This week was rough for me

I got my ass kicked this week by the market.

It started early in the week, when I bought WORK and SPCE call options, just before the market reversed course on Monday and sold off in the final hours of the day. Because the SPCE options expired on Friday of the same week, I had no choice to cut this loser. Only to see it rip higher Thursday and Friday.

I started the week in a hole, down $1,100.

I spent the rest of the week trying to climb out of the hole, only to make the situation worse. End result, down $4,000 on the week.

How did this happen?

Getting in a hole sucks. Spending the rest of the time trying to climb out of the hole led me to making sloppy trades, overtrading, and putting on trades that I wouldn’t normally make on SPY and IWM that I told myself were “hedges” in case the market sold again.

I forgot what was working.

I forgot how I made $12,000 in a matter of weeks from May 27th to June 19th.

Nothing seemed to work.

Every trade went against me as soon as I entered it. Or so I thought.

Either way, it doesn’t matter what they did.

What did matter was my mindset sucked. I was in a bad mental state, and desperately tried to “undo” my bad trades from the early part of the week, only to have even more bad trades to “undo”.

I wasn’t doing what works for me.

I started trading options expiring this week. I started day trading more even though I very much prefer swing trading a position for 1-2 weeks.

I cut winners too soon (primarily due to short-dated options being traded).

I let losers run on too long.

I added to losing positions.

I put on positions that were not favorable from the get go.

I spent too much time this week hoping for my positions to go in my favor.

Now is a time for reflection

It’s the weekend. My trading week sucked. But I still live to trade another day.

Goal #1 and always: DON’T LOSE ALL YOUR MONEY. When the money is gone, the game is over.

I’m going to take this weekend to reflect on my trades. I will review past trades further and understand what happened and why it happened. I will try to understand what my mental state was when I entered into those trades.

Trading is hard. It’s hard to tell by all the so-called experts all over social media. They’d have you believe they make profits all day. You rarely see is the hard part of trading. The part where it beats the shit out of you and makes you question why you started in the first place.

I share this for anyone else who had a bad day, week, month, or year. It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. I knew that. You know that. So take time to reflect, take care of yourself, and objectively review those trades and improve the process. It’s the only thing I know how to do.

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.

I was wrong

A few weeks back I was dumb enough to think selling would return to this ridiculous stock market.

I want to catch the next downturn. I think we all do.

Downturns provide opportunities for large profits.

Volatility events have been some of my most profitable times. The hardest part with shorting any market is being patient and strategic.

My gauge to short flashed

I have a few different metrics I monitor to gauge when are better times to short than others.

They began flashing on May 11 and 12, and sirens were going off on the 13th and 14th.

On the morning of the 14th, the market miraculously recovered. I felt like OPEX and VIX expiration would loosen up this market. Alast I was wrong. But, I ended up minimizing my losses from this due to position management.

Position sizing and profit taking

This is why position sizing and profit taking are key to succeeding in overcoming your emotions in the face of an uncertain future.

On May 12, I put on 100 SPY July 17 puts at the $110 strike for $0.03 per contract, totaling $300 (small bet).

On May 13, I took off 20 contracts at $0.06, for a total of $120. That was a 100% profit from the previous days price. Now, my cost minus proceeds received from this sale is $180 ($300-$120).

On May 14, I took off 20 more contracts at $0.10, for a total of $200. That was a 233% profit from the previous days price. Now, if I take the $180 above, and take off the $200 here, my cost minus proceeds now equals -$20 ($300-$120-$200). This means my remaining position is risk-free.

Risk-free? No way…

Yes way. I had 60 contracts left that could literally expire worthless, and I would have still made a profit on the entire trade. This is why it’s important to take profits along the way on any position you’re playing

Turned out I was wrong. But I played my signals, managed around the situation, and came out with a small profit (which actually turned into a small loss because I later added to it…).

But…I ended up with a smaller loss because I managed around an unknown future. At times in the past, I would’ve ridden the entire trade from top to bottom and loss damn near my full investment.

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.

What is ACTUALLY going on in the repo market?

Dissecting what’s going on in the repo markets

There are two sides to every deal. The repo markets are no different.

On one side of the deal, there are banks sitting on a large supply of cash. On the other side of the deal, there are the hedge funds that are sitting on a large supply of Treasuries.

Banks lend cash to hedge funds and hedge funds place Treasuries as collateral to banks. Hedge funds are able lever up trades they make on Treasuries.

How do they do it?

One increasingly popular hedge fund strategy involves buying US Treasuries while selling equivalent derivatives contracts such as interest rate futures, and then pocketing the difference. This is an arbitrage strategy that hedge funds use that would generally yield small profits.

The trade is not profitable on its own, given the close relationship and price between the two sides of the trade. Hedge funds use leverage via the repo markets to increase returns.

