Spring in sight, as well as a fine trading week (+ 5.7%)

We had a dusting more snow this past week, but it's over now according to weather guru Cliff Mass ... For me it looks like this going forward:

I had an insight on my earnings trades up to the beginning of this week: I was trading the 0.08 delta short strikes ... mostly! I was moving to the 0.10 delta when there were 0.00 prices at 0.08 ... So I STOPPED DOING THIS! Clearly, the closer to the money the lower chance of winning ...

So this past week I was more careful: I traded just the 0.08 with only occasionally hitting 0.09 ... and I won 12 of 12.

Target (TGT) was the smallest winner for me, just because I goofed and didn't set the closing order price at 1/2 the credit (I made 6 cents rather than the 13 cents I should have) but otherwise the only slight weirdness was with SSYS. This was a short strangle:

I was short the 22 put and the 33 call ... and see the flirting around with $22.95 and slightly below on Thursday? This trade was showing a loss at this point, but since it was still well away from the short strike and only one day until it expired I figured it would come in ... and it worked! The price recovered early Friday and I got out for my expected 50 percent credit!

Sosnoff and company were whining about Costco earnings today ... but then they like to sell the .16 delta ... at 0.08 it was no problem and I made full profit!

Up this coming week: the Fabulous NDX trade on Thursday, otherwise only 9 earnings trades (all I can find with enough profit at the 0.08 delta to be worthwhile ...)

More next week!

A nearly perfect week (up 10.7%!) after switching to 0.08 delta earnings trades

I put on 17 earnings trades this past week without a loss!

The underlyings:

• NVDA
• PXD
• CTL
• EQIX
• NTAP
• YELP
• CSCO
• BFAM
• TEVA
• OXY
• AKAM
• ATVI
• TRIP
• UA
• RE
• SHOP
• MOH

There were almost all at the 0.08 short delta, with a few at the 0.10 delta when there was no bid at the .08 delta.

I had said previously I wasn't interested in doing anything herculean to "scratch" an undefined trade gone wrong, and that's still true. But I did start putting on undefined risk trades in lower priced ($35 or less) underlyings where the margin per contract is around $300. This I could afford to lose without doing anything but closing out and going on to the next one.

I did trade an Iron Condor (i.e. defined risk) on NVDA, which was quite volatile (therefore paid pretty well even for a defined risk trade, around 10% ... of which we took half, so just over 5% on an overnight trade: not bad!

Overall this plus the NDX trade, discussed momentarily ... gave us an up 10.7% week on the main account we were trading this strategy.

As for NDX ... I made the change I discussed a few weeks ago, putting this on closer to 1pm PST close of trading instead of the 9:45 a.m. PST I had been using.

Unfortunately, this made only about 1/4 of the profit that it would have if expiring worthless ... NDX was going higher Friday morning and closed I guess around 7078 where my short strike was 7075. This was the only glitch in an otherwise perfect week.

I say "I guess" because CBOE or CME or whoever's in charge of it has apparently stopped publishing NDS, the daily settlement value that the NDX a.m. settlement is based on. Tastyworks certainly has it, though they don't publish it on their UI.

This is just a minor aggravation ... what  I really enjoy about earnings trades is the fact that they're OVER overnight. I don't typically get up at 6:30 when the market opens, but when I do get up and look at my phone and see the Tastyworks app has informed me that I got 6 fills on the 6 (closing) trades I had on, well wahoo!