Alert, Alert – How to Make 68% in 4 Hours with ETF Options
by phil - February 12th, 2010 3:21 am
A lot of people ask us how our Alerts work.
There’s not much to it actually. Alerts are free to Premium Members but they are just Emails that come from our normal daily Member Chat from myself, Optrade or the Oxen Group. Opt and Oxen usually send out trade alerts but I tend to concentrate on things I consider important enough to send out in case someone is away from their computers or (Heaven forbid!) on some other site. One Alert I send out almost every morning are our daily level watches and then, if something big changes, I’ll send out another one but I don’t do it often as I don’t like to bother people with Emails. We have special feeds for members who want to have every comment sent to them anyway.
Usually I send out my first alert just after the bell so we can see what the market looks like at the open. Sometimes we see a good play, sometimes we don’t. Today looked uncertain so posted two possible DIA plays at 9:33 in Chat that were sent out on our Alert system (it’s just an Email!):
So that’s it. This comment from Member Chat gets converted into an Email and ends up in your in-box a few minutes later. On top are my normal level selections for the day with comments about what to look for. As I had mentioned in the morning post, I didn’t even feel it was possible to make it to our 10,300 levels so I didn’t even bother cluttering this post with them this morning. We looked a little weak so I was more concerned about the downside but we held our downsides like a champ and bounced back nicely.
In chat, we took quick profits on the $99 puts and my follow-up comments were:
9:37: "Boy, we can almost count on these morning sell-offs lately. EU funds I think so I still want that upside play."
9:56: ".95 was plenty for the puts. For me, that’s a .15 buffer to enter the longs, now .75 but I don’t want them unless they either get back to .70, (where I’ll risk 1x with 1x at .60 and 2x at .50) or back over 10,020 with a stop right there."
11:19: "Let’s watch that 10,058 line, we either get through it or it’s a good place to buy the DIA…
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Day Trading Expiration Week at Philstockworld
by phil - January 13th, 2010 1:14 am
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 virtual portfolio and day trades should be more like 2% so, in a $100K virtual 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 vacuum. We had been discussing oil as overpriced for days and we were watching the global market,…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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