Steve, I generally go out 45 days til expiration when selling options, and 3 to 6 months out when buying options. I am never, ever sure of hitting a home run, so selling an OTM put softens the blow when I’m wrong.

With IB closing out a 300 share UVXY short I had on(Due to what appears to be that they let me short the shares, but by the time the T+2 Settlement occurred the shares were unavailable so they closed the trade. Lame) I instead put that liquidity into a Jan 18’19 Synethic short centered on the 12 strike.

Kinda sucks from a trade management point…[Read more]

And the last of available VXX shares at Scottrade are locked. About a 23% run from 26 to 31.99 over 6 sessions. Be interesting to see how much higher it can go. I looked at a volatility spike from late October of 2016, and VXX ran about 25% (the 2x’s ran about 50%). That may not mean anything, but that one was memorable because I got caught too…[Read more]

There’s still a short term backwardation to worry about on the m1/m2s

i added a short batch of vxx at 31.39 and added 20 shares of svxy at 116.94 and 30 shares at 11.70. Can’t find shares of other VOL etp’s.. VIX Futures falling hard, i hope this continues.. Needless to say, these trades take a strong stomach.

@david-moadel would you mind explaining the vertical put spread for VXX in more detail? Would the ITM and OTM be of the same expiration date? Can you give an example using today’s VXX spike? Thanks.

Thank you ladies & gentlemen.

Aim of the post was to to take stock and make sure all of us are not getting into group think that everyone is adding to positions here.

I would personally advise caution especially if tomorrow we get a repeat of today. All it takes is a small healthy correction (which the markets need and is actually good in the…[Read more]

Dumped a batch of UVXY at 9.36 (for a small loss) last week to add liquidity and carefully layer up some VXX, today took some at 29.25 and 30 in the AH. Less chance of a margin call and better executions with share liquidity. So, I’m in after rearranging last week. Still holding a TVIX position that I plan on keeping for a long time. (but it’s…[Read more]

Thinking $SPY could go for a gap fill tomorrow at 283.36 before reversing and heading higher. Reserving 60% of available short vol capital for now.

just couldn’t pass the chance to short the last batch of VXX at 29.90 ;). Full core position now.

Gentlemen!

i agree with Seth of course that a ‘real’ black swan of course is a sudden, totally unexpected event, such as 9/11 as a prime example.
A correction or even crash over a month/years is not considered to be a black swan.

The other point is: It doesn’t really matter whether we use a 10’000, 100’000 or 10 million $ account!
In each of…[Read more]

Here is another formula for tail risk hedging I got from a PM friend who works in a bank, zero premium hedge:

“an interesting / useful / cheap tail hedge, when vol and preferably skew are low, is the ratio put back spread on indices. Sell two atm puts to pay for one otm put. Zero premium net. Do in 6 mths term and unwind at 3mths before theta…[Read more]

I suppose the other thing to mention, is that most that start a 10k account lose patience and try to turn that into 50k. While that sounds doable, it just simply isn’t the norm in the markets – no free money.

@seth-golden Seth, I noticed you tended to dissuade this trade with that example of capital size “at this stage of the bull cycle.” So, how are you weighting this conclusion to @ultrafeel? Imo, the time management is the issue. It’s not worth all the time spent to manage a 10k account shorting vol (unless you did a set it and forget it core…[Read more]

It’s been fantastic trading pre-earnings thus far. Mostly 40dCalls

For next week MSFT, AMZN, MA, GOOGL, FB, BA, QCOM, EA, UPS, all good thus far. AAPL, GLW and GPRO have not come in.

These above are the best trades on the board.

MSFT now on forth reload.

MR Softy

I guess I am just too stupid to figure out how to post a clickabe link or image on this board

View post on imgur.com