In some cases, hedge funds take those Treasury securities they own, and place it as collateral in the repo market for cash. Those hedge funds then use that cash to increase the size of their trade and buy more Treasuries, and place it as collateral in repo market for cash once again. This process can be repeated over and over to leverage off the potential returns of this trade.

The arbitrage strategy above was once popular amongst dealer banks themselves. However, higher capital charges have led to their displacement by hedge funds, due to hedge funds greater ability to take on the risk of this trade.

There has been a growing clout of hedge funds in repo market, including Millennium, Citadel, and Point 42, which are very active in repo market and are also the most highly leveraged multi-strategy funds in the world.

So what really happened in September 2019 in the repo market?

This brings us to the market on September 16, 2019. The secure overnight funding rate (SOFR) more than doubled in the intraday range jumped about 700 basis points (repo rates typically fluctuate in an intraday range of 10 to 20 basis points).

The repo rate reached as high as 10% that day.

sept repo

Some have speculated that end of quarter pressures put on banks to meet those regulatory guidelines caused the repo spike.

However, you have to consider that these overnight funding Market issues arose in mid-September. Not at the end of September when you would expect banks to hoard more cash.

What happened in August and September that could have caused issues in the repo Market that rippled through hedge funds?

We turn our attention to Treasuries and their performance in August and September.

From July 31st 2019 to August 15th 2019 TLT (20+ year Treasury Bond ETF) increased almost 13%. This was following the Fed’s first-rate cut after the tightening cycle that we saw ultimately in December 2018.

tlt prices

The Fed cut the rate 25 basis points and the Treasury market responded with an outsized move on Long-Term Treasuries in anticipation more easy money Fed policies becoming a mainstay. The Fed reiterated that the rate-cut was a “mid-cycle adjustment”, but that didn’t stop Long-Term Treasury prices from surging.

From September 5th to September 13th the same Long-Term Treasury bond prices dropped 7%. This could be due to the fact that investors realized they over adjusted the price of long-term treasuries and were now adjusting prices down to reflect new expectations.

I believe much of the volatility in the overnight repo markets has to do with these large moves in Treasuries, which increased volatility in any trade related to Treasuries, which in turn would have an effect on leveraged trades made by hedge funds on Treasuries. Banks may have recognized this, and grew reluctant to provide cash funding to this market for this and other regulator reasons.

There is still a lot of research and learning I need to do on this, but these are my thoughts on the repo markets as of January 20, 2020. Please share your insights in the comments below.

Who and What are primary dealers?

Primary dealers are trading counterparties of the New York Fed in the implementation of monetary policy. The make markets for the NY Fed as needed, and bid on a pro-rate basis in all Treasury auctions at reasonably competitive prices.

There are 24 banks designated as primary dealers. Well known banks that are primary dealers include JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi Group, Deutsche Bank, just to name a few.

Why do we have primary dealers?

Primary dealers are counterparties who buy government securities and resell them to the overall market. These are banks that have an inside track to buy US Treasuries.

Primary dealers purchase the vast majority of the U.S. Treasury securities (T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds) sold at auction. They will then resell those securities to the public. Their activities extend well beyond the Treasury market.

Arguably, this group’s members are the most influential and powerful non-governmental institutions in global financial markets.

Where are primary dealers located?

Many dealers are in the US. There are also dealers across the globe, including Japan and Europe that distribute US Treasuries to those geographical areas of the world.

What are the requirements for primary dealers?

Firms must meet specific capital requirements before it can become a primary dealer.

The capital requirements for broker-dealers that are not affiliated with a bank is $50 million. Banks acting as primary dealers need to have $1 billion of Tier 1 capital (equity capital and disclosed reserves).

Prospective primary dealers need to show they made markets consistently in Treasuries for at least a year before their application.

How to download S&P 500 data from Yahoo Finance using Python

Make sure you have the yfinance package installed first. If you don’t, you can run the following command in your Jupyter notebook:

!pip install yfinance

Input:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import yfinance as yf

Input:

spy_ohlc_df = yf.download('SPY', start='1993-02-01', end='2019-12-01')

Output:

[*********************100%***********************]  1 of 1 downloaded

Input:

spy_ohlc_df.head()

Output:

Conclusion

This is a very brief summary of how you can download stock data information for the S&P 500 from Yahoo Finance, using the Python programming language. If there is something you want to learn about, please let me know in the comments below and I can cover it in a future blog post.

It’s not if, but rather when will a market pullback happen

We’ve had an extremely long run up in the market over the past month and a half.

The S&P 500 is up 8.8% since October 8. The market has barely had much of a pullback since this rally started. It feels like the market won’t pullback at any point soon. But it will happen.

There are a lot of questions to think about though when it comes to timing a pullback in prices:

How much long will markets run higher before the market pulls back?
What will the depth of the pullback be when it does happen?
What is the likely magnitude of the pullback?

These are all impossible to know, but are at least worth considering.

