Busy with damage control

The last two days have been a little hectic. The market's big run up isn't good for delta neutral traders, especially if they were already leaning a little negative deltas!

First the good news. Monday's big run up allowed three of my bull put credit spreads to exit with their profit targets. This included EWZ, ICE and GS, exiting for 7.5%, 8.8% and 8.2% respectively.

Next up was an adjustment on my SPX calendar. It started as a 915 calendar on 5/20, turned into a double calendar a day later by adding a 850 put calendar, and with the run back up on Monday, I took off the 850 calendar for a $450 loss and am now sitting at the 915 calendar's upper break even point, and -14% loss. Not bad considering the massive whipsaw this trade has gone through in just 11 days. If SPX doesn't retreat soon, I'll consider another adjustment, or possibly just take off the trade.

As for my June RUT high prob iron condor, I didn't reach my $0.10 call buyback price on Friday, and now the spread (570-580) is trading for $0.72, more than I originally sold it for 21 days ago. I did buy back my puts (390-400) for $0.13 today. Last Friday I was up 8%, now only 4%.

As for the really bad news, I started my July RUT HP IC a little early. I put a fraction of my normal size trade on last Friday. Due to some technical difficulties (computer access issues) the order was left working since morning, and executed in Friday afternoon's big runup. In fact, it executed after 3pm CT. So the first of the bad news is that my fill was horrible. It was based on prices earlier in the day, not after the runup. Secondly, I didn't receive an SMS that the trade filled until after 3:15pm CT, which means I didn't put on my "insurance". I wasn't able to buy my extra long puts and calls. And for those of you familiar with iron condors, especially the high prob, you know that you're leaning quite short deltas and the profit (LOSS) curve drops quite steeply going up. Normally this wouldn't have been an issue overnight, or over weekend, but this wasn't a typical Monday morning open. And with Tuesday's continued climb, I decided to cut some deltas by buying back half of my call spreads. Even with the huge run up over the last couple days, the put IV is up nearly 8%, causing the put spread to retain most of its value, so I can't even buy it back cheaply.

Lastly is an adjustment I made on COST today. COST is hanging around my upper breakeven, so I decided to give it a little more room by buying a few 47.5-50 call spreads. You can see the before and after (red) below on OptionVue: