BWB road trip trade – Page 3 – Travels and Trades

Aug 6 – Rhino Trade Update

Terrible re the lack of posting. My apologies. These past 3 weeks have been very uneventful in trading, it’s been a constant grind in a very very short BB range which is a terrible environment for butterfly trades after a large up move. Our trades have suffered and we patiently await a pull back. Time is ticking for August (big time!) but it was setup just recently to be able to go past the 21 DTE area I usually close things at. I’m afraid it’ll be a larger loss if we don’t see some sort of decent volatility this week.

Another reason for the lack of posting, I’ve been traveling extensively the last 3 weeks and just forgot to post. We did a road trip from Vienna–>Krakow–>Hannover–>Frankfurt–>Freiburg–>Arona/Como–>Lyon–>Turin. Not quite as large as the summer before but good enough that I think I’ve now see most of Europe in the last 5 years.

Anyways, after the Brexit bottom, the market has been straight up making ATHs and been challenging the Aug/Sept trades we’re in. They were all at about 4% profit during the Brexit event to now be about -4%+ I am still in August surprisingly since I don’t have all that much upside risk and my theta is still positive. Any pullback of 3% or more would get us into break-even territory but I am running out of time (we have about 4-5 days max left) before I have to close. The September trade is quite negative now but can easily pull off a win in any normal PB before first week of Sept. I feel our October entry was great and should make up for the losses in Aug/Sept trades (if any). September upside risks are minimal.

The RUT has been up 34% since the Feb bottom and in that environment, it’s impossible to make any real money with the Rhino structure. It’s been a frustrating year but if we get any pull back of 4% or more in the next 30 days, the Sept and Oct trades will likely put our account profits at 50% for the year and that would be a great result.

I think a pull back is around the corner, but what do I know. Especially in this central banker environment. There’s been a total of 666 rate cuts since 2009 and 4 of the major central banks are easing. There’s loads of money keeping things propped up. What reason are there for a pullback? Well, at least short term, via Cobra

1. VXV to VIX ratio is way to high. All previous occurrences at this level resulted in a PB

2. Smart money/Dumb Money confidence spread is way to large

3. Many of the Sentimenttraders indicators are all way overbought

4. The nasdaq 100 commercial hedgers (smart money) made a

record

short just now.

5. The VIX is down 6 weeks in a row (only happened once in a decade) and the other times it was down 4 weeks in a row–> the results were not good.

6. The BB bands are similar to right before the Sep 2014 correction and the 2015 Aug correction. Very tight! Explosive moves are more likely.

Jul 8 – Rhino M3 Trade Update

Rough week in the markets. The RUT was in the 1130s yesterday and the trades were doing fine though fairly delta negative (just not enough to warrant ANY adjustments). I did have a few TF futures, some long IWM and some calls on as additional hedges, but I removed those at a decent profit throughout the day just not at today’s high by any means. I wish I waited longer. I sold off 1 call per account at 131 (1050s Aug) and TFs at 1157 during the jobs report (damn!) and IWM at about 116.57.

Yesterday, the trades were down about 3% from our all time highs and healthy positive, this was understandable since the market was up about about 4% in a few days and our trades will always suffer in larger up moves. Today they’re down a lot more from the high but still slightly positive over-all. Our upside risk is not so high as today’s move was fairly big and sudden and took away most of that upside risk. Today’s up move was next level and puts the move from the Brexit lows at 8.3% up. This removes most of our profits for Aug but we’ve got limited upside risk and a huge profit tent built underneath. IF we get Any move into the below 1145 in the next 3 weeks, we’ll be singing. IF we continue up..well we’ll enter negative P/L but with not so much upside risk per say. The entire Aug trade now banks on a pullback where we’ll take some off and/or adjust on the upside.

The September trades I entered are now negative which is understandable since they’re a mix of 1150/1110/1060 and 1140/1100/1050s. I’ll have to add some call BWBs sooner or later if we continue to be at 1170 or above. I would like to wait for some cool down first. I want to see how this next week proceeds. I would have thought the EU bank risks were bad news but maybe EU money is now flowing into the US market. The internals today were insanity. That worries me a bit re continued up moves.

