Trading Long Straddles

Monday morning review.

I'm looking to put on another LONG STRADDLE. If I can get matching PUTS and CALLS in prices. Decided not to average down on the first straddle yet, in which I'm holding OTM CALLS on the losing 1/2 straddle side. Market seems to have some downside to it yet?

Looking at ten days out company earnings, settled on SFD and will do a 'paper trade' condor at 61 high and 60 low and see how it plays out over the week? This is for SFD.

Otherwise, just to sit and wait patiently!
 
Added a new LONG STRADDLE

1 Aug. 60 LONG STRADDLE, QQQ @$5.85. Puts and Calls at $2.93 each.

- Still holding 1/2 straddle, the OTM CALL on the 62 Straddle.

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Note: Was reading some old notes and you can do a LONG STRADDLE superimposing two Vertical Debit Spreads for long options. I wonder how that would work out in the world of dollars and cents, gained or lost?
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Kind of interesting with a dead undecided market. At least for long straddles. Nothing much doing. The big thing to resolve with my strategy is how successful I can be in breaking even on the losing side of the straddle. I'm estimating about 5 weeks maximum to get the breakeven, by one way or another. The profit comes easy. Keeping it is the real story. I'm only trading 1/2 as many long straddles that are available. In the interest of trying to work things out thoroughly. See if I have a working system?
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Been perusing RANDOM WALK web pages on various adjustments to the butterfly. Something they call the 1,2,3 and another unbalanced one called the 1 to 5. Got to learn the basics first before I try to get more advanced. The broken wing butterfly and the unbalanced condor seems straight forward variations, that simply need more study and practice.
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Wednesday morning. Made a stupid mistake. Instead of a waiting sell order, at a picked strike price, put in a buy order in error, and ended up with another CALL at a bad price, giving somebody $50 at my expense. Reset the order to sell, at my target price of $4.08. At the time, I was reasonably far away. But as I got closer, decided to couple them together and cancelled my sell order and replaced it with a sell order for two CALLS at $4.08. Will accept the loss of commissions of $10 on that if I get a fill. The STRADDLE CALL will make a $100 bucks, so thats okay.

I got involved in doing experimental research on a Long Straddle with Vertical Debit spreads. I couldn't make it work. Went ITM, ATM and up to 3 strikes OTM. But could not get a price low enough on the debit spread to make it worth while. In the QQQ with .10 cents for round trip commissions and a strike width in a debit spread only covering .60 cents, there just was not the ability to get a real low price on the debit vertical spread. So gave that idea up as a failure.

In the meantime, with all this stuff this morning, I forgot to put on another Long Straddle at the 62 strike. Have to watch that for a while and see if I can catch it. Think I'll go out another month too. From August to September.
 
Open an IB account and wire them $10k. The front-end is a spreadsheet, but powerful. A lot of embedded functionality that takes some time to learn, but you can place complex orders very quickly. I can't stand the TOS middleware and latency.

I make some mkts with IB and Lime and IB's fills are excellent by comparison.
 
I've looked at IB, but while I'm losing on my current account with TOS, cannot get my wife to agree to another $10,000 yet, to open an account with IB. Thats their minimum and I probably have $7100 right now in TOS and working my way back up, albeit slowly. A happy home life is more important ( grin :D .
 
I am fairly new to options... 3-4 months and a few books.

I opened my account at Option House and have been happy... Maybe I do not know what I am missing.

Platform seems fine... price structure over 5 contracts at $8.50 plus $.15 per contract.

I am still learning how aggressive I can be on fills...

Am I missing something?
 
When I started a year ago. In cash. I tried Options Xpress, Option House and TOS. I found the platform for TOS to be more friendly and the help chat line, excellent. I went with TOS. My friend ATTICUS a professional trader swears by IB. I never heard of them before, and by the time I heard of them, my $10,000 was down below their minimums. So one day, I think I will probably move to IB based on my professional friends recommendation. At the moment it seems to be more trouble than it's worth. I'm just getting the hang of this trading and platform on TOS.
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Wednesday. June 6, 2012

Okay sold my winning side of the Aug. 60 STRADDLE, which was CALLS and had made a mistake, with my original sell order. Put BUY
instead. Anyway, I have come out at the end of the day smelling like ROSES. + $114 net on the winning side, plus selling the mistake call I ended up buying.
I'm now HOLDING 60 STRADDLE PUT and a 62 STRADDLE CALL which has to be worked out, adjusted to Breakeven, before these two STRADDLES are completed. I also got FILLED with a new 62 LONG STRADDLE before the CLOSE. So still in the game here. It's going okay so far. Will know better by the end of the month.
 
I've got three paper trades to tend to for Thursday and Friday. See how they go?

Still a work in progress on this new trading method for me. I'm getting better I think, at tweaking and adusting any variables. I think I'll give it a new name.

EBB AND FLOW - TRADEOPONICS !

In a very small circle of tropical vegetable market gardeners, I'm reasonably famous and referred to, for a book I did on a three year study of Tropical Agriculture in vegetables. My specialty being self taught, trial and error learning in hydroponics. So TRADEOPONICS sounds like a nice title. * If it works in another 5 weeks? Then we will know.:D
 
Quote from webicknell:

I am fairly new to options... 3-4 months and a few books.

I opened my account at Option House and have been happy... Maybe I do not know what I am missing.

Platform seems fine... price structure over 5 contracts at $8.50 plus $.15 per contract.

I am still learning how aggressive I can be on fills...

Am I missing something?
More...

What is their ticket charge on complex orders?
 
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