I’m sorry for anybody shorting this market

This is a difficult market to get a read on, that’s for sure.

Shorting the market right now is a fool’s errand. Whether you believe liquidity from the Fed is driving the market higher or not doesn’t matter.

The market wants to go higher. That’s where the path of least resistance continues to be at the moment.

Selloffs are very few and far between. You have to be tactical and quick with any shorts in this market. They can payoff, as they did for me on Thursday and part of Friday. But they stop working very quickly.

We are all waiting for the next big selloff. It may come. It may not. For that reason you have to be careful until we get there.

I learned my lesson last year

I got burned time after time shorting the market for the larger part of 2019.

I was focused on fundamentals, trade war headlines, and a seemingly deteriorating market.

So I shorted consistently all of last year. I came very close to blowing up actually. I was down 80% at one point.

It wasn’t until March of this year that my short positions paid of very handsomely and actually got me back to even despite the horrible 2019 year.

In recent weeks my trading has improved

I’m more focused on what VVIX and VIX are telling me in terms of volatility. If I believe these are trending higher, then I’m going to be biased to mix in long and short trades to capitalize on a move in either direction.

However, if VVIX and VIX are trending lower, them I’m biased to hold a majority of my positions long in the market, depending on what is moving on that given day. In recent weeks, I’ve been able to make good plays on the likes of XLF, GS, JPM, BA, UAL, RCL, CCL, F, TSLA, XOM, AMD, NVDA, VIAC just to name a few.

Take profits and cut losers

I like to play options that are 2-4 weeks away from their expiration date. Weekly options (5 or less days to expiration) are too risky for my style right now. I like to give my options a little breathing room.

I watch my positions like a hawk. When I begin getting down 20% I seriously have to consider cutting this position and taking a loss. Once I’m down 40% I cut it no questions asked.

I also try to take profits on 50% of the position around a 10% gain (or more if it’s there). Then I take off another 25% around a 20% gain (or more). The I leave the final 25% of my position to run to see how far it can go.

Last week I had a SPY put option that I let run, that went from $90 to $630 in a matter of days. In the past, I would have never let it go that far because I would’ve booked all of my profits too soon. But because I had already closed out 80% of the position at a gain, that last contract I was holding was essentially risk-free and I had no problems holding it for a little longer.

If you want to learn more about trading psychology, I highly recommend you check out my notes on Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas.

Been playing lotto calls on big movers…

This market is insane. For that reason, I’ve been playing short-term call options on those names getting bid the most recently.

Banks, airlines, cruise lines, oil, casinos, retailers, are all industries I’ve dipped into and out of recently. I’ve traded it on short-term call options about 3-7 weeks out.

My main focus is to take of 1/4 of a position at 10% profits, another 2/4 position at 20-30% profits, and then let the remainder of the position run. Taking profits is critical to setting up risk-free trades.

That’s the way it has to be played right now.

It’s very very very easy to adopt a bearish mindset right now.

The market is going insane.

But I’m thinking about it like the tech bubble.

My main focus is to keep my holdings short. I never held any of my lotto positions past 2 days unless it was the 1/4 winning position remaining.

It’s much much easier to let winners run when you booked 3/4 of your position at a profit. Those runners have ended up making up my big home runs in recent days.

My best trade was UAL last Friday, which I booked at 361% profit. F also netted me 192% profit.

I cut losers at around 20-40% drawdown on these positions without any regrets. It’s worked out well so far. But that can change very quickly.

The return of selling in the stock market

I believe we are about to see heavy selling in the market once again.

We have seen the return of some selling, with the S&P 500 down 4.7% this week as of my writing on May 14th.

Why do I believe this?

Coming into this week, I expected a calm week with usual options expiration (OPEX) week behavior. From my observations, market makers can usually move markets and control price action more strongly some weeks than other.

Market makers can influence markets especially in times when volume is low and volatility is low. This week, the market has seen more selling than usual during OPEX week from my experience.

Not only that, but we haven’t seen the drastic moves in the S&P futures contracts overnight. Last week, it felt like every day we were seeing moves higher after a day of selling off during regular trading hours. See tweet below:

on moves 5-14-20

The last time I remember feeling like this during an OPEX week was for the trading week ended February 21, 2020 and we all remember what followed over the next month.

What are gamma levels saying?

On May 11, 2020 I noted that $2.2 bn in positive gamma was coming off books this opex Friday.

tweet 5-14-20

Now these options could have been rolled out or closed altogether. We never really know. But I expected much of this gamma exposure to be moved in a manner that would bring us closer to zero gamma.

With all the selling this week, gamma levels have now turned negative across the board according to spotgamma. This is not good if you are bullish equities right now.

spotgamme 5-14-20

While component gamma is still positive, per Squeezemetrics, and DIX signals that Dark Pools continue their buying binge, I can’t ignore headwinds that we are going to face in the next week or two.

squeeze 5-14-20

What headwinds are we faced with?

Will we see a second wave of infections?

What businesses are going to go out of business for good?

How many of the now 36 million lost jobs will actually be recovered?

What will be the recovery time of those lost jobs?

What kind of demand shocks are we in store for over the next year or two?

How far is the Fed willing to go with their monetary policies?

Will the Fed buy equities?

With all of these questions unanswered, it’s very difficult to be bullish right now.

We are all at the mercy of news trading algos

It’s become commonplace for news stories to drastically and instantly influence the movement of stock prices. This has become more observable in the past two years, with China trade deal news dominating headlines seemingly every day.

According to Larry Harris (Trading & Exchanges) there are four kinds of informed traders, with news traders exhibiting the second most influence on the market. According to Harris:

News traders collect and act upon new information about instrument values. They try to predict out instrument values will change, given new information. News traders try very hard to discover material information before other traders to.

Unlike value traders, news traders do not estimate the value of an instrument from first principles and all available data. Instead, they implicitly assume that current prices accurately reflect all information except their news.

It’s difficult trying to day trade or swing trade around the drastic changes in stock prices that are triggered from a single headline.

Many algorithms are programmed as news traders, which read news headlines or tweets and have some pre-programmed objective-based method of interpreting the sentiment of those headlines.

Algorithmic trading has been of much chagrin of people in Wall Street such as Jim Cramer. Earlier this fall, Cramer said the following about machine trading

Cramer blamed the errant jumps in the transport stocks on machine trading, calling the buying “robotic.”

“Real human buyers wouldn’t pay up eight points for FedEx on no news, unless they think there’s going to be some sort of takeover, which there probably isn’t. Real buyers work an order. They wait for sellers to come to them,” he said. “Instead, these machine buyers they blitzed all the sellers all the way up, and you have to believe they didn’t even attempt to try to get a good price for their customers.”

The dreary truth

We have to accept the fact that algorithmic trading is a part of the market as we know it.

As a day trader you will always at the mercy of algorithms suddenly going against your positions which makes day trading harder than it already is.

If you’re a swing trader, you can ride out the waves because news headline trading tends to smooth out over time (unless it’s something dramatic like a President Trump tweet tantrum).

So we must deal with it, must learn from it, and must learn how to trade with or around it. It’s up to you what you do.