Market retreats slightly from record high; oil trade behaves beautifully

The global market declined a bit from the record highs of recent days. We'll see if it amounts to this:

So far, not much: just down 0.4% on Friday.

In the meantime for those of you who took my advice to sell 2 of the 63 calls and 1 of the 49.5 put in the crude oil futures options market (/CL):

Specifically, /CL just kept bumping through 57 and 58 ... and eased back all the way to 55.42 at the close Friday ...

I should have the NFA approval this week and I have one subscriber (I think!) ready to sign up. So you folks who are waiting and want to take the plunge I do have a promotion on right now to save you some fees if you act immediately!

More next week ...

Oil trade closed out: +39.5% since October 1; one more step for NFA registration; promotion for new subcribers

The oil futures trade I had on finally cooperated a bit on Tuesday, getting down around $56, and I closed it out when the short call was finally showing a profit.

It bounced up to almost $59 after that but then dropped right back to the top of its previous range, closing at $57.93 on Friday afternoon.

So: sell 2 /CL $63 calls and 1 /CL $52 put, credit just over $1100, expiring January 15 (51 days, if you do this Monday).  Thank me later!

Navigation Trading continued to "outperform", booking almost all of the profit available on an AMZN trade:

He was short the 1717.5 put and the 1750 call, and closed midmorning today with only $25 of the $273 potential profit still on the table. Wahoo!

I was mistaken about having fulfilled the last requirement for NFA Commodity Trading Advisor ... there was one more:

Yes, I had to send a copy of my fingerprints to NFA so they can make sure I haven't been previously busted for financial crimes under another name, I guess ...

There is a  local fingerprinting business (who knew?) that apparently does enough of these to make a living ...

I sent in my copy via certified mail so I should have final approval by next week, I think!

Finally ... I'm offering a promotional incentive for anybody who signs up by December 1 (2019) ... Details here ...

More next week ...

I passed the "series 3" exam; ready for subscribers! (Oil market is still sort of behaving ...)

As regular readers know, I've been talking about a subscription service I am starting. I should have one or two subscribers signed up this coming week. (Don't be left out!)

The good news is that I just passed the FINRA Series 3 exam, which is the final requirement I had to satisfy to qualify for the NFA Commodity Trading Advisor designation.

As for my short oil strategy, it's hanging in there  ... the technical analysts talk about resistance, which certainly looks like what's happening around $57.80 ... fine if it would stay there or bounce down a bit. I am still not showing a profit on the short $60 call but the short $49.50 put is making up the difference and more.

My plan is to sell 2 calls to 1 put when I have a larger account to work with, and this experience certainly tells me I need to go out a bid wider on the call side!

The rest of the market continued what it's been doing: going pretty much straight up. This works fine for Navigation Trading's Iron Duck ... but not for anything with risk on the upside.

More next week ...

Market zooms, at least for the moment; oil propped up temporarily ...

The broad stock market continued zooming up after noises of the trade war being eased:

SPX the last 2 weeks

And oil went up with it, partly, but some of the push up was dented due to a report that the top producers aren't pushing for supply cuts, and Brazil's attempt to lease oil deposits flopped [source: Bloomberg].

I'm only a week into the trade, now 37 days to expiration, showing a profit due to the short 49.5 put. The short 60 call is still underwater ... I'll roll the whole thing to the next expiration when this one has 21 days left ... or sooner if it gets much closer to my 60 strike!

Otherwise, Navigation Trading's Iron Duck trades continued to pay off. The best example of these was an earnings trade in ROKU:

The Roku price was around $140 when the Navigation guy sold 2 of:

• 135/137 call spread
• 121/113 put spread

... for $2.31 credit. This would give just a tiny profit on the upside ($62) ... but instead this happened:

So instead it was closed for nearly the full profit, $440 or so ... or $4400 if you were doing 10x his trade size!

For those of you looking ... what are you waiting for? Opportunity calls!

More stellar results published; a couple of possible resolutions to the automation challenge

Navigation Trading published November results ... profitable again (*yawn*) 😃It's not as useful as it could be, as they're vague about the size of account that's required to take full advantage of their trading plan (minimum, of course; one could scale this as high as desired if one wanted to do that).

So Navigation Trading for November:

+ $2581 

Their blog gives details on the "closing only" strategy, so please take a look at that.

Their Iron Duck strategy paid off this past week, as the market went mostly straight up:

As for my "short oil" strategy, I have a more traditional report of results:

+25.2%

Note that this is on a small account: $5400 to start, and the trade I put in took about 60% of the buying power available. On a larger account I wouldn't have risked quite so much on this single strategy, but you can see its potential.

But also: I

• sold the 59 call
• sold the 49.5 put

This is a neutral trade, not a short one ... what I will do when I have more money in the account:

• sell 2 calls
• sell 1 put

This is still neutralish, but with short bias ... and would have made even more money than the trade I put on.

As for the automation strategy: I had lunch yesterday with an old friend who's been down the same track I've been working lately of trying to get the Interactive Brokers API to work.

One piece of data he had: he said that they found that the live back end behaved differently than the paper trading account for the API .. some trades worked on the live API that didn't work on the paper API. Sheesh ... this defeats the whole purpose of trying this with the paper API!

As for Vela Trading, I finally talked to them and they're hugely too expensive: $20K per year per market ... whatever that means. (I am fuzzy on CBOE vs CBOT vs the 1800 futures markets) ...

So it's going to be Interactive Brokers or maybe TastyWorks ... I applied for the beta test program for their API.

More details next week ...