Evil Scheme Proceeding As Planned

We had our share of lucky entries here in recent weeks but the one last Friday probably takes the cake. If you recall my evil plan was to wait for a drop to ES 2176 and then take out a long position assuming that the Zero wasn’t flagging red. Apparently Mrs Market was in a favorable mood and decided to grant me my humble request:

The low of the entire session turned out to be 2175.50 – excellent, why can’t the futures be this obedient more often? Now with price where we wanted it the remaining criteria was the signal on the Zero:

Which donned a clearly [bullish] divergent signal that at the lows had barely been scraping the zero mark. I hope some of you were able to shake off your mid summer fatigue and spring into action while the getting was good.

The Retail Rat’s Guide To Holding Positions Over The Weekend

Now although the discretionary campaign above shows the spoos I did in fact not trade those. Instead I bought about 1/2R worth of SPY calls in order to make sure that there was zero chance to expose myself to unlimited risk over the weekend. Unless you’ve been living in a cave you know that over the past year we’ve been seeing a growing number of social unrest in the U.S. as well as numerous terrorist attacks over here in Europe. There was no telling what the swelling legion of lunatics had planned for this weekend, thus the notion of exposing myself to theoretically unlimited risk without being able to exit didn’t seem like a smart idea in the unfolding geopolitical landscape. A long option play however limited my maximum downside risk to the premium paid at purchase. Yup, I can live with that.

Of course the fact that the VIX is currently scraping between 11 and 12 was making option premiums available at discount rates. Finally there was even the chance that my call premiums would remain almost intact on a quick drop lower due to a sudden surge in vega (volatility). Which certainly sweetens the deal in my book.

So that was last Friday’s evil scheme and thus far it is proceeding as planned. At this point I don’t see any reasons to cash out and will leave it up to the strategy running on the futures (in a demo account) to tell me when it’s time to get out. Despite difficult market conditions we’ve been doing very well over the past few weeks and months, to a large extent due to a refusal to overthink the situation. So why start now while the tape continues to move in our favor? 

Where Did Goldfinger Find Those Henchmen?

Now Goldfinger is without doubt one of my favorite Bond movies. And what always cracked me up the most about that scene with the laser is neither Gert Fröbe nor Sean Connery, although both delivered a brilliant performance. No what gets me the most are those henchmen in white lab coats all the way in the back calmly operating all that new fangled computer equipment. They don’t seem to be fazed to the very least about the prospect of a man about to be cut into half right in front of them. Maybe that was a just a regular day at the office back then?

I frankly can’t remember the last time I cut a secret agent into pieces with a laser. And it’s not my fault, you just can’t find good help these days that knows how to properly operate industrial cutting equipment. So I wonder: Where did Goldfinger find such professional and well dressed henchmen? Over here at the lair I have gone to great lengths to find a loyal stooge with an ambiguous moral disposition for even simple tasks like delivering blackmail letters or roughing up a subscriber who’s late paying the monthly protection fee. You’ve know – the basic stuff. So you wind up doing it all yourself and all that blogging and trading just doesn’t leave any room for wet work if you get my drift. Maybe I just need a vacation. But the moral of the story: I guess they just don’t make them henchmen like they used to anymore.