Showing posts with label butterflies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label butterflies. Show all posts

Friday, May 17, 2019

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!