This market just marches forward. I am looking to continue to thin my positions. I have been looking for additional positions to enter. But Calendar entries are not meeting my criteria. It is too early to go short, and seems to be too late to go long. Curious market.
This market will get you to drinking. Out of boardom..
I was squeezed out of half of my TXN position. I don’t like to take losses, but if I can keep them to .06, I will prosper.
TXN – Exited half June/July 30 for .24.
IWM – Exited ALL of my Jun/Aug 67p for 1.10. I actually made a few cents on this trade with the May to June roll. I have 3/4 allocation of the 71c June/Aug. The breakevens of this calendar is very nice. 67.50 and 75.25. I have already rolled this position from May to June for 1.10. So my original breakevens are quite a bit wider.
PETM – Exited June/July 22.5p for .36. I didn’t want to go through earnings with this small trade on.
LOW – Exited Jun/July 25p for .32. I still hold on to 3 units.
SDS – bought 2 units @ 54.71. The S&P broke the up trend, if but a few minutes. I bought as it crossed with this double inverse ETF to short the S&P. In the past few weeks, very little shorting has worked. Today the S&P hit the 200 day MA. I decided to play this to the downside.
There have been no new entries, yet. The SPX hit 1440, a market target from 6 weeks ago.
The Dow hit 13,139 (A double top from May 4th.)
When all was said and done, the acct was up 5% on the day. With 150 negative deltas.
In the past month I have added another rule to my strict range calendar trading. While I don’t mind picking a calendar in the direction I believe the market will travel in. I will not use a full asset allocation for these trades. I will only use a full calendar allocation if I have a Vol skew, range bound underlying within breakevens. I have found a few trades I took a shot on with the Vol Skew edge, but didn’t meet my range bound criteria, they were about 50/50 in success, and they use too much mental capital to keep track of them.
I like finding the trades which have the edge of high front month vega, and low beta in the underlying stock. Those give me the results I enjoy. Look at UST, it is beautiful.