My prediction is that we experience a pullback sometime after December 20, 2019. Why that date? It’s the infamous quad witching date. What’s that?

What Is Quadruple Witching?

Quadruple witching refers to a date on which stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures expire simultaneously. While stock options contracts and index options expire on the third Friday of every month, all four asset classes expire simultaneously on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December.

Source

There is large gamma exposure coming off the books on this date. To the order of $2.7 billion. Source

There are the potential risks that could be a tipping point as well. If any catalysts materialize, a pullback is likely.

Possible risks include:

No trade deal with China, or worse, a more tense U.S.-China relationship.
Issues in the short-term funding market where the Fed can no longer control short-term interest rates
Bad guidance on future earnings
Declining GDP becoming more known

I believe a pullback could see much of gains up to this point being wiped out. $2900 isn’t out of the question of being tested at some point in mid-December to mid-January. That’d be down 7.7% from where we are currently at.

A deeper decline is possible, but would need to be closer before any thoughts about it happening.

I think a pullback could be very quick, 3-4 days like August and May pullbacks. Some even say it could be like February 2018 pullback, but I’m not so sure that the magnitude would reach that level.

With that being said, my predictions are usually wrong. Follow Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. So make sure you hedge your bets and spread them out intelligently over some specified time frame.

Did the Federal Reserve Kill the Volatility Trade?

On October 11, 2019, the Federal Reserve announced they would begin buying Treasury Bills in an effort to ensure there are “ample reserves” in the banking system through the end of the year.

fed treasury oct 11

On October 11, 2019, the Volatility Index (VIX) sat at 17.4. Today on November 26, 2019 the VIX has recently closed at 11.5. As you can see from below, it appears as though this not-QE program that is “organically” growing the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has effectively killed the long VIX trade.

fed vix chart

The case made that supports this idea is that investors are engaging in more risk on behavior, because they are basing their decisions based on the Federal Reserve’s prior balance sheet expansion programs (QE 1-3).

Because the Fed is purchasing T-bills, they have eased some of the money market pressures. Liquidity in the market has proven to be a positive catalyst to the market.

Why do I believe this?

It can’t be the trade deal.

That’s the only other source that has been moving the markets higher according to many daily stock market new reporters. And I don’t believe these markets are pushing higher on hopes of a trade deal.

I think the Fed’s easy money policies have once again eased tensions. For now.

A lesson to me

This whole scenario has taught me a valuable lesson about position sizing. I’ve learned to not be so overconfident in my predictions.

Every trade made is a small bet. Each bet will abide by the Kelly criterion.

Never go all in.

Grow your money slowly and strategically.

Live to trade another day.

Read

Barton_options on Twitter has been a great resource for me to learn more about the Federal Reserve operations and how it relates to the Treasury and the overall economy.

He recently wrote about this in a newsletter you can read here.

This is what’s going to happen in the market this week

In this article, I’m going to review my past predictions and make some new ones.

On August 3rd, I wrote a post laying out what I thought would happen. Shall we take a look?

As I mentioned earlier, I expect IWM to pullback 5-7% since it broke the $153.50 support level earlier today.

IWM finished this week down 1.28%. I didn’t put a date on the 5-7% pullback, but this is something I expect to play out within the next two weeks.

This would give you a range of $144.95 all the way down to $141.90 coming into play.

At a minimum, I do believe that $145 will be retested. This is the level that IWM dropped to in May following the added tariff announcements. See IWM chart below:

iwm81019

SPY is a little trickier for me. It tends to whipsaw in price when volatility picks up, possibly due to algorithmic and HF trading. I think we see SPY revisit $285 range before the end of next week (Aug 9 expiry), but it’ll be a rocky ride.

SPY surprised me this week with the massive selloff that took place on Monday. I thought it would be a rockier ride to get down to $285, but we actually touched as low as $281.72 on Monday!

I was correct about the whipsaw though! Tuesday and Wednesday started off as days that looked like they were ripe for shorting, but the market ripped back almost 2% higher come Thursday, and 4% higher off Wednesday’s lows.

I believe that this upcoming week (August 12-19) will see SPY dropping as low as $279, retesting those levels reached around May 13 this year, in the midst of the May selloff that took place.

I’m also watching the $272 price level to get rested in the next two weeks. See SPY chart below:

I think VIX will also whipsaw next week, seeing a range with a low 14.7 and all the way up to 23.5. That’s just my guess.

This week, VIX saw a high of 24.8 and a low of 16.8. Not too bad of a prediction!

Next week I’m looking for a high of 26 on VIX and a low of 17. Keep in mind, when VIX is this high and with the current news, a much higher VIX is always possible.

I mentioned on my Twitter that I picked up some VXX call options and XLF put options to set up for whatever could happen next week.

These are a small part of my portfolio. I have positions both long and short in tickers or tickers derived from the ones mentioned above.