Pipe bombs and volatility, SPX, NDX, futures

There's nothing like watching the market for your just about to expire (neutral) options spread when you get this news:

Pipe bombs were sent to George Soros, CNN, other "liberals"

This whacked my SPX trade for a total loss ... This was one of the low points (Wednesday at 1pm PDT of an extraordinarily volatile week:

I'm still trading futures options, but I've decided to try SPX and NDX 4-day spreads at the .08 delta: SPX Friday to Wednesday and NDX Monday to Friday in hopes of juicing the results between Fabulous NDX monthly trades. Bad timing for the SPX last week, but the NDX came in for full profit after bouncing around like a ping-pong ball on Friday. (It actually never got too close to my short strike at 6725).

And (duhhh ...) I can test this with SPY and QQQ ... I've dropped back to using SPY (a short strangle, at 247 and 275.5 (i.e waay out wide). Tomorrow morning I'm going to put on a 50-point-wing wide NDX iron condor and a QQQ trade also (strangle or condor).

I'm going to try all these for 10 weeks ... I speculate that they should work in the 90% range, but we'll see.

Futures options are not quite as fabulous when doing strangles/condors as with butterflies, but I'm still using them also as part of the mix. But with volatility at such hugely elevated levels lately, it's too tempting to mix in equities. The VIX closed Friday at 24.16!

More next week ...

Volatility too much for the TSLA trade: now 3 for 5

The TSLA trade failed last week, making it now 3 for 5. It's out of Kelly Criterion range for sure, now and I'm looking for an alternative.

The one I have for this coming week is the old standby NDX trade, since it's monthly option expiration. But for the following three weeks I need to figure something else out.

One possibility:

Its leveraged ETF is VXX, and I'm going to try both of them by backtesting on a dataset I can get from QuantGo:

They resell options and futures data for a pretty reasonable price. I used their service early 2017 when I was trying to develop an algorithm. I gave up on that but now could use this again to more quickly sort through different underlyings to narrow down candidates to test via monte carlo simulation ...

More next week ...