DecWk3 - SPY Market Summary

DecWk3 - SPY Market Summary

After a brief hiatus, I am back. :) I have been losing money in forex these past couple of months, and have largely neglected losing money here. (just kidding) We all know that there is money to be made anywhere, you just need to have the financial discipline required to be successful.

The way I see it, losing money is like paying school fees. The more you lose, the more expensive your financial education, and hopefully you will learn from your mistakes and make better decisions in the near to long term future. Of course there are those that never learn. I am not talking about them. I am talking about having a consistent trade journal and knowing your trades and how to capitalise on your experiences.

I guess I can say that after 3 years of Options Experience, I know a thing or two about Options. Not much, but at the very least, I know how to make money and I also know when to cut loss and move on.

This week I sold a trade on the SPY, knowing that it is pretty volatile. Crazy volatile to be precise. I took that opportunity and landed a trade in the SPY.

I sold a Call Spread on the SPY for $183/184 and collected a premium of $0.06 on Wednesday when there was nothing, but I knew there was going to be some market volatility as a result of the "tapering". Well I was right!

My trade expired worthless, and the ROI on that trade was 3.95%. Not bad. Looking forward to making more hits in 2014.

DecWk1 - SPY Market Summary

DecWk1 - SPY Market Summary

Last night the SPY looks like it was on a roll. Need I say more? I was looking for an opportunity last night, perhaps one day too late. I should have entered the market on Thursday with a Put Spread. It was already on a downtrend for about 4 days already since last Friday.

Thursday would have been a good day for a Put Spread, never mind if there wasn't any good spreads to sell, a 4 cent premium would have been good as well. Oh well, these days it seems that it's not as easy as I would have thought it to be. The spreads available are a little tight, and the safety buffers don't seem to be there anymore.

So in short, I didn't take a trade last night. I sat out and basically watched the market expire worthless for what would have been a nice 9 cent premium had I had taken a risk and entered into the market. But that risk might not have been worth it because the SPY finally closed at 180.94 up 2 USD regaining all the losses that occurred over the past week.