March 2014, SPY Credit Put Spread and management of the RUT Iron Condor

Today I opened an SPY Bull Put spread using March expiration options.
At a point where only 28% of stocks were above their 20 SMA and the McClellan Oscillator was below -170, I figured we were near a Bearish extreme. This is the trade:

Weekend Portfolio Analysis (January 25, 2014)

Folks, yesterday was a very exiting day in the markets. We had a scary bearish candle that is mostly body and no wicks, with the market closing at the low of the day. A -36 SPX points candle. Needles to say, a bar like that one is not frequent. Suddenly, all CNBC analysts are saying that it was "clear" we were going to correct and that this is not the end. Folks,...........save your electricity and your cable bill. You don't need market media for your trading. Doesn't provide you with actionable ideas, but it's really fun to turn it on in a day like yesterday for entertainment purposes.

March 2014 RUT Iron Condor

Today I entered the first position of the March 2014 monthly options expiration cycle as follows:

Buy 2 RUT 1040 March Put @4.70
Sell 2 RUT 1050 March Put @5.30
Sell 2 RUT 1250 March Call @2.60
Buy 2 RUT 1260 March Call @1.80

Weekend Portfolio Analysis (January 18, 2014)

SPX went from 1841.26 to 1838.70, just a -0.14% decline in the end. Monday and Tuesday were pretty exciting,....the rest of the week, ahhhh, not so much. The market didn't reach a short term overbought extreme and therefore I didn't do anything. I haven't entered new positions since December 27. This is probably my longest hiatus, but with this dull, boring and so low volatility environment I just haven't seen the clear opportunities that I like.

Weekend Portfolio Analysis (January 11, 2014)

This was the most boring week in the US Markets since this blog started in September 2010. Not even a disappointing jobs report moved anything. But boring is not always bad! Boring is good if you are a credit spread seller and you already have positions in your portfolio that benefit from theta decay without being threatened. Because there wasn't a convincing push higher, I didn't sell the RUT Bear Call spread I planned last week.

An even more disappointing jobs report was issued in Canada this week. We lost almost 46000 jobs. That's a terrible number. Think about the magnitude of that number for Canada. With a tenth of the US population, this number would be equivalent to more than 400 000 jobs lost for the US in a month. The Canadian unemployment rate went up from 6.9% to 7.2% and now after a good while, Canada has a higher unemployment rate than the US (7.0%). Ironically, unlike the SPX, the TSX index did react to the disappointing Canadian job report: It rallied almost 2% this week!! And there are gurus out there trying to predict market direction. he he he. Such is life.

Analysis of Forex trading results in 2013

I didn't trade Forex with real money in 2013. I must admit, so far, it is the Forex arena where I find the toughest challenges and where I haven't been able to come up with a consistently profitable method. I designed the LT Trend sniper system back in December 2012 and had it in demo mode for all of 2013. The results were not good.

Weekend Portfolio Analysis (January 4, 2014)

Welcome to the first weekend portfolio analysis of 2014. If you're new to the site, this is the article I write every weekend analyzing every position in the portfolio and outlining the action plan for the upcoming week. My little contribution to the options trading community, specially premium sellers.

This week SPX opened at 1841.47 on Monday and closed at 1831.37 yesterday for a 0.55% decline. However, we are still trading in the same uptrend channel that has been in  place for 13 months. Therefore, the long term trend is still up.

Closed 2nd January 2014 SPX Bear Call Spread

Today I got out of the January 2014 SPX 1880/1885 Bear Call spread.
I traded this spread twice. First as part of a 1645/1650/1880/1885 Iron Condor. I closed it when it hit 75% of its max profit. Then the market had a year end rebound and I entered the position again for 0.50 credit in this case.

Analysis of Investing results in 2013

I started to invest in dividend growth stocks in October 2013. After reading comments of clever investors on Twitter for a while, plus reading websites/blogs dedicated to investing in dividend stocks with a history of growing those dividends, I decided it made sense to put some of my money in solid companies with strong track records of paying cash to their share holders.