Blood Everywhere

UPDATE 12:35pm EDT: Everywhere I look these days I see ugly tape – it’s like a freakin’ war zone. The wave count has gotten pretty rough lately on all fronts, which of course it should during a Primary corrective wave – they are always nasty and we probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Makes it tough for us traders – and of course OPEX week isn’t helping.

As an antidote it’s probably wise to forget about price for a while and perhaps play on theta burn or sell some finely crushed volatility. Thus I took a sip of my own medicine and just jumped into a very evil GS calendar spread which annamall and fujisan cooked up over the weekend:

Let’s see if we can’t turn some good old IV crush into some cold hard cash.

The Dollar seems to have picked a direction as it got close to breaching that 86.13 line but never did. Today are seeing a big sell off which could be the beginning of some major downside in the short term. That in term would not sit well with my GLD puts and I am actually very tempted to admit defeat and cash them out with the little profits that are left. Let’s see if the ole’ buck can stay above that 23.6% fib line – if it pursues a lower trend from here it could turn bullish for commodities.

Evil-Mart Public Service Announcement:

I was able to cut a sweet deal for you rats with the good folks over at ThinkOrSwim – unfortunately I had to sign over my last born for a year of slave labor in Tom’s secret trading lair but I think it was worth it and the kid eats too much anyway:

Evil.rat subscribers will be eligible for a special partnership discounted futures rate at ThinkOrSwim. You will have to prove that you are an evil.rat subscriber, so after you sign up just email your username to support@thinkorswim.com to see if you qualify – starting rate is $2.75 per contract per side inclusive of exchange fees. know there are a few brokers who are a few dimes cheaper but this is an aggressive rate and in my not so humble opinion TOS is the best retail broker around – period. Also, if you continue to trade I’m sure they can probably match what some of those discount brokers are offering – just a matter of seeing some activity in your account.

I also plan to work closely with the people over at TOS to put together some kind of starter page for you futures trading impaired rats. Nothing complicated – just a primer on the ES and NQ, including:

• Initial Margin requirements
• Specs, like tick value, ATR, daily dollar moves, etc.
• The new TOS latter and how to execute market and limit orders (plus the handy shift-click feature to execute without having to go through the confirmation).
• How to place stops automatically when executing a trade in the TOS latter.

You get the idea – fortunately you won’t have to deal with overnight margin requirements because, guess what – evil.rat does not hold overnight. Which is a great plus for any fledgling futures traders. Anyway, more will be forthcoming in the near future.

Call to Arms:

Annamall and fujisan (and the rest of you spread trading rats): Could you please look at the following finviz filter and let me know if you like any of the following IV crush candidates (similar play as GS)? You might also look at this guy’s post as his picks might be promising.

Updated channel du jour – but who am I kidding – this tape is a mess…

UPDATE 2:00pm EDT: I forgot to mention this: If you are an iPhone owner please make sure to go to the Apple store and download the new iSwim app for free. This way you will be able to trade evil.rat from almost anywhere. Just set up your SMS # and when you are being notified just go over to iSwim and execute the trade. Hey, does it get any better than this? We didn’t get flying cars but I have to say this almost makes up for it 😉

UPDATE 2:34pm EDT: Annamall just sent me the HOG calendar she would play:

I already got filled at .92 – not bad.

UPDATE 3:14pm EDT: Here’s the BBT calendar – courtesy of Fujisan:

UPDATE 3:23pm EDT: Updated channel magic:

Let’s see if she holds – it’s like dealing with a fucking velocity raptor on steroids – fucking thing won’t go down! LOL 🙂

Looks a lot like Mr. Green to me at this point – we might see 881 before this thing dies.