Monday, February 13, 2012

Couple of Quick Updates

Good days are quickly maligned by trading errors. Best to stick them in a hole and move on. Take your lesson or your lump and keep slinging. I guess that maybe, just maybe its a zero-sum game and one of these days I'm going to have the winning error of a lifetime. That being said, I have no intention of holding my breathe for that moment.

I want to write about just a few of the Eurodollar positions we have on and how we're managing them.

Currently we have an outright long position in the Dec '12 - '13 -'14 butterfly. We established the position from roughly -35.25 and though we've scalped some intraday {+/- a 4 tick move} we are holding our longs. Against it, as a micro-hedge, we're looking to sell the Dec '13 - 14 -'15 fly. Though we're NOT doing this trade one to one {therefore not establishing a true Eurodollar double fly 1 x -3 x 3 x -1} we are doing this to allow ourselves a chance to catch the fly contracts rolling through different periods and configurations. We expect the Z2/3/4 to appreciate and the Z3/4/5 to sell off based on our analysis of their trends vs the constant maturity charts.

The March - June spread has been a lot of fun to trade as of late. We hedged our short position by layering into the March - June - Sept butterfly at -3.5 and -4. That fly is currently trading -1 and we're now short from that level. This is not a home run type trade. Rather we're just trying to catch the fluctuations as it meanders through various price levels and back. Ideally, we hope to be completely out of this fly by the week's end {2/17/12}.

Finally, we've continued to buy back our short deltas versus the Green March 9912.5 straddle that we're long. We maintain a short delta position of 50% from a price of 9931. Our straddle is still roughly the same price we bought it at {18 vs 18.5}. Also, in order to buy more deltas in, we have sold 50% of the puts that comprised our straddle at a price of 4 ticks. This allowed us to lock in some profits, get long some deltas, and avoid the impending acceleration in the theta decay. We still have 75% of our original position and have resting GTC's to cover our remaining shorts as we approach the strike. Conversely, we have GTC sells out our recently purchased deltas.

Hopefully your day was error free and full of huge PnL.

~LH

No comments: