Earlier this month, we announced a change in how we're going to publicize the performance of our strategies. Much as a company's performance and the price of its stock can suffer in the long-run as a result of too much focus on short-term performance, we believe that investors do best when they take a long-term perspective...
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
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The unrelenting August rally put some pressure on the call side of our iron condor positions. However, we were able to close out the month with flat-to-positive performance for the newsletter trades due in part to our ability to stagger trade entries based on volatility and delta exposure and to size positions on a risk-adjusted basis – both techniques that we teach on the members area of the site. We are nearing the end of the September expiration cycle and…
Sunday, September 21, 2008
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In our August monthly review, we expected that “the next phase of this bear market will likely be driven not by U.S. financial companies or by energy prices per se, but rather by the effects of the American slowdown being felt by the rest of the world.” See, that’s why we’re traders and not economists. Although in our defense, the reason AIG was nationalized was partly because of the effect its failure would have had on European and other counterparties. …
Saturday, June 21, 2008
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We feel like we’re saying this every month, but it sure feels nice not to have any skin in the game come expiration day. Options expiration surely had something to do with the intensity of today’s selloff, and this was a textbook case of why we never hold positions into expiration. The fancy-pants phrase for the influence options expiration had today is “negative gamma.” The practical significance of that phrase is that when we gapped down at the open, lots of…
Thursday, October 29, 2009
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