Jul 2- Rhino M3 Weekend Update

I managed to get some calls and call BWBs in on Friday during the dip and luckily, pretty much right at the bottom of said dip.

Trades:

2 x 1050 calls at $106 to hedge my Bearish Butterflies I put on as a hedge pre-brexit (converting them to an M3). I have 1160/1110/1060 and 1150/1100/1050 Butterflies x 15 and 2 x 1050 calls. Note: Earlier on the week I had bought the same calls for 90 and sold at 99 when I thought the RUT was exhausting itself. I had to rebuy at 106 when that was proven wrong though the same calls touched $114 on the height of the RUT move. So I was pretty much in M3 configuration the entire up move except from 99 to 106 re cost of the call.

15 x 1210/1180/1130 Call BWBs to hedge the Rhinos @ 18.33

The trades are mostly hedged to the upside now and though I expect some weakness into next week, I also expect the markets to quickly resume its uptrend. On dips, I’ll start taking off some Aug trades and hedge a bit more with call BWBs or Calendars. I’ll be quick to take profits on Aug. I had built up a lot of profit in Aug expiry and though some of it was taken away in this most aggressive up move, I still have a lot. My overall balance is about 6% from its earlier and max highs on Monday. I am very happy I took off all of July on Monday as those wouldn’t have fared well in the maniacal three day bounce. I was quick to take profits on those 🙂

As for September, I am only somewhat entered. I have 1150/1110/1060s and 1140/1100/1050s. I am looking to add some call calendars or call BWBs to protect on the upside. Waiting to see what happens post Jul 4 weekend. I got a bunch more on thursday @ 2.90 which isn’t a great price. I won’t pay much more than that so if the volatility continues to fall and the BWB prices go above 3.15, I’ll sit out and manage what I have on and wait for a high volatility day to enter more @ better prices. If we don’t get a high volatility day in the next 20 or so days, then so be it. I struggled with July due to bad prices and won’t repeat the same thing again. Trading well means getting good prices and being willing to sit it out until you do.

Jun 14 – Rhino M3 Trade Plan

On this mornings bounce I sold off some upside hedges I had (1 TF future per account) and (10 2125 call hedges for SPX) and the market proceeded to sell off through most of the day making the decision look great. That said, it did end up bouncing towards the end of the day. I took the bounce as an opportunity to add some Bearish butterflies (Jul Expiration) at such a good price (If I recall, they were 10.60 for July expiration!). The steep option skew has made butterfly pricing very attractive these past few days. As I said yesterday, it was different and kinda unusual. Volatility increased and usually vol skew flattens out but this time around it actually did the opposite. This made pricing great for entry but negatively affected BWB and BB trades already entered. My OV risk profiles were not as expected going from Thursday till today. However, it got better towards end of day.

There is a lot of doom and gloom right now, we cut 2080 like butter and kept going. The selling is relatively emotional and fearful and until we have resolution in the events, we can expect some more uncertainty and volatility. The Brexit is mostly about immigration and I’d guess that on an exit, the politicians would keep the same trade agreements in place. So probably ‘much ado’ about nothing that has any real effects on the economy.

My gut says we’ll have a bounce tomorrow re the Fed meeting and probably into OPEX. I might hedge with some cheap weekly calls. I don’t know yet. We’ll see how it plays out.

Here are the risk profiles of the three Jul Rhinos. The P/L aren’t accurate as I hadn’t updated pricing on a few adjustments but the profiles are correct.

Jul Rhino M3 (P)

Jul Rhino M3 (M)

Jul Rhino M3 (D)

Here are the other three which started off more as an Broken wing condor.

Jul Rhino M3 BWC (P)

Jul Rhino BWC M3 (D)

Jul Rhino BWC M3 (M)

Here are August trades, which are a testament to the whole Vol skew issue. These should have had a massive P/L increase on the fall. We were outside the tent and entered in, the OV mdoel would have suggested a large increase in P/L. This will self correct. But I kinda learned something, I was or had a tendency to add Rhinos at perceived tops and I did this fairly well timed a week to two weeks ago when RUT @ 1180-1190 and I’d have expected that with heavy negative deltas and a bearish bias, that I’d not be down right now. but I am, at least for now, because of Vol Skew. The pricing on the BWBs were about 3.30-3.40. Not great. I don’t think I’ll be as excited to enter on big up moves, rather, I’ll be more excited to enter during down moves where vol pops and skew is favorable.

