Balance and Patience

It is my personal belief and experience that on the whole (for every trader no matter what their tools), patience is your biggest competitive edge over Wall Street. You can pick and chose your battles or you can decide to stand aside, few funds can stand aside (other than moving to safe haven assets like Treasuries or hedge), we however can.

Today I think was a very successful day in managing patience and flexibility as were are in a very fluid situation that has repercussions that no one can fully imagine. In an environment like this I want to be patient with the positions I have established as they are set to fully take advantage of a black swan event, but as to new positions, this environment is very fluid so one must be very careful.

Today AAPL was giving a strong  negative signal the trade was entered at 10:15 a.m. using puts and then exited as momentum seemed to swing at 1:10 p.m. for a gain of +28% for 3 hours, this was a good gain, low risk, but the point was it was picking your battle and then standing aside.

So as part of my assessment of what action I want to take, if any, I took a quick look at the market. Do I want to enter shorts or puts? Are there any longs I want to enter?

Here's what I found in a basic look at the 3C charts, the best vs the minimum worst.

 As for the DIA, I couldn't find any charts that were bullish looking, the 10 min chart looks really bad, there are other charts that look worse, but I'm just trying to get a bare minimum, local feeling.

 IWM 3 min positive divergence, this is about as strong as the IWM gets.

 The IWM 15 min chart looks very severe.

 The QQQ 10 min chart is probably one of the strongest on the bullish side.

 However at 30 min, it looks pretty bad.

 3 min SPY IS ABOUT AS POSITIVE AS IT GETS

The 10 min SPY is again pretty ugly.

So what do I decide based on this, to me there's not enough of a case to make any new long commitments beyond my scope of influence, that means I don't want to establish any new longs that are held overnight. If anything my bias is to the downside based on the charts, but even then I think in most cases, like GOOG, we are a bit too far from a great entry with low risk.

I'm fine with holding the established GOOG April Puts and the equity short position, I'd probably be fine with an equity short position here too although I think it can be had at a better area. I don't want to add to or start any new puts in GOOG at the moment because prices on puts haven't fallen with a strong gain over a day or intraday. I want to establish a put at the best discount and the best timing possible, I don't feel strongly about that right now.

 It looks like a weak move to the upside early tomorrow is possible, so I want to look at that, although I don't want to buy it. If there's a strong signal like AAPL had today, then that is something we look at when we get there, but for now patience with the current positions is the name of the game. In fact you saw the option model portfolio gains for the week and placement number 5 of 606 with a +23.45% weekly portfolio gain.

The Equity model tracking portfolio alo did very well...

 A 4.23% total portfolio return and #47 of 1417.

This week some of the positions that have been built that are coming together include:

AMD long, which is up 10% over the last 2 trading weeks.
UNG long, which has run about + 22% over the last month.
IOC Short, which is gained nearly 8% since the March 11 Entry near the very highs.
AMZN Short is working, although I'd like a bit of a bounce to add to the position or at least give others the chance to get in at a good area.
ERY long is just starting to really look ready for a strong move as well as VXX...

The typical "new" Double Bottom with a head fake shakeout first and in to strong 60 min leading positive divergences.

We'll probably start some new core positions as well, but as I said, for now, just let the trade come to you, there are plenty of assets out there, no need to rush it.