R.I.P Traderbot; Mistakes were made; A very wild week in the market

First, my efforts to try changing around the traderbot by tweaking parameters:

• Waiting 1 or 2 minutes between changes of direction
• except when the market was on the 'wrong side' and more than 2 points away from current price

None of this was enough to fix the problem; it went from 30+ trades to 17, still too many to handle and stay profitable.

This was bad enough, but then I made two key mistakes in this crazy week:

• Taking too much risk for the size of the account
• Not getting out while the getting was good

I have had previous success with SPX butterfly trades:

So just thought, I'll put on an /ES butterfly ... the SPAN margin was only a little over $2000, and I got $4000+ credit (for selling two at-the-money options and buying way-far-out .10 delta long options to cap the risk). Waiting until I got 1/4 of the credit is 50% on margin. Not bad!

But! I did this with the market right at record high ... where it had been for months the short strikes were at 3380. Then this happened, widely blamed on the Corona virus:

I could have gotten out the first day of the downturn just down 8.4% or so ... but I let it go and fortunately set an alert for an uptick the next day where I was able to get out for something like down 26% ... sheesh. And even then it could have been much, much worse ...

Belatedly I came back to the Tastytrade motto: "trade small, trade often." I realized that to get a spread of different trades on that I really can't do much more than $5 wide iron condors, meaning the risk is less than $500 per trade.

I put these small trades on:

• Gold (crazy down move today but still will be closed for a profit if it calms down from this point)
• Australian Dollar
• Canadian Dollar

(One thing I'm having to adapt to is the different names Tastyworks and Interactive brokers give these underlyings. Tastyworks Australian Dollar and Canadian Dollar futures are /6A and /6C, respectively whereas IB calls them AUD and CAD...)

When the market was around its lows (2920 to 2905) I also put on some SPX long trades:

• Short put spread
• long debit call spreads

Since we got the bounce after Jerome Powell talked, these long trades look to be profitable too and I will probably take them all off on my next opportunity: Sunday afternoon when the futures market reopens.

Looking for volatility to calm down just a bit on Sunday & Monday ... here's to a calm weekend!