Mar 3 – Trade Plan

TLT has fallen about 2% yesterday from its Friday close sitting at 126.89 from a close of 129.5 on Friday. We closed most of the TLT portion of the SPY/TLT trade on Friday during the rise and we’re left with about 25% of the TLT portion. Not a great day for TLT but the SPY portion made up for some of the loss on the TLT.  I gather we should still be able to get out of this thing at break-even or slightly below. We’ll see.  TLT has about a 30% chance of double-bottoming at 126. Markets are getting over bought on many indicators so we may see a bit of strength in TLT as we start to stall in the markets and as participants start to accumulate TLT as they usually do during these prolonged topping or perceived topping patterns. After consecutive ups, SPY may spend a few weeks in a range.  During this phase, TLT generally does go up because more and more people start to expect a pullback (during bull markets) buying bonds to hedge an expected pullback is a better way than to short SPY directly.  Going to give what’s left of the trade a bit more time. SO hasn’t closed their trade either (100% of it). I’ve closed 70% of it.

I closed most of my MIC from February. It did well. Happy with it and the new parameters.

The MIC for March is doing well. RUT isn’t really moving all that much which is great for the trade. No adjustments required. I did enter a small amount of call spreads at 1243 yesterday and added the corresponding put spreads after it fell a bit at about 1237. As well, when it rebounded to 1242 I put on the debit spreads.  When I leg in I do it with very tight stops and only small portions. If RUT proceeded to 1246 I’d have immediately added the put spreads.

 

Feb 22 – Update

My portfolio has hit a yearly all time high.  Not bad considering our SPY/TLT is down about 19%.  I am going to wait for a bit of a down day next week to roll up our spy pair for more credit.  Any movement up in TLT will get the trade towards the profit zone (captain obvious). This is a smaller portion of our portfolio and we expect these sorts of swings.

The momentum portion is still positive but just barely

The alpha protector is doing very well.

TLT roared to 128 on Friday and closed back down to 126.65 after news of a Greece deal. This also pushed up SPY about a half percent in a minute. At 128, I think our pair trade was only down 10%.

I think I personally will start to increase the MIC (modified iron condor) portion to a significant amount of my portfolio (20%). My portfolio will mostly consist of MIC (20%), Alpha Protector (40%) and very small leveraged portions of momentum rotation (10%), earnings based volatility trades (10%) and a small portion of spy/tlt pair trades (10%) and some bond rotation (10%). I’ve also got a  position in the optimal fund at Covenant capital but I don’t include that in the above percentages. I gotta say, I am kind of excited about the optimal fund, I like the way they approach risk and volatility. The idea is to use a lower amount of capital with a higher volatility trade style to achieve the same results. I am looking forward to seeing how this performs in 3-5 years.

I will post all my MIC trade entries and adjustments on this forum under the heading “MIC – Month”.  So anyone who is interested can follow along.