Opened Iron Condor on AAPL

As if I haven't been abused enough by AAPL, I'm going to open an Iron Condor on it.

This is my trade:
Buy Feb '08 230 call @ .60
Sell Feb '08 220 call @ 1.04
Buy Feb '08 125 put @ .97
Sell Feb '08 135 put @ 2.16
Credit $1.63

So I'm opening this, but because AAPL is on my Sh*t list, I'm only doing 1 contract.

Opened Put Diagonal on DRYS

Looking to take advantage of the recent bearish sentiment in the market and opened a Put Diagonal on DRYS today.

Bought 4 contracts of the Jun '08 85 put for 29.85 and sold 4 contracts of the Feb '08 55 put for 4.05.

My CB is 25.80

My stop-loss is 20.64

Closed BDK and KO

Finally closed out BDK and KO - the last two of my first four long trades.

So as a recap - I bought a 100 shares each of these stocks. With my initial "rookie" analysis, I expected KO to continue on a bullish trend, increasing my stock value. BDK had just come off a big sell off, and what appeared to me as a gap down, so I was expecting a rebound in the stock price... yeah, that didn't happen.

After a few days of sitting with this long stock, I decided to sell a call on each so that I would at least be making some money in time decay.

In closing BDK, I lost $320 on a CB of $6865 for a 5% loss, and for KO I lost $62 on a CB of $6487 for a loss of less than 1%.

So I spent $382 on an education in long stocks, calls and how not to read charts :)

Stop Loss fired on AAPL

Well I got stopped out of AAPL today. My stop loss was set at $33.05 and with AAPL reaching a low of $170 today, that's all she wrote.

This is a case where I got in just as it turned, so now I need to focus on preserving capital.

1/10/08 Put diagonal on WYNN

Bought 4 contracts of the Jun '08 130 puts for -$27.80 and sold 4 contracts of the Feb '08 100 puts for +$3.95

CB is $23.85

Stop-Loss is $19.08

1/7/08 Opened a Vertical on NILE

Bought 4 contracts of the Feb '08 80 calls for -$.93 and sold 4 contracts of the Feb '08 75 calls for +$1.60

So I'm at a +$.67 a share on 4 contracts.

Price of NILE is currently at $59.15

We'll let this one ride to expiration.

AAPL adjustments for 1/7/08 - 1/10/08

Well we've survived a 30 point sell-off of Apple over the last few days and this is how we did it:

1/07/08 Rolled AAPL

Bought Jan '08 185 at a cost of $4.28.

We add this back to our CB of $56.58. $56.58 + $4.28 = $60.86.

We then sell the the Jan '08 170 for $11.92.

So we subtract the $11.92 from the adj. CB of $60.86 which equals $48.94.

Our new CB for AAPL is $48.94.

If we want to set our stop-loss so that we don't lose any more than 20%, we take $48.94 x .2 which equals $9.78 and subtract this from our CB of $48.94 which equals $39.16.

An easier way to do this is to just take $48.94 x .8 (this shows us what 80% of $48.94 is) which is $39.15. So we go into ThinkorSwim and set our Stop-Loss for $39.15.

1/10/08 Rolled AAPL

I did this one the same way as the one above so I won't explain all the math:

Bought the Jan '08 170 @ 11.45 and sold the Feb '08 170 @ 19.20 for a credit of $7.75

CB is now $41.19

Stop-Loss is $32.95

We've lowered our CB $27.96 since we started this diagonal.