Friday is options expiration. I know from @Misiu357, a great Twitter follow by the way, that the most actively traded S&P options this week have been puts. My feeling is that there could be a wash 'n' rinse sometime today -- the market gets everyone on the wrong side of the boat and then shoots higher into Friday morning. S&P options expire in the morning.
Overnight the S&P futures have come back to retest yesterday's highs, and they look like they could care less about it, meaning I'm not expecting for the market to blast off to 1370 from here. My plan is to look for spots to be short up to 1330-1333 (cash) for a retest of the 1295 futures low of 3:00am Tuesday.
Anything above 1333.71, the low of 7/8, and I'd likely concede that I've misread things.
Bernanke is appearing before congress today (10am EST) to brief them on the economy. The perfect foil for some volatility.
UPDATED: Stuck to the plan. Bought OEX 585 weekly puts in two tranches starting just before 10:30 EST. Took some heat with Bernanke's announcement of QE3, then started hedging with e-minis about 12:00 EST.
I didn't accumulate as many puts as I wanted (one rarely does), and I over-traded the e-minis for the rest of the afternoon, completely forgetting my trading plan: a wash 'n' rinse style flush. Instead, I slowly scaled out of the puts while I got repeatedly pummeled by trying to hedge the rest with e-minis all the way down.
Finally I stopped, took my profits, and reassessed. From an average price of 1.28 for the puts, I scaled at 1.50, 2.00, 2.65, and $3.00. I lost 2 ticks on the e-minis -- was too aggressive and got smacked a few times instead of relaxing and letting my plan unfold. Something I immediately try to burn into my brain when it happens.
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