I’ve got five different vertical spreads going, but they’re all leaning toward the bearish side. Just to mix things up, I’d like to offer a long idea for a change: the energy sector, as represented by symbol XOP.
Energy Spread
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Strategy Guide
The options-ization of Slope continues this weekend, with me spending a fair bit of time putting together a simple strategy guide which you can see here. The purpose of this new page is to serve as a repository for basic information about various options strategies, which will become increasingly important as our new SOAP tool has its own capabilities expanded. (It presently just handles call spreads and put spreads).
Please give my new page the once-over, and if you see anything egregiously wrong, please, drop me a line! This is just the beginning, but I certainly want the quality of the information to be solid, so I appreciate the extra sets of eyeballs.
Spread Stuff
My nascent efforts as an options spread trader are still going pretty well! I just closed my TLT spread for a nice profit. I originally bought the 146 puts and sold the 140 puts. The price traversed that range beautifully. Here is TLT with the strike prices tinted:
Payoff Analyzer
I am very pleased to be announcing the introduction of a new tool here on Slope known as SOAP, which stands for Slope Options Analyzer for Payoffs. That’s a mouthful, so we’ll just refer to it as the Payoff Analyzer.
You can access the Payoff Analyzer by clicking here or choosing it from the Options menu:
Two Good Spreads
For obvious reasons, I’m taking it kind of easy in this Kafka-esque market we’re in. I cannot wait………let me say that again – – Can……… Not…….. Wait….. for the good people for the Chinese delegation to hop on a plane and go home. This has become just absurd.
In the meanwhile, I’ve got to say my interest-sensitive put spreads are doing nicely. I’ve marked in green where I bought the puts and magenta where I sold them. I’m up to about 35% of its potential profit now.
