Friday, April 5, 2013

All Systems Go

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Not a bad trading week for the Small Time Trader. Here's what happened while I was at work:

My Apr 5 '13w Reverse Iron Condors in Apple and Citi both closed at a profit. On my RICs I close the profitable leg, and let the losing leg expire to save on commissions.

Citi was opened at $.54 on the 28th of March, and closed on the 3rd of April for $.85. Here's what the closing transaction looks like:

 
After paying $229 to open, we closed for $323.85, a close to $90 profit in 5 days over a shortened trading week.

Apple on the other hand was opened for $3.20 on 28 March, and closed manually on the 4th of April at $5.89. I had to close manually on Thursday 4 Apr, because I was not sure that the trade was going to stay in the money based on pre-market movements. Here's the closing transaction:



After paying $330.75 to open, we closed for $577.46, a $246.71 profit in 5 days.

One of the reasons that both of these worked out so well, was that one day of premium was missing from the entry cost of the trade due to the easter weekend, so both of these cost less to enter than normal.

I was intending to roll both of these positions over to the closing week of 12 Apr, but I was only filled on AAPL. The price to enter C this week was more than I felt comfortable paying.

For this week I entered the AAPL 12 Apr '13w 440c/455c/420p/405p at $5.15 with a conditional order to close either winning side of the trade at $9.00.

On the Forex front, my CCI breakout strategies on the hourly charts went my way this week, even though it was looking rough at the beginning of the week.

I added GBP/USD to EUR/USD and USD/JPY. Here are the charts and the reports. Some of the entries and exits for the beginning of the week don't show on the screen caps, but they were all red anyway as you'll see in my weekly report.




As you can see, the Dollar's breakout against the Yen was the best performer by far with 207 pips captured by the strategy. This trade alone made this a profitable week. Toward the end of the week, the Dollar went the other way, declining against both the Euro and Cable on a poor Non-farm payrolls number.
The Euro and Cable positions are rolling over to next week, and will depend on opening gaps to see if they will close at a profit or not.

Here's the Profit and Loss for this week for the 3 strategies. Starting with $145.44, and ending at 159.6.


As always, comments and questions are always welcome.

STT

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