Vacation update and late Monthly report: 122 -14 Grade B

I am back from my trip. Suffice it to say, I would have been better off not doing any trading. I took some big hits in NFLX, FB and am in the red on several other trades in GOOGL and other underlyings.

For the monthly option cycle ending 7/21/18, I count 122 winners 14 losers. Please understand that most are high probability trades, so a high win rate is baked into the cake. I use the strike price as a mental stop level. Some of the losers were big ones, whoppers 500% 1000% 3000% of the premium collecte.

Here are a few etfs, best to worst for 2018 performance:

IWM 10.5% Russell 2000 U.S. small cap
SPY 5.1% SP500 U.S. large cap

TLT -4.8% U.S. 20 year Treasury bonds
GLD -5.7% gold

EEM -6.7% emerging markets equity
SLV -8.8% silver

My account was +11.8% through July third week expiration. That's the good news. At that point, I was ahead of the pack, well ahead of SPY. Since then I lost a couple of percentage points, so the current year to date is more like +9%, which isn't bad, but it was better. It's been a tough couple of weeks and a day.

I decided not to post the trades during the time away. I’ll resume posting weekly trade summaries this Saturday. Someone asked me today, if this is a buying opportunity. My answer: I don’t know. The market will tell me what to do.

Rule #1 is to live to trade another day.