S&P 500 down 4.5%; your virtual $200,000 account + 0.1%

Finishing up the butterflies that were a drag on futures results limited our gains this past week, but the S&P tanked Wednesday and Thursday and we didn't get any of that on us.

A couple of the butterflies we had on continued to hurt results; I am mostly giving up on these and going to short strangles (on futures only) and iron condors with wide strikes.


Futures options pay better than equities, and the diversified bunch of trades I had on after Wednesday's sharp down move wasn't bothered at all:

So: I'll keep on a widely diversified bunch of futures options trades: strangles if I can afford them and otherwise iron condors with wide wings. I'll add an occasional equity trade as well, favoring those that are highly volatile (and therefore which pay better!) I plan to keep around 75% of my futures-enabled accounts in play (not all them are ... the IRAs don't get futures and futures options until later this year on Tastyworks. For those I still limit exposure to 30-40%.)

And one week of every four ...

This is "expiration week" when the Fabulous a.m. settled NDX trade is available Thursday and Friday. I'm going to hit it hard this week, as it should make about 20% on margin (while risking not much more than that, given 75-point wide wings on the iron condor) ... since over time this trade has shown a 91.7% win rate, the only wish I have for it is that i could do it every week, like in the good old days of earlier this year!

More next week!

Widely diversified bunch of trades show great week (+6.8%) though equities underperform!

Here's a screenshot of my account at the end of the week:

Notice the green on the rightmost column: that's profit or loss since the opening of the trade. (I was wrong about the /ZN trade winning at the end of last week; that was a pricing anomaly. But it's doing well.)

These are all futures butterfly spreads, with a diverse group of currencies (British Pound, Euro, Japanese Yen) and "soft commodities" (soybeans and wheat and corn) and crude oil. None of these have moved very much over the past week, just what we want for these neutral trades. And even the one currently showing a loss is just an artifact of pricing weirdness during the end of the trading day. This should be green when the market reopens tomorrow afternoon, too.

This is my little account that I've had to raid too much the past few months for some real estate and other personal stuff that's going on. But another account is more nearly representative of your virtual $200,000 account. It went from $21537 to $23009 this past week ... that's $15560 in your account!

Here's that account in detail:

This account has the gold futures butterfly with short strikes at 1200 & showing a nice profit. But notice a few more red numbers over to the right ... the Amazon trade is a 21-day iron condor, now with 20 of those days left. It's typical for an iron condor to be showing a small loss for a while until its constituent options start to expire. Even though AMZN has been on a tear upward again lately, I don't think it will get anywhere near the short strike of $2090. So this one should pay the 50 percent of credit we're looking for.

CMG (Chipotle) is a butterfly trade that's right on the edge of getting back to profitability. But the worst one is another butterfly, TSLA.

The ramifications of the "funding secured of TSLA sale at $420/share is assured" tweet from last month are coming due ... Elon Musk was first offered a deal by the SEC that he turned down ... the SEC then brought the hammer down.

But today Elon blinked and made a deal to step down as chairman so he could stay CEO. Thus Tesla shares should recover nicely on Monday ... I think!

Now enjoy this summer cornfield picture and help visualize my corn trades flip into the green ... more next week!