I don’t want new Members to get the wrong idea…
We don’t day trade a lot at PSW, EXCEPT during option expiration weeks so call it 12 times a year we turn into day-traders as the front-month premiums get low enough to make the trades interesting. The rest of the time, my usual motto is “I’m not a day trader but I’m certainly not adverse to taking profits in a day.” Our goal with any option trade is to make a 20% profit and we put up at least 20 trade ideas almost every week so that’s over 1,000 opportunities a year to make 20% – that means when we do make it – getting back to cash and moving on is a wise strategy as there will certainly be something else to trade tomorrow.
During expiration weeks, we have a unique (if 12 times a year is considered unique) opportunity to gain tremendous leverage on trades that have good risk/reward ratios to hopefully give us a series of small, quick wins so our focus shifts away from the longer trades (and we are often waiting out the week before rolling our longer positions anyway) to zone in on these wonderful opportunities.
This is covered under our Strategy Section so I won’t rehash it here but I thought I’d use my new chart tools to try to illustrate what we’re doing by going over a few of today’s trades. As we do discuss in the strategy section, allocation of assets is key and no single trade should ever be more than 5% of your portfolio and day trades should be more like 2% so, in a $100K portfolio, these quick trades should be opened in blocks of $1,000 or $2,000 entries. Ideally, we want to be comfortable doubling down if the trade goes against us right off the bat (and we still believe in it).
Our first trade of the morning was a short on USO. At 9:42 I made a comment to Members: “Jan USO puts have little premium left (the $41 puts are $1.06 – .19 premium) and can be played as a mo trade but I’m in the Feb $39 puts, now $1.01, patiently waiting to make .50.”
The January trade was, of course, the riskier trade but these plays aren’t taken in a vaccum. We had been discussing oil as overpriced for days and we were watching the global market, the oil futures and the news out of China and I had mentioned in the…
