Fully Automated Trading Journal - $50k per month goal

I think you will be the first man on earth who would be pulling off 20% monthly profit in trading markets.

When I say I am allocating 250k of the account towards the strategy - its about margin tie up. The 20% return would be against that margin, however, that is only possible due to the fact that I have other positions in this account offsetting the required margin due to using portfolio margin. This is a highly levered strategy- 250k would not be sufficient to trade it in an account by itself. Without the far out the money puts held in this account, I would be at a very high risk of ruin.
 
When I say I am allocating 250k of the account towards the strategy - its about margin tie up. The 20% return would be against that margin, however, that is only possible due to the fact that I have other positions in this account offsetting the required margin due to using portfolio margin. This is a highly levered strategy- 250k would not be sufficient to trade it in an account by itself. Without the far out the money puts held in this account, I would be at a very high risk of ruin.
It's still 20% monthly return, whether you leverage 250k or not.
 
It's still 20% monthly return, whether you leverage 250k or not.
He is trading this strategy within the context of a 735k account, so a 50k return would be 6.8%. But that is not really accurate, because you would have to factor the cost of the puts mentioned earlier.
 
Thanks for the feedback.

Why would you not consider going pure delta01 then? You indicated you have a large enough account. Your total transaction costs would most likely be significantly lower than doing it through options...

I appreciate the feedback. This is not my first rodeo. To make money with options you need to either correctly predict volatility or predict direction. My two strategies are not "mechanical" sell X options every N days.

The strategies are designed to identify direction first, and volatility second. I admit they are somewhat weaker on the volatility predictions but are golden on direction. The one thing I have gone back and forth over is if I should trade the shares straight up instead of options (since the direction prediction is very accurate). It would be a very profitable strategy in its own right.

However, my goal is to smartly leverage the strategy up - and the way I intend to use options gives me the best shot.
 
He is trading this strategy within the context of a 735k account, so a 50k return would be 6.8%. But that is not really accurate, because you would have to factor the cost of the puts mentioned earlier.

Wow 6.8% monthly returns at what volatility.

With sharpe of 1, 81.6% volatility
With sharpe of 2, 40.8% volatility
With sharpe of 3, 27.2% volatility
With sharpe of 4, 20.4% volatility

Strategy is tenable with sharpe of 3 and 4. Else, it would be a crazy volatile strategy.
 
@frostengine, could you give an overview of how you structure your OTM hedge?
The OTM hedge are generally bought 90 days out. At any given time, I like to have 3 to 5x the number of put contracts for each 100 shares. For example, lets say in my account I have 1000 shares of SPY and I am short 4 puts. That means I need protection for 1400 shares. So I will own around 40 to 70 far OTM puts. This allows me to sleep very well at night knowing if I woke up to a black swan - my account value generally increases very nicely irrespective of what all my strategies are currently holding.

I end up paying about 10% of my account value each year to maintain this hedge. I am not counting this hedge against this strategy - other strategies pay for the hedge over the course of the year (outside the scope of this strategy). That is just how this overall account is protected - and a by product means this strategy is also protected.
 
As fate would have it - today is a very bearish day so far, resulting in several trades being stopped out. I am not overly concerned with those trades though, I am spending most of my time analyzing the execution engine - making sure thing are behaving as expected. So far things look good.
 
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