Aug Rhino M3 (P)

Aug Rhino M3 (M)

Aug Rhino M3 (D)

I have a bunch of SPX ones as well but I’ll post those later. They were purchased at much better prices and are doing well.

May 11 – Rhino M3 Trade Update

The June trades are doing well now. We’re at about 4% on planned capital and we are 37 Days to expiry (DTE). We started off pretty rough with this expiry and I am not interested in taking too much more risk with them now that we’ve got some profit. We paid a lot at the beginning as it was low-volatility as such I have reduced profit targets. So I’ll start peeling off as the market moves through the next 14 days. Right now, they are delta negative by about -10 deltas each unit.

I have some concern for the downside as downside moves can be swift and more difficult to adjust and with potential negative news in after hours, I’d rather have a nice cushion. We just fell from 1155 to 1115 and I’ve got a lot of upside hedges on. These have to start coming off if we fall much more, else I’ll have too much exposure to the downside. Up moves are a bit easier to manage (re fills and size of moves especially after a big run up) and generally there’s less explosive positive news in after hours that could get us in trouble. Plus, we have way less upside exposure in the T+0 line. I have a bearish bias at least around May expiration (May 20) and onward. We’ve got 7-14 days left and if the market continues to fall, I’ll remove upside portions of the trade more aggressively which will remove my downside risks and expand the tent. If, for some reason, we should get whipsawed hard, I’ll then remove the downside portions all while keeping things fairly delta negative. Thus unwinding the trade while allowing theta to work for us while keeping the goals of protecting the downside. I’ll continue like this over the next few weeks, seeking out more and more theta and unraveling the trades.

I don’t have the full unit exposure on July trades as I couldn’t get fills. If things get more volatile, we might be able to get great pricing this week or next. The more volatile it is the more closer to expiry pricing acts. I.E what you pay for a BWB @ 72 DTE in a low vol market would be similarly priced 55-60 DTE in a more high volatility market.

June Rhino M3 (P)
# of Units: 30
Planned Capital: 750,000
Current P/L : 27,092
Max Draw Down: P/L: -18,000
Current P/L(%): +3.6%

June Rhino M3 (D)
# of Units: 16
Planned Capital: 400,000
Current P/L: 13,356
Max Draw Down P/L: -11,000
Current P/L(%): +4%

June Rhino M3 (M)
# of Units: 25
Planned Capital: 625,000
Current P/L: 25,547
Max Draw Down: -16,800
Current P/L(%): +4.0%

May 7 – Rhino M3 Trade Update

Here’s the trades from yesterday at 2:30pm. I had a few call BWBs close on auto orders that I haven’t included here near EOD on the ramp up. Slightly exposing on the upside but given the sharp down and deteriorating technicals, I wanted to get things more delta negative though. Profits are coming back in nicely. After next week, I’ll be aiming for 7.5% to close the trade. If we make it to about 27 DTE, I’ll take 5-6%.

BPSPX indicates that the upside move is not to be believed. It’s deteriorating rapidly and suggesting more downside as are the other bullish percentages. The past 18 months I’ve tracked the BPs closely and to be honest, it’s probably now my favourite indicator. I used to loathe them because often they’d be in the opposite of my market opinion and where I needed the market to go in order for my trades to do well. So much for market neutral trades being market neutral eh, being market neutral is a myth in extended markets (up or down) when your trades get out of the zones. However, we’ve rallied into OPEX quite consistently and smart money hasn’t moved this week or gone sharply short. The DAX is at a perfect position for a bounce. Maybe we have a little downside this week towards SPX 2019 and then bounce into OPEX. I think we’re going down after that though. But that’s all just gut feeling and bias based on everything I read and follow and based on technical indicators that I use. How does it affect my trades?? Not a whole lot other than I might be more biased to take off some upside calendars and BWBs on big bounces.

