Recent content by Theinkdon

Yes, that's a good point. But I don't average down. Either I was right on the direction or I wasn't, in which case I'll take the loss and move on. "Cut your losers and let your winners run," that sort of thing. If it's not your style that's cool too. Take care.

Mindset. This is a stock-replacement strategy, that's all. That's why you'd only want to use it on stocks that are trending up. And if you've set it up right, the BE should be right at spot. The deltas get you close, but you really need to make sure the Extrinsic you're buying in the 2 long...

I guess the classic ZEBRA is to go long 2 Calls at 75 delta, and short the one ATM, ostensibly 50 delta. So 75 + 75 - 50 leaves 100 deltas. Though I often see it as "buy 2 70's and sell 1 50." But I don't understand that because it adds up to only 90 deltas for the position. But I think the...

Hi, I'm trying to follow your numbers but having some difficulty. Were you talking about July 12th expiration? Because you said July 10th and then June 12th. And why not do 100 shares, or 1 contract, to keep the math easier? And I wouldn't go long BITX at all because it's trending down over...

Hi, I know I'm posting to an old thread, but I recently discovered ZEBRAs and was looking for more info on them when I found your post. I'm all for mechanical trading like you backtested, but have come to think that's a Holy Grail and may never work. Would you expect to outright buy and sell...

Got curious about the idea of a 50% stop-loss with a 25% take-profit, so I ran your smallest winner from LAST week, DASH, which you bought for 1.64. At the low of the day, ~11:45, it was worth 1.24, so a 50% stop-loss (0.82) would've kept you in the trade. At the high of the day, ~12:45, the...

Good numbers this week! But before I ask you about some of those trades: I went back to LAST Friday and ran your only 2 losers through ToS's OnDemand feature. It's kind of clunky and time-consuming to follow a trade through time, but there might be a way to see an end-of-day P&L curve, which...

Good luck on your picks this week. I read through your "Vs. Hold to Close" post last week and found it interesting. Did you just look at the closing spot price and calculate the final value of the spread? I'm guessing that, vs. using something like ToS's "OnDemand" feature to step through...

Today seemed like a bad day for butterflies for some reason. On 8 1-lots my PM account lost 94.50, not counting commissions. If I divide that loss by the number of contracts I get (-$12) per lot. Does that math seem right? Trying to compare that to your much-larger $-loss I counted the number...

Forgot that piece. Waiting to hear also.

5% of capital in short strangles is earning you 14%/yr on a portfolio level?? See, that's what I'm talkin' about: I see that and go, "Heck, if I could do that at 50% utilization that would be 140% per year!" Too much risk? Then back off to only 25% and make 70%/year. That's surely not too...

Last night I staged iron butterfly 1-lots to mimic yours (or in a few cases deviated a little, like on DASH). I already had an IB on UPST, and I didn't like the looks of SAVE so I didn't do those. I put the asking prices at the Natural Price, but they usually fill better than that: BNTX...

Okay, so you're managing these more than I had assumed. I pretty much just go with the probabilities: set up the trade based on the current numbers, let it go in or not, set the BTC, then just ride it out. I like the idea of looking at the Volume also to predict the direction, I'll have to...

@Retief Thanks, that was an interesting read. My takeaway was that either short strangles OR ICs can blow you up if you don't risk-size your trades properly.

@caroy Do you mind some questions/differing opinions on these plays? I'm playing along, staging these trades (or similar) in my PM Iron Butterfly account to go in at the open tomorrow. I'm doing them as IBs because I'm more familiar with them, but they should be about the same, right? BNTX &...