Monday, August 11

Today's recap:

Seems like an interesting day -- all three major US indexes closed higher, although not significantly higher.

I got into 2 of the 3 trades from yesterday, and Nick picked out a few more to try for tonight.

We got closed out of 2 positions today, and we're 50/50 for the day.  Overall, though, we still trend positive, and we're definitely net positive in our paper money account.  

Without further ado here's what's happened today.

Closed Trades:

IWM -- looks like the stock price jumped too high toward the call side strikes today, and we got stopped out.  Bummer.  Unfavorable result.  I'll have to check into some news sources later and see if I can figure out why the gap up.  I'm wishing I put a put vertical on instead of the condor as this seems want to continue up.  We'll see though.  It is approaching the moving average line, and that might act as resistance again.

MU -- Minor gap up today, which triggered the trail stop to pull us out.  Profitably, which is always good.  This is one to watch again.  It's sort of int he middle of a pattern.  It might go up and break back down, or it might keep trending up.  I'll give it another couple of days before deciding if we get back into it.

Current Positions:

GLD -- Price is doing what it's supposed to for the Iron Condor to work for us.  Just need to let it have time.  The mark price is now $0.13 below our max loss stop, so I switched the loss side stop out to a trail stop.  We're still at a loss if we were to get pulled out, but it's not our max loss.

New Positions entered today:

QQQ -- Sold the September 97.63/98.63/90.63/89.63 Iron Condor -- Stock price gapped up slightly today, but still well within our range.  Added our stops tonight per the rules.

TWTR -- Sold the September 41/40 Put Vertical -- Despite the underlying closing slightly lower than it opened, we're still higher than yesterday, which is a good dollar higher than our strike price.  We've also got a higher high and higher low, so should this pattern continue, we'll be well on our way towards capitalizing on the time decay part of the option pricing.  Added stops tonight per our rules.

Potentials for tomorrow:

MSFT -- Looking at selling the September 42/41 Put vertical -- The numbers look good, and we had that doji show up last Wednesday followed by a strong up day Thursday.  Friday and today both had higher highs, but lower closes than opens.  Weirdly enough, the closes of the last 2 trading days have been identical, both of which are slightly lower than the previous close.  Today opened slightly lower than Friday's open, and the price is hovering around the 30 day simple moving average, which could be a support line.  It seems to be poised to hit an uptrend again, but it might not do that just yet.  I'll put a condition on when entering the trade so that if the stock price hits $0.20 higher than today's high, we'll attempt to get in.  We'll see what happens tomorrow!

To quote Nick, "There's a whole lot of nothing tonight."  Guess picking these was harder than we'd like it to be!

YHOO -- Take 2:  Selling the September 40/41/33/32 Iron Condor -- We attempted this last week and didn't get filled.  It still looks good today, so let's see what happens.

And those are our additional 2 trades for tomorrow.  I've got 2 more on the watch list, so more to come tomorrow night!

Happy Monday night all!