I wasn’t able to really get any good fills for the remaining July trades despite the increased volatility of the week (you’d expect better prices). I did get filled well on some SPX trades earlier in the week but I haven’t bene able to get a fill anywhere near since.

June Rhino M3 (P)
# of Units: 30
Planned Capital: 750,000
Current P/L : 19,550
Max Draw Down: P/L: -18,000
Current P/L(%): +2.6%

June Rhino M3 (D)
# of Units: 16
Planned Capital: 400,000
Current P/L: 13,356
Max Draw Down P/L: -11,000
Current P/L(%): +3.39%

June Rhino M3 (M)
# of Units: 25
Planned Capital: 625,000
Current P/L: 19,007
Max Draw Down: -16,800
Current P/L(%): +3.0%

May 5 – Rhino M3 Trade Update

I’ve closed out all my May trades. There’s none left. They were closed for a profit and I regained a lot of ground with this fall in the RUT. Had it gone to 1080 or 1090 quickly, we’d have done better but I’ll take it, we were essentially break even on the May trades to finish up and recover about 30% of our max profit.

I have no opinion on which way the market will move. We could bounce or we could continue down. I don’t have the foggiest even in terms of levels so I am keeping the trades nice and neutral. There’s a lot of negative headlines but the most furious rallies are amongst negative sentiment. The persistent shorting and subsequent buying pressure on covering can make for very intense up moves. These headlines are all old recycled headlines, nothing really new. Whoever would have sold due to those specific headlines, probably have already sold, they had their vote, a big sell-off typically requires some sort of new surprise headline to instigate other sellers to sell. All that said, man, we’re entering an interesting time politically in the US. Trump. I can’t see how things won’t get more volatile in the summer with that, the general negative seasonality and a lot of the global macro issues. All of my trades prefer volatility and down’ish moves. So I’d welcome that.

I did enter some July trades last week, I’ll update the blog with those as well. I’ve been trying to get good pricing today but I haven’t got filled. I’ll wait and try again tomorrow.

Here are the June Trades

June Rhino M3 (P)
# of Units: 30
Planned Capital: 750,000
Current P/L : 12,551
Max Draw Down: P/L: -18,000
Current P/L(%): +1.6%

June Rhino M3 (D)
# of Units: 16
Planned Capital: 400,000
Current P/L: 9,531
Max Draw Down P/L: -11,000
Current P/L(%): +2.3%

June Rhino M3 (M)
# of Units: 25
Planned Capital: 625,000
Current P/L:13,463
Max Draw Down: -16,800
Current P/L(%): +2.1%

Apr 25 – Rhino M3 Trade update

Today provided some refuge and an opportunity to get my trades adjusted. The RUT closed at 1146 on Friday and even touched 1148 with after hours action (using IWM as a proxy). In a previous post, I thought RUT would stall out and short term top at about 1140/1150 area and so far that’s what’s playing out. There’s a ton of resistance and supply at the 1150 area so my gut was saying that we’ll hit 1110 after a test and fail at 1150 but with the FED meetings and AAPL earnings tomorrow, anything really could happen. After the action today, I am not convinced we’ll be going much lower than 1125 before a retest of the 1150 resistance area. If we fail on a retest of 1150 then maybe we’ll go down towards 1110 at minimum but I think we probably do retest 1150 before any significant move down. The market has moved so much in 2 months but it’s been consolidating and sort of reset itself re overbought conditions. In short, I have no idea where this will go and any direction is not a surprise.

Everyone’s expecting AAPL to report dismally and that could cause a sell-off but any surprise could catapult it further. and then there is the FED, well, before they can rate hike, they have to telegraph the intentions, they usually always do. There’s been no telegraphing so perhaps this is where they’ll telegraph utilizing the recent market strength as a buffer? Perhaps it’s more jaw-boning. How can we predict anything in the next few days? We can’t. I can’t say that there is an edge one way or the other. All I can do is manage risk appropriately.

