I received several comments/questions about the cost/risk of last week’s double-diagonal trade. Cost, including the relatively large cash reserve needed for possible adjustments, is discussed in Part II of our two-part introduction to the double-diagonal—but because the base-position margin for this trade is larger than what many members are used to (especially those who joined us after our last DD trade, in the May cycle), it’s worth taking a minute to review the margin calculation and…
We spend a fair amount of time on this blog looking for trading systems that have some discernible and consistent edge over the market averages. And edge is important: if you don’t know where your profits will come from, you certainly shouldn’t expect to have any. But an empirically demonstrable edge is just one of the three components that comprise any good trading system. The other two, execution and allocation, are also essential to the success of any trading…
As we said to the members this morning, when all your historical studies are broken or unhelpful and the market is behaving inexplicably, there’s really only one sensible way to think about capital allocation:
Look at the positions in your account this morning. If each one of those trades closed at its absolute worst possible price – its “maximum loss point” – would you lose a minute of sleep? If the answer is yes, your trades are too…
We often refer to the complementary nature of iron condors and calendar spreads, in that the former benefit from falling implied volatility, while the latter generally get a boost from rising IV. So does that mean you should balance out volatility risk by allocating as much capital to calendars each month as you do to iron condors? Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.
First, it’s important to think about where implied volatility might be headed, especially when it’s at one extreme…
We’ve actually made this point before, but it bears repeating: iron condors have hard stops already built in. They’re called “long strikes.” So risk management is incredibly easy when you’re trading condors – it’s simply a question of determining how much capital you’re prepared to lose on any one position, and then selecting the appropriate number of contracts for your trade. Then fire and forget.
You don’t need to set some arbitrary mental point at which you’ll exit the…
As you probably saw, the markets staged a broad-based rally yesterday on reasonable volume. The rally kind of came out of left field, as there is still a major divergence across the market indexes, and getting long here seems like a rather risky move.
For that reason, we do not plan to adjust our June positions at this time. There’s an old saying that “markets tend to crash down, not up.” But bromides aside, as we have written elsewhere,…
Sunday, October 25, 2009
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