My Life My Trade

Going forward, all the trades for a given day will be posted in the comments section for the “Plan & Trades” post for that date. I will stop making a separate post for individual trade. It just unnecessarily increases the number of posts making it a huge inconvenience to go through the blog.

At the end of the day, I will summarize all the trades and edit the “Plan & Trades” post to include the trades here.

Plan for Jul 1, 2009: Ahead of the long weekend, I expect lighter trading activity, and it usually results in an upward bias. Additionally, all the bears and lots of bulls are looking for a quick downside here given that Q2 is over AND the possibly non-existent window dressing is over as well.

I expect us to chop around in the range between ES 908.5 and 918 with an upward bias. If we visit the lower end of the range, I will start to scale into longs. If we visit the upper end of the range and breach it, I will look to add shorts around ES 926, ES 930 and so on. There is a good chance we might create a higher high than today.

I will use Jul options mixed with Aug options till Thursday. I do not intend to hold onto any un-hedged Jul options beyond Thursday mid-day. If there is a position that I want to hold over the weekend, very likely I will roll over into August options. The goal here is to eliminate as much of the 3-day theta burn as possible.

Trades for Jul 1, 2009

• SELL FSLR Jul $160 Calls @ $8.80
• BUY CME Jul $330 Calls @ $3.30
• BUY OIH Jul $100 Puts @ $3.30
• BUY USO Jul $39 Puts @ $1.35
• SELL CME Jul $340 Calls @ $2.25 (hedging the Jul $330 Calls esp ahead of long weekend)
• BOT a bunch of puts on GDX, GLD, PCLN, AAPL – details later in the day. Got to go now.

Look at the ES Hourly graph for past few days. ES has largely been confined to the range between 908.5 and 919. This graph is from 3 hours ago. And not surprising that about an hour ago, a rally attempt in ES was rejected precisely in the 918-919 region.

ES did make a foray out of this trading range, but swiftly returned back on Tuesday. Let us see what Wednesday presents itself with. I will continue to trade in the range unless proven wrong. I will be looking at TICK to tell me if we have broken out of the range and are trending.

BOT them for average price of $2.00 – 4% loss after commissions.

Final cost after position management was $3.62 – net profit of 9% after commissions.

Final average position cost after position management was $3.00 – 23% loss

BOT them here for $1.84 and managed the position down to $1.57 – 7% profit after commissions

This was one trade that I got stuck into and did not get out in time and violated all my rules. Added more contracts even after my maximum funds allocated to this trade had been exceeded. I am glad that it did not pay off, and that it worked out to be so painful. Important that I learn these lessons with small money.

BOT them for average price of $2.54 – this was a 40% loss trade.

Trailing stop loss hit.

BOT them here for $1.50 and managed the position down to $1.23 – 12% profit (after commissions)

Just checked my brokerage account – this one got filled a while back. Sorry couldn’t post it earlier