On Friday, I had removed some upside hedges right at EOD on Friday (great timing) and then re-added them around 1137/1138 today. Bonus. Anyways, as for market action, the RUT fell to 1135 where I did some adjustments to the trades and got them a bit more desensitized to an up move. Not perfectly of course, as there are always trade offs, and any up move won’t really generate any profit but they’ll allow it to occur with out as much pain as before. The idea being that a pull-back will occur after a brief move-up sometime in the next 20-30 days. What we really need is a nice juicy fall into the 1100-1110 area.

I want to add in some 1150/1110/1060 BWBs into each of the trades below to raise that T+0 line in the middle (the dip) and add theta to the trade. I’ll do this if we move up in towards the fed. It’ll add negative deltas so I’ll offset it with some call calendars or BWBs. Get that thing beefed up so that in 2 weeks anything between 1020 and 1170 will be profitable.

Here’s the June trades

June Rhino M3 (P)
# of Units: 30
Planned Capital: 750,000
Current P/L : -11,706
Yesterdays P/L: -16,425
Current P/L(%): -1.56%

June Rhino M3 (D)
# of Units: 16
Planned Capital: 400,000
Current P/L: -6,762
Yesterdays P/L: -9,643
Current P/L(%): -1.69%

June Rhino M3 (M)
# of Units: 25
Planned Capital: 625,000
Current P/L: -12,139
Yesterday’s P/L: -16,206
Current P/L(%): -1.9%

June Rhino M3 Trade Update

Been a while. I’ve been traveling and when I get back its insane catch-up mode and I always tend to leave this blog behind,regretfully. I just got back from a 3 week trip which included a week in Barcelona, 2 weeks cruise in the Canaries and Madiera as well as a quick stop over in London and Toronto.

The trades for June are underwater as the relentless 22% rise in RUT is exactly an environment which does not allow a Rhino to profit much. Been a frustrating year but no mistakes were made and the trades are behaving exactly as they should, they just aren’t profiting. That’s expected. If you look at the SPX chart (RUT is even more pronounced!). It’s an environment which in backtesting or in live, will not make money and should be slightly negative. That’s where we are. In June (as you can see below) any 2-3% pullback will bring us well positive. Just a patient waiting game. The year will end well, I am confident in that as I don’t think we’ll have another 20% run up, and anything else is great 🙂

I was hoping the unsuccessful DOHA and the Saudi threat of selling treasuries would bring the market down more than 1% this AM but it doesn’t look like that will happen. Today, I am looking to add some call BWBs to my June trades to reduce negative deltas and add theta and a tent to the right side of the trade.

This chart says it all, this is just not an environment (since Aug) that would be a good one for market neutral trades. It’s, in fact, probably one of the worst. Patience is key. I am trying to exercise it.

Rhino M3 Trade (M)

I’ll be looking to add 20x 1100/1150/1180 call BWBs to this trade to reduce negative deltas

Rhino M3 Trade (D)

I’ll be looking to add 10x 1100/1150/1180 call BWBs to this trade to reduce negative deltas

Rhino M3 Trade (P)

looking to add 20x 1100/1150/1180 call BWBs to this trade to reduce negative deltas

Mar 10 – April Rhino Trade Update

The RUT has resumed its downside move and is @ around 1061. This is positive for our trades, it gives us a ton of upside breathing room while maintaining good theta and even a large correction would still be profitable. Lots of room on each side, though we are in the sea of death on one of the accounts. The sea of death is that little dip area between my original Rhinos and the call hedges. In this area the T+0 line will start to sag as time goes on. Ideally we have another 2-3% down move to get us in the tent. I am going to look at how I can correct this a bit. On my bigger account, the goal is to break even and we’ll do this if RUT stays in a decent range and we’ll profit significantly if it falls another 3%. On my other two accounts I should be able to profit decently unless RUT breaks 1105 and continues upwards. All in all, we’re now likely to have a modest month overall with no loss despite the 16% up move after we put the trades on around 950-960. I guess I shouldn’t jinks myself but I am happy if we get out of this at $0. That was a rough start to the year. A 20% correction followed by a 16% up move while in both expirations. Challenging and probably what I’d call a “Trader maker” if you can survive it.