Wow -- Catch up time!

Sunday, well really Monday September 15

Wow -- has it really been over 10 days since I last posted?  Well, I promised that this week would be a reboot week on a few things, so I'm catching up on this blog. 

Just because I haven't been posting, however, doesn't mean that we haven't been trading.  We currently have 3 positions in place on our paper money account, and we had one close out positive last week.

Closed positions:

We sold a put vertical on Yahoo that closed out on Friday.  Specifically, the October expiration  36/35 vertical.  We put our stops on and hit our profit goal.  This trade netted us $25 in paper money.  Which is pretty good!

Open positions:

Currently we have 3 positions open, which we are watching and seeing how they're going to close out.  All three are currently positive for us, which is great!

IWM -- Sold the October expiration 119/120 call option. 

SPY -- Sold the October expiration 202/203 call option.

MU -- sold the October expiration Iron condor, 28/26/36/35

Current standings:

We've made up the losses we had a couple weeks ago, which is good.  We're still net positive in our trades over the last few months.  Which is great!  And our percentage of favorable trades is still pretty good.  We're better than 50% successful still, but not quite as high as we want to be.  

New positions:

I'm looking for two new positions to start the week.  Nick didn't have much luck earlier this afternoon.  Hopefully I'll find some others to consider.  

AAPL -- sold the October expiration 97.86/97.14 put vertical.  Unfortunately Apple is a weird one that doesn't like complex orders.  I get an error message from the platform every time I try to put on an OCO order.  Unfortunately, this means we incur the same-day risk.  Well, I'll put on the closing order tomorrow night.

YHOO -- Sold the October expiration 38/39 put vertical.  Nick actually put this one on last week, and it has been profitable for him.  I'm doing an experiment here.  The current delta on this position is actually outside our current accepted range.  nick has been doing some research on using positions with a lower delta looking for a higher success rate, even though the per trade yield will be less.  Theoretically, higher success rate offsets that  lower yield.  We'll see!

Now, all caught up for a good start this week.  I'll keep you posted!

Post Labor Day Recap -- Thursday, September 4

Wow!  Step away for a bit for a long Labor Day weekend...  

Come back after a couple days and a LOT has changed!  (Technical difficulties slowed my return.  We're back tonight.)

For starters, 5 of our 6 positions closed out between last Friday, yesterday and today.  3 closed positive for us, and 2 closed at the stop.  Overall though, we came out ahead on those 5 trades.  

IWM -- Iron Condor, October expiration -- 120/121/108/107 -- we stopped out of this one.  It hit a high today of $117.80.  Apparently, that was too close to the 120 strike for our rules.  So we lost on this position.  At least, because we followed our rules, we didn't lose too much.  Down $12 calculated net.

GM -- September expiration sold the 33.50/33 put vertical -- closed out yesterday at our profit target.  Glad this closed yesterday and not today though!  We won on this one with a calculated net of $7.

Looking at GM and IWM made me stop to look at the news.  Yesterday was a mixed day among the US indices.  Today was down on all three.  Interesting.

MU -- sold the October expiration 32/31 Put. -- Well, this one stopped out on us, unfortunately.  Fortunately, we only lost $7 on it.  So that was a wash with GM.

YHOO -- sold the September expiration iron condor 40/41/33/32 -- This one was a winner!  (I love it when this happens!)  We bought it back from $0.01 per share, or $1 for the contract!  Net result -- profit of net $35.  Hurrah!

TWTR -- Another winner!  we sold the October expiration Put 43/42 -- Net income $18.

Overall for the last week we made $41 on our trades, net positive in paper money.

We did learn something rather important this week as well.  Iron Condors on IWM are not working well for us.  We lost on the last 5 condors we put on with that underlying.  So, we're not doing that anymore, at least not in the near future!

New Positions:

GLD -- Looks good for a call option, but the one within our rules is a bit too close for our comfort.  the other one that fits our delta rules is just barely outside our return rules.

IWM -- So even though we're avoiding condors on this, this one looks good for a call option.  We're putting a conditional order on to see if it goes down again tomorrow.  If the price does go below $115.52, we'll be entered into the trade.  Selling the October expiration call vertical 119/120.  

And I think that's it for tonight -- we're not at our 5 positions that we like to be in, but I'm tired and need to call it a night.

Happy Thursday!