPX trade I had on with the short 3000 call for a profit before the latest crazy up move:

The two SPX trades I have on now are short the 3050 and 3060 calls a couple of weeks from now, which should be safe ...

On to today's topic: retirement on $150,000. My example account had a bit over $14000 in it as of 6/23/2019, so let's use that and assume 10x of a balance in that account ... $14433.06 -> $144330.60 ... then at the close Friday, balance was $15421.78 -> $154217.80   ... up 6.4%, or not quite $10000 in your theoretical retirement account ... in the last 3 weeks.

Full disclosure: it won't be quite 10X as you have to pay more commissions with a bigger account ... but not much more with the brokerages I know of. Commission prices have crashed in recent years, so a frequent trading strategy is feasible in a way it wasn't before.

I am looking for one or two people willing to try this, with around $150,000 to $200,000 to start ... I will trade such an account for 5 years with no charge just to use as a demo account for some advertising I'm doing.

Take a look at the page here for details and contact information.

Thanks and have a good week! (Enjoy the unrelated dog photo!)

TSTO week 2 and trading plan comes into focus: (+3.9% this week)

The trades I put on last week started to come off for profit this week ... I had a couple of losers including CSCO and SPX (more about the latter below), but widely diversified the results still held up well.

As for SPX and its futures equivalent /ES: I've lost more money being short these two than I really want to count, so I'm giving up on this and just going completely neutral. Most recently I said to myself "it really won't reach 2980, will it?" And ...

The /ES futures price was 3003 when I looked at it Thursday night ...

The latest one of these I have on, I sobered up ... I'm short the 3050 call, expiring July 24. Should work! I also got lucky (so far) on one expiring July 22: short the 3000 call ... fingers crossed on that one that the jobs report today took a little wind out of the silly market's sails, finally.

So the trading plan from here:

A widely diversified set of trades for most of the month, taken primarily from the Tastytrade list ... I'm going to avoid earnings for these trades, set 21-30 DTE  ... 21 for iron condors, 30ish for butterflies ... so far I'm putting on butterflies just on the indices IWM, SPY, QQQ and TLT ...
If I run out of earnings-avoiding stocks, I can double up on the indices as SPY and SPX have expirations Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week.

During "earnings season" (coming up again in force shortly) I plan to put on earnings trades (defined-risk only in customer accounts) on the nearest-expiring weeklies, on higher-priced volatile stocks only ...

Last but not least, I will put on the "fabulous NDX trade" (1 standard deviation NDX iron condor on Thursday just before it expires on the print of XQO early Friday a.m.) once per month (which is all
 it's available these days ...)

More next week ... I'm very optimistic about this plan and wish I'd tried this sooner!

TSTO week 1 up 1.9%: so far, so good!

Tom Sosnoff and company have been promoting "trade small, trade often" for years ... I've never really tried it but put it in this past week to see if I can smooth out the volatility of returns one of my clients has been getting ....

I have currently these positions:

I'm using 21-30 days until expiration for these, so they expire July 10-19. I'm taking maximum of 1/2 the credit I get for Iron Condors and 25% for butterflies (currently IWM and QQQ) ...

Also I will keep trading the fabulous NDX trade (using observation and intuition deciding what time of day to put it on) and some earnings trades ...

The only position that went "in the money" when it wasn't supposed to (IWM and QQQ butterflies are inherently "in the money" as they have a short straddle at their core) was CSCO:

I am short the 54.5 put, so as you can see that was ITM on Friday during the day.

I'll probably "roll this one out" (close the current position and establish a new one, centered on the current price) on Monday ...