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!

No mistakes this week but annoying market continues; hope in Fed meeting?

I didn't make any goofs like last week, but the market continued Way Too Up for my short SPX call spread and SPY butterfly.

The short call strike on my SPX iron condor is at 2870 ...

This all started when the market interpreted remarks by Jerome Powell and other Fed Governors that they were ready to cut rates.

But there are plenty of dissenters with this view ... I mean, rates are still at rock bottom in historical terms ... And in any event the market has been very poor at predicting interest rates.

So: hope springs eternal for the S&P 500 trades. Otherwise I have on: TSLA, LYFT, QQQ and IWM ... all of which are showing profits but TSLA, and it's still $10+ below the short strike at $225. So I have expectation that all of these will come in for full profit (25% of butterfly credits, 50% of Iron Condors) over the next week or so.

I'll send another update then ...

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 ...

A good week: up 8% or so

Butterflies continue to pay off ...

That's IWM, SPY and QQQ ... just one-lot "iron fly" trades for the moment. Basically:

• Sell 1 put and 1 call at the money
• Buy 1 put and 1 call right at the .10 delta

... Take the trade off when you've achieved 1/4 of the credit ... in this case about $250 in SPY, $160 in QQQ, a bit over $125 for IWM. Not bad for around 8 days (typical) time in this trade.

I also have a TSLA trade on ... I skipped the main part of its recent price swoon (in my own account, though I had this on in one of my client accounts, unfortunately) after this analyst remark:

Tesla shares could drop to $10 in a worst-case scenario, Morgan Stanley says

Elon Musk says not so ... and I doubt it too. But it's below $200 and I'm willing to bet it won't go below $170 for the next 3 weeks ...

I also have a LYFT trade on that looks to be working ... LYFT just has not to swoon or soar for the next couple of weeks also.

Finally, I did one earnings trade that worked very well:

I just did a 1 standard deviation short strangle for a nice credit: $2.66 ... and I got a bonus on closing it! I had the standard 50% set for closing out price: $1.33 ... but I actually got filled at $0.95 ... more like 65% of the credit. Wahoo!

More next week ...

Excellent week ... with one glaring exception

Butterflies are beautiful ...

and profitable!

I closed profitable trades on in LYFT (again), AMZN and TSLA ...

I put on small butterfly trades in each of SPY, IWM and QQQ ... SPY and IWM each were closed out for their expected 25% of the initial credit profit within 7 days of entry of the trade. QQQ didn't quite make that, but I closed it out for a smaller profit to free up buying power for the "fabulous NDX trade" I've written about so often here.

And that turned out to be the glaring exception ... I was short the 7530 put (long the 7450 -- 80 points wide) and the NDX settlement this morning was 7511.94, damn it ... I got a $750 credit but lost then $1806 ... so net loss $1056 ... but since the possible loss was $7250, not too bad (only 14.56% of the amount I could have lost).

Two nuances of the NDX trade:

• At low volatility (like today) the short strikes aren't nearly as wide as they are as when volatility is higher.
• I put this one on just before 10am again, the way I had done consistently until the big loss several months ago. This one wasn't all the same: no monotonic up move all day, in fact down from 7600 or so when I put the trade on to 7580 at Thursday's close ...  and if I'd waited until then I'd probably been short the 7510 puts and made full profit.  I guess I'll have to move the trade time up nearer the close for next time ...

The 7511 settlement value was a shock, but showed weakness that further erupted Friday in the Nasdaq:

I'm going to put on the 3 butterflies again Monday a.m. ... More next week!

Today's result: up 12.4% since July

I had to pull $2500 out of the account before I got started, so revised basis is $4000. Today's Net liq is $4497.24, which is up 12.4% ....

I'm trading more volatile options lately, not just SPY ... TSLA returns up to 25% ... in about 3 weeks!

More results as they become available ...

Finally a down tick lets us cash out the oldest trade ...

It looks like the Trump vs. Comey story is finally affecting the market:

It was down enough this a.m. early for me to finally get the April 17 trade off for a 6.7% profit.

Once again, the trade characteristics are such that there's more room on the downside than the upside. The market was somewhat down on April 17 when I put this trade on and the market's flirting with 2400 the past few days kept it just barely unprofitable. Normally I would have taken it off last Friday, 21 days until expiration (June 2 expiration for these particular options), but I wanted to give it a few days to see if there would be this profitable down move ... and it worked!

The charts are now like this:

Trade Date	Symbol	Result	Profit/Loss	Comment
02/06/2017	SPY	Lost	-18%
02/13/2017	SPY	Lost	-16%
02/21/2017	SPY	Won	+15.4%
02/27/2017	SPY	Won	+17%
03/06/2017	SPY	Won	+15.3%
03/13/2017	SPY	Won	+12.9%
03/20/2017	TLT	Lost	-1.4%	Dumb!
03/27/2017	SPY	Won	+9.6%
04/03/2017	SPY	Won	+6.6%	18 days long
04/10/2017	SPY	Won	+11.1%	only 14 days!
04/17/2017	SPY	Won	+6.7%
04/25/2017	SPY	Open
05/01/2017	SPY	Open
05/08/2017	SPY	Open
05/15/2017	SPY	Open

That's a 72% win rate on these, finally.

The futures trade is doing well also:

Trade Date	What	Qty	Credit Received	Net Liq Change
04/25/2017	/ES Put	-1	$362.50	$0
05/03/2017	/ES Put	-1	$487.50	+$70.00
05/12/2017	/ES Put	-1	$337.50	+$1250.00

More details as they become available!

Back on track: up 9.6% for the trade closed this a.m.

I made the right decision taking a small loss on the TLT trade I took off last week, as in fact it zoomed up to the point I would have lost 15% instead of the small loss I did have to take.

But back to the current one:

Here's the results chart as of this morning:

Trade Date	Symbol	Result	Profit/Loss	Comment
02/06/2017	SPY	Lost	-18%
02/13/2017	SPY	Lost	-16%
02/21/2017	SPY	Won	+15.4%
02/27/2017	SPY	Won	+17%
03/06/2017	SPY	Won	+15.3%
03/13/2017	SPY	Won	+12.9%
03/20/2017	TLT	Lost	-1.4%	Dumb!
03/27/2017	SPY	Open	+9.6%
04/03/2017	SPY	Open
04/10/2017	SPY	Open
04/17/2017	SPY	Open