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Got 15 $7.50 calls on CONN for 1.00. Stock is down over 30% today on earnings. Looking for a bounce back to $9+, hopefully.
Ended up getting a straddle of 10 contracts at 400 for 1.10. just sold the puts for 2.50, and the calls will expire worthless. Basically made back what I lost on the overnight try.
BIDU was basically flat overnight. I was able to get out of the calls at .20 and thinking of holding the puts for a bit in case the market really takes a dive today.
Got some BIDU 420 calls at .80 also. So I want to see a huge move up or down tomorrow...
Good luck, I'm just trying to learn some as I go. :)
Hi PC, board marked, new to options so will be watching/ learning.
bid
Sold those last week at 1.90. Took a bath. I apparently suck at options trading...
Sold those at $1.
Forgot to post this earlier but posted it on the bounce board.
In 20 $5 calls at .90 for RVSN
BIIB took a loss,out at .48 average
BIIB in $55 calls at .55 on pullback,traded up to .80
RIMM sold calls at the open for .69
thx looks interesting!
I just added a description of my program to the IBox. I doubt it would be all that helpful for your style of trading, but you may find it interesting regardless. You may also find it useful the day before options expiration since that would only require an overnight hold. Let me know what you think.
Edit: Here are the results for RIMM if you bought 20 of the $65 puts and $70 calls selling half for a double. (I'm sure this will paste horribly)
Results over last: 5 days 10 days 15 days 20 days 40 days 60 days 80 days 100 days 125 days 188 days 250 days 500 days
Count of gains 4 8 8 8 11 22 35 45 66 121 176 329
Average 4,527 3,985 806 (822) (2,146) (1,027) 106 63 3,237 4,674 5,694 4,099
Avg % gain/loss 70.5% 62.1% 12.6% -12.8% -33.4% -16.0% 1.7% 1.0% 50.4% 72.8% 88.7% 63.8%
High 7,421 3,985 806 (822) (2,146) 4,527 4,527 4,527 4,527 4,527 4,527 4,527
Low (3,284) (3,284) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420) (6,420)
thx! I use Questrade,looks like their competitive
ETrade is 9.99 + .75 per contract and ThinkOrSwim looks like 9.95 + 1.50 per contract
curious,if you don`t mind me asking,what commissions to do u pay for options,I`m paying flat $9.95 + $1 per contract,when playing the .15,.20 contracts its gets a little expensive but the % gains are nice if on the right side the the trade,like on XRX today I made $1k on it but dished out almost $500 on the round trip thx Rob
thx,doing well!I opened an account on Aug 21,2009 with $20k to give options a try and looks like I went over $50k as of todays close, about a third of the trades have been options,rest were my usual bounce plays! with the options trades I`ve made I`m just following the same concept as the Bounce Board and day trading them! Rob
Damn dude, you're on a nice roll to start out!
RIMM bought $75 calls at .62 here
XRX all out at .20! weeee!!
Nice job. I set up a simple spreadsheet, but I keep adding complexities to make it more flexible. At this rate I'll be done in 2013...
XRX bought some $8 calls at .15 here,spread is terrible,not in a whole lot but a sell at .20 would be nice % gain
RIMM all out at .32 for a modest gain! watching for your post
Nice, you're already up 10%+ on them at the bid (.31 as of now, stock is at 67.50). I'm doing a spreadsheet nw for RIMM to see about a straddle. I'll post the results here later.
RIMM in some $80 calls at .28
No, that would be great. Hopefully we can use each other to figure out a good strategy.
Hey Paul, just starting out tinkering with options,I'm taking what I've learned playing bounces and trying to use it playing the options! do u mind if I post what I'm playing here on your board! Rob
Well, I got smoked. had an plan to sell half at 1.40 and hold the other half until the end of the day. AIG had like it's 3rd flattest day in 2 months, and my options expired worthless. AIG is up almost 20% today, and had this happened on Friday, I would have sold 50 calls at 1.40 and been holding 50 more at over $6 right now, wihch would put me up $30,000 right now. Amazing how one day can be a swing of close to $40,000 for me. Oh well, nothing I can do now.
Trying something with AIG for tomorrow's options expire.
Bought 100 $41 calls and 100 $38 puts for a combined .70. Basically I want AIG to go way up or way down tomorrow. I did an analysis and in the last month, if you look at the % change of the highs and lows each day, there were 2 days that I would have lost 100% of my money, and 3 other days when I would have lost some money. But on the other end of the spectrum, there were 5 days that I would have had the opportunity to make 500% or more, and another 10 days that I would have had the opportunity to at least double my money. So i am taking a shot here, and hoping AIG moves big tomorrow, one way or the other, and that it's not one of the 2 days I would have lost all of my money...
