Actually we’re not going to make it. We played very aggressive but on the short side and had our asses handed to us trying to get from $26,000 on Thanksgiving to $50,000 in 60 days. Did we learn a valuable lesson here? No – it was kind of fun and we didn’t do too badly but we did come close to giving up our early gains (we had jumped to $29,957 in cash by Dec 16th and $30,737 on Jan 3rd) as we were forced to press our virtual bets against an ever-rising market.
Back on the 3rd we had $30,737 in virtual cash against and unrealized loss of $4,810. All the moves since then (originally from daily Member Chat) are detailed under the main $1050P post in our Portfolio Tab but the short story is we killed the XRT Jan $46 puts even on the 4th and, that turned out to be a bit early as they flew all the way to $2.50 and, even now, are $2.03 but it doesn’t pay to have regrets – but it does pay to review your actions to see if you could have timed things a bit better!
That’s the purpose of tracking these virtual portfolios – hopefully, we learn something along the way. Keep in mind we were losing big time on the XRTs on the 3rd and the call in that morning’s alert was to roll the 10 Jan $46 puts, which we had bought for $1 and were down to .30 so we rolled them to the $49 puts for .80 more and then Doubled down at $1 for an average entry of $1.40 when the puts were down to $1. Why do we do that? By rolling up to a higher position, we increase our delta so that the pullback, if it ever does come, gives us more bang for our buck. So spending .80 to roll up $3 in strike made a significant difference in the delta and put us in a position where we still could win at a net $1.80 entry. But the $49 put was only $1 and needed a huge move in XRT to get us even so, logically, doubling down at $1 and bringing the average entry on 20 down to $1.40 meant we had a far better chance of getting our .40 back.
