Hi Zen,
First let me say I appreciate you guys who stick your neck out in the line of fire to bring a small community together. Second, I'd like to say:
"I have seen the error of my evil shorting ways. I just closed all my shorts, sold my puts, bought back my calls, bought 5000 shares of GX at 9 1/2, 20,000 shares of MFNX at 4.055, and 50 Apr37 QQQ calls at 1.60. That means bring on the crash, the low fruit is ready for plucking."
I don't often box a stock, but if there's a lot of volatility in a trading range I'll box a stock as a pseudo-straddle. When the QQQ's hit 39, I had no idea if they were going up or down. But I was pretty sure they would be going past 43 1/2 on the upside and below 39 on the downside in the future. This let me protect my account from the long going further down, as well as not get whipsawed by selling the long, going short, and having the QQQ's reverse right away. I have now covered the short at 35.9 (as well as bought back my QQQ 39 calls for 1.05). At this point my net gain/loss on the long including the boxes is close to flat (haven't figured it exactly). If at this point if it heads back up, everything is profit from here on up. Now if I had known exactly what was going to happen, yes, I would have been better off to have run the shorts, shorted the calls, and sold the long at 43. But, I didn't know. So now, if QQQ's go back over 43 1/2, I will have made a full profit on every single one of those individual transactions, as well as the long.
Best,
Steve
P.S. Despite it's facetious tone, I really did do everything I listed in the second paragraph. |
