EOD short-covering rally, redux. Aftermarket lift in futures is typical of risk-off covering before weekend, does not indicate direction for Monday's opening price.
Short weeklies wilted into the EOD rush, so I rolled em up for a credit and netted ~60% gains on some of these (shorted in AM for .60c or even .80c, covered in PM for .25c or .35c, , etc).
When I woke up this AM contracts that I sold Thursday for as much as .83c were trading in open for between .03 - .08c, I closed em all and shorted more that went in half over next three hours; I cannot stress enough how no one reading these pages should be trading dailies as long contract positions, the R/R is terribad, you WILL lose most or all of your money, most of the time!
About one in ten trades you will bring in a win, and one in twenty will scalp a killing. The other 18 times you lose... MOST OR ALL OF YOUR MONEY!!
People wonder, "Why even pay 0.03c for the lousy things? Why not let em expire?" Because you got to hold them all the way to close and a lotta things can happen in six hours. I've seen 0.07c calls on UVXY jump to over $2 in an hour. Better believe I was pretty mad about failing to cover those! "I'll just wait till they go under a nickel and cover them for 3c!" I told myself... LOL. You got to look at what you can still get from them (3c) vs what they could cost you ($3 or more!), its useless to hold a threepenny contract and expose urself to unnecessary risk. When you take 80% or more out of them, it's time to roll out and move along. This is ESPECIALLY true if you are SHORT options. FGS cover the damned things when they go in half or less! I dd a lot of verical call and put spreads and nearly lost my entire life savings AND entire future life earnings; when these move ITM you're gonna get an exercise and the margin call can be more than your entire net worth.
E.g.: You short 100 SPY 320 calls and buy 100 330's in a $10 vertical spread. Suddenly the Great Donald tweets; "We have a Deal with China! Pres Xi is a nice man!" and BAM the index jumps instantly up to 328; now the short calls you wrote for .50c are $8, but the OTM calls you bought for .10c are STILL OTM, worth only .45c; you are out 75,500 USD instantaneously. Worse, if you can't afford to buy these back you will be subjected to exercise and must deliver 10,000 shares of SPY for USD 3.2 million. No kidding and brokers will let you so it for as little as 10K margin deposit.
Pls give urself time to be on the right side of a trade- options depreciate exponentially in their last 30 days! Any contract OTM on expiration day will 95% likely become worthless by COB, why take that chance?! If you want to day trade options, trade the NEXT series expiration date, not today's! If you're wrong, you will lose ALL ur money in a few hours, game over then!
Well that was a dreadfully tedious blog, kudos to u if you got to this bottom line, LOL, GLTA!