February 4, 2024 I tried Credit Spreads again, and though I followed the rules of >30 days, < 30 delta, and more than 1 strike wide, my account balances never went up. Then I thought that maybe Iron Condors on government bonds (mostly TLT, but some IEF) would work nicely, but in the first 4 days TLT went up 4.7%, blowing through a few of my shorter-term Call sides. That experiment will continue, and may yet pan out, but I’ve …
Thesis: find boring ETFs that don’t move much, sell Iron Condors on them. What underlying doesn’t move much? Treasury bonds. What ETFs cover government bonds? These have daily average volumes of >2,000,000 shares:BIL, GOVT, IEF, IEI, SGOV, SHV, SHY, SPTI, SPTL, TFLO, TLT, USFR, VGIT, VGLT, VGSHTMF/TMV (3x), TYD/TYO (3x) I’ve argued before that for spreads you don’t need leverage, so exclude those.Some don’t have options, and some that do are thinly-traded, so exclude those, then sort by average volume:TLT, …
As I come across things in reading forums or researching, this’ll be a place to jot down ideas. Mainly trading ideas, but anything really. The Spintwig backtest of SPY Vertical Put Spreads with various parameters is interesting. I’d always heard about it, but didn’t find it till today, 1/18/24. I don’t trade SPY (or the indices in general), but some interesting observations in it. One is that being short at 16Δ is in some ways better than 30Δ (less volatility, …
Where selling option time premium meets momentum. It’s Tuesday, 1/16/24. A lot of back-story in these first paragraphs, but if you want to jump to the trading details, skip down to Trading Plan. I’m 2 years from retirement and about 2 years ago started seriously looking for a way to earn just 10% per year on what should be a nest egg of almost $1M. 100k/yr from that plus a pension about a third of that, plus Social Security some …
Playing around with 1- or 0-DTE call credit spreads far OTM. $1 wide unless noted. Sorted shortest to longest time-in-trade. All returns are net of fees.
Expiration week 11Nov22. ETFs with weekly options, BarChart 1-month Performance Chart view. Starting this week I’ll try to start noting the spot price, “juiciness” of the ATM Call option, volatility of the options for the given expiration week, and the Expected Move. The last 2 being the numbers shown on the Thinkorswim option chains at the upper right: And juiciness being the Midpoint price of the ATM call that’s just OTM, divided by spot. For example, FAS (above) is at …
Expiration week 04Nov22. ETFs with weekly options, BarChart 1-month Performance Chart view. ERX again this week OIH again SPXL UCO XOP again NO ASSIGNMENTS THIS WEEK. Average RoR 1.3% per trade. Ending account balance 105,958. End of 3rd week since reset to 100k, so averaging 1.9% per week. Some of that is coming from the CCs, which are tracked in the other thread.
Expiration week 04Nov22. Two assignments from Week 6 CSPs, SARK & TBT, and only TQQQ carries over from last week’s CCs. SARK TBT TQQQ
Expiration week 28Oct22. Of the 7 trades in the Week 5 CSPs, none were assigned, so no new CCs. And of the 4 assigned stock positions I was working CCs on last week, JNUG & TNA were called away (both at >1%/week), and I’m carrying over TQQQ & UPRO. TQQQ Carries over into a 6th week with CB 20.18 and the 28Oct21C still open. Spot 20.63, so the trade is 2.2% positive, hoping to get called away at 21 for 4% …
Expiration week 28Oct22. Back to ETFs with weekly options. ERX OIH SARK TBT XOP