All February Option Credit Spreads Expired Worthless This Week!!!!!

All Bull Put and Bear Call Spread trades expired worthless on Friday February 16th. 4 Bull Put Spreads trades on the 3 Indexes were traded first followed by a Bear Call Spread trade on the SPX Index. The NDX Bear Call Spread was entered last month as part of a rolling adjustment and will not be counted as part of this month's return performance.

The total return this month was 2.5% ($160/$6,340). All credit premiums collected totaled $160 (20+30+20+20+70) and the margin required per contract was $6,340 (980+970+980+980+2,430). If you traded 10 contracts per spread your credits totaled $1,600, 20 contracts $3,200. This 2.5% return missed my goal of at least 3%. Only one Iron Condor trade was completed on the SPX index causing this lower than expected return. With at least 2 Iron Condors completed each month the return should be 3-4% and with 3 Iron Condors 4-5%.

Those subscribers who rolled the January NDX Bear Call trade to the February (1900/1925) were rewarded this week because the spread trade expired. The strategy worked perfectly and prevented realizing a loss on a spread trade in trouble. By closing and rolling this Bear Call spread we successfully extended the time frame for realizing a profit from the original trade filled in January.

This weekend I will be emailing new credit spread trades expiring in March. We are doing very well with Bull Put trades so I will be focused on these first for each index. If I can execute a safe Iron Condor I will certainly do this. Last month we started entering our limit amounts using 1/2 of the bid/ask midpoints. All my trades were filled at these higher limits amounts as were the trades for the majority of subscribers who sent me emails. I will continue this process for all future trades. In the instance our trades are not filled I will email a replacement trade.

If any subscriber would like a Flash movie illustrating the steps to order a credit spread trade please send me an email. I have Flash movies made using OptionsXpress, TradeKing, Interactive Brokers and Think Or Swim. I have a subscriber making the IB and TOS movies because I do not have accounts with these 2 brokers. This subscribe is also helping me to create a PDF movie file that should work on subscriber's computers who are experiencing problems running the HTML and .SWF files. For the PDF movie to run you must have Adobe Reader 8.0 which can be downloaded for free at Adobe's website.
Click to view more details of these
February trades.