Author: Jon

Well, maybe not horribly but it did not go they way I would have liked.

I opened the trade in BA on 5/2 when the stock was around 325. They had just announced earnings the day prior and it hadn’t moved much yet the implied volatility was still fairly high. Seemed like a good time to enter an Iron Condor with a June 305 / 310 put spread and a 350/355 call spread for a $2.15 credit. Since these are $5 wide spreads this left me with $2.85 in risk. So far, so good.

On 5/21 the stock gapped up and went completely through my call spread trading around 360. I rolled the puts from 305 / 310 to 342.5 / 347.5 for a $0.96 credit. So total credit is $3.11 with a total risk of $1.89 and I still have a narrow Iron Condor. At this point I’m just waiting to see if the price will come in a bit.

On 5/31 the stock is down a little to around 350. I was about 17 days out from expiration so I decided to roll out to July options. I rolled the calls as they were 350 / 355 and took the puts to 340 / 345 for a total of $0.30. Total credit is $3.41 with risk now at $1.59.

The stock then proceeded to rise to as high as 375 and then back down to as low as 327. The options never really provided a good exit price so I just rode this out until 7/2. It was trading around 335 and I was running out of time in the expiration cycle again. I rolled everything as it was to August for a $0.29 credit. Total credit was sitting at $3.70 and risk at $1.30.

On 7/24 I exited the entire trade for a $4.40 debit the day before BA announced their earnings. Didn’t seem like a good risk to keep on at this point (and I was kinda tired of the whole thing anyway). So total cost to me was $0.70 plus commissions.

 

A couple of observations I’d like to make about this trade:

1. This is an example of how you can continue to reduce your overall risk on an options trade by rolling up (or down) the untested side. If you only had one side you could also add that side rather than rolling.
2. You can also reduce risk by rolling out in time provided you can do it for a credit. This one wasn’t too bad because even though price went through my strikes, it didn’t go that far. I was able to pull in credits with each roll. That won’t always happen if the stock continues to move in the same direction for a while. In that case you may need to roll out farther in time to get the credit or just take the trade off.

The bigger question you need to ask as you consider what to do with a losing trade is whether or not there are better opportunities elsewhere. In this case, I didn’t necessarily have better uses for the capital so I stayed in to possibly get lucky and have the stock move between my short strikes. I probably stuck with it too long as the implied volatility continued to rise going into this last earnings date but I was still able to get out at less than a full loss.

Probably not, but I thought I would ask anyway.

I’m going to attempt to get this thing going again. I’m still trading, both systems and discretionary. I’d like to spend some time detailing some of my discretionary trades and analyze them a bit. I’ll start the next post with a trade I’m currently in with Boeing (BA) that hasn’t gone as I would have liked.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even put out a newsletter again. (don’t get your hopes up on that one though).

So it seems there is much panic in the streets after the major market indexes have fallen around 8% over the last few days. And today they opened another 4% lower.

So what does that mean from a system perspective? One of my primary systems is a “dip buyer” which currently is loaded up and all in. Unfortunately it loaded up before the major drops in the market so it’s down about 7% as of this morning. Does that mean it’s broken? Nope – in testing drawdowns were as large as 20% which is about what I can realistically stand.

So in context, the 7% drawdown I’m experiencing now is less than half what I can expect for this system. It’s still not fun. I would prefer not to have drawdowns. But it’s part of the process. You can’t have the returns without the drawdowns (by the way this same system is still up ~6% year to date, so that makes it easier to handle this dip). So I continue to trade the system. I’m not making any changes to it because it’s well within the the tested parameters. If it falls below a 20% drawdown, then I will consider taking it offline and examining the logic.

Here’s my February calendar position as of yesterday. I exited with about a $76.00 loss compared to a total risk of $292.

(Click on the picture for a better view).

The major markets have been grinding up since the beginning of the year with very little volatility. This being options expiration week, I have some positions I need to exit. I’ll wait and see what today brings, but at this point it looks like I’ll end up with a small loss in my options portfolio this month. My trend following systems on the other hand have done quite well  and I expect it will more than make up for it.