Tuesday 7/29 Recap

Overall Summary:

Today was an overall good day for our trades.  At the moment we've got $6.50 in unrealized gains from the 7 positions we're in.  That's not too bad, I think.  We'll see how things shape up as we start closing out next week (or sooner).  

No realized gains or losses today as nothing closed out. 

New position from yesterday:

I did put on a new position last night that I didn't blog -- an Iron Condor on IWM -- Nick found this one over the weekend, but I missed it somehow.  So now that I'm all caught up, I added the stops today. 

Here's the details:

IWM -- September expiration Iron Condor -- 119/120 calls; 107/106 puts.  So far so good.  We'll see what happens.

Current positions:

Nothing new to report.  Some ups and downs depending on the underlying.  

Apple (AAPL), for examples, hit a high today, but closed lower.  As a result, some of our gains from yesterday were lost, but we're still ahead.  With the trail stop though, we'll definitely come out positive.

GLD -- had a good day for what we wanted it to do.  Essentially, price of the underlying went down.  Now there's enough of a window between mark price and our max loss rule that I'm changing the stop side to a trail stop with a $0.10 trail.  That will help further reduce our max loss.  We're not yet at break even on the trail stop, so we could still lose money.  However, if we closed the trade at the current mark, we'd be profitable.  We've got time on this one though; it is a September expiration after all.

IWM  -- with 2 trades on, I have to keep a close eye on this:

1. Our August expiration vertical -- We lost a bit of yesterday's gains here, but we're still in good shape.  At current mark, we're better than break even, so that's a good thing!  I'm not adjusting the stop yet as that's only an $0.08 window between current mark and our stop rule.  
2. September expiration Iron Condor -- Just put this on in today's trading, and it's looking good so far! 

QQQ -- Again 2 trades, both September expiration, so I have to keep these straight in my head.

1. Iron Condor -- Looking good.  I put the stops on yesterday, but forgot to change the time frame from a Day order to a GTC order (Good to close).  Oops!  I discovered that one while going through positions tonight, so there's another reason to check your positions each day!  Overall this is looking good, and I might be able to change the loss-side stop to a trail stop tomorrow.  We'll see.
2. Vertical -- current mark price of the option contract is almost at break even.  That's cool.  Not yet to the point of changing to a trail stop, but that would be my next move on this.

TWTR -- OOPS!!!!  I'm not sure how I missed this one, but Twitter had an earnings announcement and call today.  I did not have that noted on my calendar anywhere.  Ugh.  It looks like it was a good announcement though.  (Side note -- I think I might need to subscribe to WSJ Online because it took me an extraordinarily long time to find an article that wasn't WSJ that I could access the full content and find out what happened!)  

At the moment, Twitter is up a crazy amount in after hours trading as a result of this announcement.  So that should work to our favor.  However, I'm going to have to make sure to look at this position during the day tomorrow (lunch break) and make sure we get out of it appropriately.  The good news is that we should come out on our max profit side of this.  

This was super risky.  We shouldn't have been in this position at this point.  For some reason I just ignored those little icons warning me when looking at this every night.  Not a good idea!  While it seems this one is doing well, there's no way to guarantee this will happen again.  It's equally likely a company will report something that goes against expectations and the stock will tank.  Then, we'd lose a bunch.  We don't want that to happen, so I need to be really careful and make sure we get out before earnings.  Also that we don't get in too soon before earnings, which was the case here.  

Yikes -- so at least this one seems to be working out positive.  We'll know more for sure tomorrow.  I'll let you know.

Daily Take-away:

WATCH OUT FOR EARNINGS!  (I feel like I've said this before.)  

Double checking stops each night is seeming to be a good thing for me. 

1. First, it allows me to discover when I make a mistake entering closes, and allows me the soonest opportunity to fix.  
2. Second, I'm liking the idea of protecting our gains as we can.  Sure, it could mean that we get closed out earlier and potentially "lose" some further profits if there's a setback one day and a rebound the next.  However, because of where we are at in our trading lives right now, I'm okay with keeping more of what we gain.  

Happy Tuesday night!  Have a fantastic Wednesday.