Day 1 September 1, 2022
Gonna try a little Day trading with options test starting today September 1, 2022. I may not trade every single day, but will try to trade at least several times per week, and show the results. Primarily this will be with SPY options. This will not be using real money, but rather a “paper trading” account I set up with WallStreetSurvivor.com in an account I set up about a month ago, and I have been playing around with it. Actually in playing around with it, I have lost most of the original $100,000 that I started with, and the starting amount this morning in the account was $5228.98 with the margin amount about double that. Since I intend to only trade options in the account, margin doesn’t matter anyway. This WallStreetSurvivor.com website does have some limitations that may impact the trading, primarily in that it is setup to not allow trading of all SPY options, which are normally available to expire on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but they only allow trading of the “Friday” expiring SPY options so I will be restricted to that day. This also means I will probably NOT be trading on Fridays too much, since I never trade on the day an option actually expires. So the only trading I will do on Fridays, is perhaps trade the following Friday on some occasions. I will start out trading 5 options per trade, either puts or calls depending on the market direction. Please note I trade generally for a short period of time, holding the option rarely more than an hour, often much less. I fully expect to have losses, probably several times a week. Lets see how this turns out:
Day 1 Trades
I only made one trade today, although there was actually several opportunities, as it turned out an up day after several down days previously. I trade exclusively on technical analysis, I try to avoid trading on days of big announcements especially if the FED is involved, and generally do not trade before 10am.
I missed the first big upswing after 10am (where I should have entered), but bought 5 390 calls (market price) at 10:59am on the second upswing, which is actually not bad since those first moves can happen quite fast, and sometimes be deceptive. I bought at market, and put in a limit order to sell all 5 contracts, at $4.24 which was executed at 11:36am (see below).
So this trade made a real nice gain of $585 which is a gain of 38% on the invested amount of $1535, and a gain of over 10% on the overall starting account amount of $5228.98. Please do not expect gains like this all of the time, as often I am quite happy with gains quite lower than 5%. I did not make any other trades today, although if you look at the chart there was a nice downward move at about 11:45 or so. So, I ended the day with $5813.98 in my paper account. As mentioned above, I may or may not be trading tomorrow as its Friday.
Here is info on one of the trading books I admire, available on Amazon, by Toni Turner
Bye for now,
Dan Parliman