VVUS just released news that they are doing a public offering for 9 million shares. Only traded 3 million shares all day, so that's a pretty decent chunk. Down from 10.79 close to 10.20s after hours. Hoping to see a big gap down tomorrow and be able to get out of my options for a nice gain. If not, I'm okay holding for a while since these are October expirations.
Edit: Looks like it actually got as low as 9.75 when the news first came out, so hopefully that's a sign of things to come for tomorrow.
Just doubled up on each, calls at .40 and puts at .60.
So I now have 60 options at 1.20 average.
First documented trade is buying October VVUS $15 calls and $10 puts. Stock is trading at 12.20 right now. I got 50 of each, at .75 and .65 respectively. VVUS was trading in the $6 to $7 range before releasing positive news about a weight loss drug Qnexa.
This is just a place for me to document my options trades. I lost a ton of money trading options earlier in the year, and felt like every time I went heavy into something thinking it would move one way, it would seem to always move hard in the other way. So I started hedging by trading straddles instead, and sometimes will buy both a put and call out of the money.
Update: I spent a few hours creating a spreadsheet to do some backtesting of options strategies. It's fairly flexible, but also simplified greatly in many ways.
It was created with straddles in mind (or ones that I don't know the name where if the stock is trading at $1 you buy $10 puts and $12 calls, because you expect a big move but not sure which direction)
The first step is to pull historical data from yahoo finance. It has daily high, low, open, close, and volume
Then I set up some parameters to test. They include the following:
Current price
Call Strike Price
Call per Contract Cost
Number of call contracts (actually, as of now it's set up to assume the same number of calls and puts. You can buy only one or the other by zeroing out the cost of the one you're not looking to buy, but you can't buy 10 calls and 20 puts for this iteration of the model)
Put Strike Price
Put per Contract Price
Number of put contracts
days unti lexpiration
1st sell trigger (e.g., sell 50% of the position if the contract value goes up 100%)
2nd sell trigger
What the model does is look at the data and figure out what the gain or loss on the position would have been assuming every day was options expiration. In other words, if there are 5 days until expiration, it takes the closing price from 5 days ago, converts it to the current price and looks to see if the sell triggers would have executed at any point during the next 5 days, and if there are contracts remaining, sells them at the value of the contract as of the closing price after the 5th day.
One important simplification is that I assume NO PREMIUM. So if you have an $11 call and the stock is trading at $12, I value tha contract at $1, even if there is a week until expiration. Calculating the true value would be WAY too complicated (if even possible), and so this model inherently UNDERESTIMATES gains, and the underestimation gets larger as you go further from expiration.
A "simple" example is here. Stock ABC is trading at $10. You buy 4 $9 puts at $1 and 4 $11 calls at $1. The options expire in 5 days, and you'd sell 1/2 of your position if the price doubles (<b>note that here I mean the combined price, since if the price rises your put value goes down, so you want to double your intial outlay in order to be riding "free" shares<b>), and another 1/4 if the price goes up 300%. The closing prices for the last 6 days were 10, 13, 16, 11, 12, 8. The stock went up 25% in the last 5 days (8 to 10) so recalibrating the values as if today was day 1, you'd have prices of 12.5, 16.25, 20, 13.75, 15, and 10. So what we're doing there is saying "if the % change for the last 5 days happened over the next 5 days (until options expiration), what would happen to the stock (and underlying option) price?". So after day 1, the price would now be at $15, and your $11 call would be worth $4. So you would have sold 2 contracts at $4 at some point during that day (you've now gotten your initial $800 back, and have 2 "free" contracts). The next day the price dropped from $15 to $13.75, so no further action would have occurred. The 3rd day the price went up to 20, so your call option would now be worth $9. So at some point during that day you would have sold 1 more call option at $8. You're now sitting on an $800 realized gain, and are riding 1 "free" contract. The 4th day the price drops to 16.25, so nothing happens. Then the 5th day (option expiration) the price closes at 12.50, so just before the close you sell yoru contract for $1.50 for another $150 gain, and your puts expire worthless.
So in the above example, both your 1st and 2nd sells were triggered, but had they not been, all 4 contracts would have been sold for $1.50 at expiration, and you would have lost $200.
The above process is repeated for each day that data is available (10+ years for most big board stocks), and then I do 4 calculations for multiple time periods. I find the number of gains, average gain/loss, maximum gain/loss, and minimum gain/loss (really just the maximum loss) for the last 5 trading days (~1 week), 10 days, 15 days, 20 days, 40 days, 60 days, 80 days, 100 days, 125 days (~6 months), 188 days (~9 months), 250 days (~1 year) 500 days (~2 years). So that is what I will refer to when I say things like "if I made this play each day in the last month I would have had a gain 15 of the 20 days, and made an average of $2,000", etc.
As I said, there are a lot of simplifications here, but I don't have the time or energy to correct them all.
Please let me know if you see anythign egregiously wrong in what I've done here.
Thanks.
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