It’s been a few days and GLD continues moving up slowly.

The weekly calendar needed to be adjusted but since it expires today I am not posting the picture here.

The Oct/Nov Calendar is still within the breakevens. It is trading right now at $126.72 and the upside breakeven is $127.95. Here is what the trade looks like right now. Notice how it has gotten close to the upside breakeven.

GLD Option Calendar Spread

If I add the 128 Oct/Nov Calendar it will look like this:

GLD Calendar Spread Update

This will center GLD in our trade and extend the breakevens. But I am going to hold off making this adjustment until GLD moves up a bit closer.

When adjusting you need to look at multiple factors. Time decay is working in our favor and so holding off on an adjustment can result in a higher yield. Also, even though the trade is far from [...]

Here is a trade I am looking at today.

Iron Condor in YUM:

Sell 6 Sept 46 Calls,   Buy 6 Sept 48 Calls

Sell 6 Sept 42 Puts, Buy 6 Sept 40 Puts

Thinkorswim is showing the mid price to be .18 cents. So the credit would be $108 and the margin would be $1092. That means the potential ROI is 9.8%. There are 9 days left to expiration. With so little time left, there is no room for adjustments so the trade would be to ride it to expiration.

The breakevens are 41.86 and 46.20. As long as YUM expires within these two breakevens, the trade is profitable. The trade has a 65.15% probability of making money.

This one would be a good one to papertrade. The one downside on this iron condor is the commissions. If you are paying too much for commissions, this trade does not have the proper risk/reward. In your case you would [...]

Would you like a 17% one day return?

That’s what one of my members got today. He actually did much better than I did. I am still in this trade. He was able to get in at a much better price than I did yesterday and already exited the trade today.

The trade is a butterfly on IBM. For members, it is May Trade #2

I got into the trade for a debit of 1.24, but this member got in at 1.15. For 4 contracts his cost was $460.

He sold the butterfly and exited the trade for 1.35 today. That’s a gain of $80 and a return of 17.39% – in one day!

I myself am up a little less than 10% so far.  Hopefully I too will be out in a couple more days with a nice double digit gain.

A little over a year ago I went to one of those free trading seminars provided by companies that want you to sign up for their coaching or training.

The concept they were teaching was day trading and so it did not interest me very much, but a couple things the speaker said were very interesting. The guy’s name was Tom Busby.

He said that once a stock breaks a hundred $ level for the first time it zooms up 10%.  For example, once a stock breaks through $100 it is going to $110. When it breaks through $200 it is going to $220, etc.

I had heard this before somewhere so I started looking it up. It turns out that Jesse Livermore mentioned this in one of his books. Livermore was probably the best trader of all time.

So now with two reference points I decided this was something worthy of looking into. [...]

Is Gold a bubble or the trade of a lifetime?

Maybe both.

I have not been in the gold trade myself. But several of my members are, and doing very well so far.

Here is a chart provide by one such member. It shows that the stock of gold companies, miners, etc continue to appreciate evn though gold prices peaked earlier. If this hold true this time, even if gold has peaked, which it does not look like it has, the miners will continue to rally.

Last week a member emailed saying that it looked like GLD had topped out and would I consider selling calls. My answer: No Way.

This train still has momentum on its side as you can tell from the rally today. What I did do on Friday, was to buy a debit spread in GLD.

I bought the Jan 115 Calls and Sold the Jan 118 Calls. I paid about $100 [...]