Thursday 7/24/14

Recap today:

Hurrah!  Everything I'm in did what I wanted it to do today!  So right now we've got $16 in unrealized gains on our paper money account just today.  That's over $24 on these current trades.  I'm liking this!  

I got into one of the trades I put on last night (AAPL).  Need to figure out why I didn't get into BX.  But we'll get there. 

First things first -- put the closing order on AAPL.  Per usual, this is based on our rules as an OCO order.

Or not...  Apparently there's something funky in my thinkorswim paper money account, and I cannot put an OCO close order on AAPL.  Oh well.  Plan B -- put the stop order in for what I'm willing to accept on the loss side and keep an eye on it.

Now, time to look at my other positions and see if I need to make any changes.  

GLD -- I adjusted my close order tonight so that the losing side is now at breakeven, $0.09 cents lower than my loss side per rules, and it's $0.10 cents higher than the current mark price, so I shouldn't get pulled out any sooner.  Here's the second "Hurrah!" for the night -- Hurrah!  We will no longer lose any money on this position!  The worst we can do is breakeven!  (I did factor in the cost of commissions for this.  Yeah!)

MU -- I think I'll leave this one alone.  If I change it, I'm going to get too close to the current mark of the option, and I don't want to get pulled out too soon.

TWTR -- This one took a bit of thinking.  I don't want to adjust the stop too close to the current mark price, so we'll change the stop to $0.10 above current mark.  That reduces are max loss by half, but should still give us enough of a window to not wind up pulled out earlier than we'd like.  Ideally, we want to ride this all the way to our profit goal.    

Now, why didn't I get into BX?  Well, the stock did exactly the opposite of what I was wanting it to do.  It gapped down on opening, and stayed down compared to yesterday all day.  It didn't even come close to getting to the price for the condition order to fill.  

It's a good think, I think.  Without that condition in place, we might have been filled with this contract and then lost a boatload.  So those conditions seem to be really working right for us, even though it's only been 2 weeks, almost.

For tomorrow 7/25/14

REMEMBER!  WATCH OUT FOR EARNINGS.  THERE'S A BUNCH COMING UP.

Time to work down my list.

IWM looks promising.  It actually looks like it might be at the high point of a bear flag pattern.  So I sold a conditional call vertical at 116.5/117 (August expiration).  I did put a condition on that the stock price has to hit $114.14, or $0.20 below the low of the day.  We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Fingers crossed for another great day!  

Have a nice evening one and all -- off to dreamland I go.  Good night!