Monday 8/4

What happened today?

Seems like a mixed market today.  Overall there was up and down, and several of our positions indicate that.  So what are we doing tonight?

1.  Evaluating current positions and making any changes.

2.  Adding stops to the new positions we entered today.

Current Position:

QQQ -- Iron Condor, September Expiration, 99.63/100.63/92.63/91.63 -- This is working well for us.  Slow and steady towards profitability.  The mark price of the option is now more than $0.10 lower than our loss-side stop, so we've adjusted that to a trail stop to help reduce our max loss.  Ideally, we want this to continue to work for us, so we'll see how the trail stop works for us.

New Positions:

We got into 4 of the 5 possible positions we researched last night.  The QQQs call vertical didn't get put on because we had the condition in place that the price of the underlying had to reach $0.20 below Friday's low, indicating the continuation of the down trend.  That didn't happen, and the stock actually opened higher and closed higher still.  So the conditional order allowed us to avoid getting into a situation where the underlying is doing the opposite of what we wanted it to do.  

Now on to the new positions:

YHOO -- Iron Condor, September Expiration, 40/41/32/31 -- Price stayed right in the range, so that's good.  I'm putting on our stops tonight.  One for the max loss we'll accept, and one for the projected profit we'd like to get, per our rules.  Then it's a monitoring game going forward.

GLD -- Sold the Call Vertical, September Expiration, 127/128 -- this position is $3 positive today for us.  That's because the downtrend is continuing.  I'm adding stops tonight, per our rules, then, as above, continuing with watching and evaluating each night.

This is actually already at $0.10 better than our max loss side-stop, so I just put on the trail stop, and we'll see how it goes.

IWM -- Sold the Call Vertical, September Expiration, 114/115 -- hmmmm...  it's still trending downwards overall, but it looks like we got in at the base of the upside flag of a bear flag pattern.  This is not exactly ideal, but we'll ride it out and see what happens.  I'm putting on our stops tonight per the rules.

MU -- Sold the Call Vertical, September Expiration, 33/34 -- And the stock when up today.  So we have some unrealized losses at the moment.  I guess we'll put our stops on and wait and see.  It might hit some resistance level and fall again.  32 was a previous support which might become resistance.  We'll see!

And that's all for tonight folks.  A bit of an easy night overall for us.  More to come as the week goes on though!

Happy Monday evening!