Feb 102016
 

OMG this is absolute madness! A market anomaly that is the most insane thing. SPY 185!
Or wait that SoyBean 999.75 thing was just as crazy. But anyway,, the 185 level for SPY is pretty heavy duty, and now it’s a very obvious thing. If you haven’t noticed, today is the 3rd day in a row of the SPY close at 185. Think it’s a coincidence? In the most volatility market in a long time what are chances it will close 185 3 days in a row.  WTF!

Where do I begin..?

Check out the SPY daily.

2016-02-10_16-05-40

Huge gaps and huge runs, but wait… Today’s action was real weird. Yellen spoke and the market went nuts and spiked way up to break to new session highs, but then look.

2016-02-10_16-21-10

The /ES squeezed all fricken day on the 15min, of coarse until the end of the day when they stuck it to the 185 on SPY. When have you seen that before? Plus this morning crude dropped into the 27 range and it would usually take the market to lower levels, but the market didn’t give a shit cause Yellen opened her big mouth.

2016-02-10_16-23-59

But the Yellen noise was again a huge backfire. The price action of the after hours market on the /ES has been almost as big as the daily. Nuts!  The gaps have been huge.

So this is just some weird BS that I’ve notice the last few days. Here’s some posts from the last couple days to sum it all up.

2/9/16 –2016-02-10_16-28-53

2/8/16 –

 

2016-02-10_16-07-30

 

So look out below. I don’t think we can hold this 185 for to much longer.

Aug 132014
 

Here’s a great tool that you can use to scan for good calendar trades. Calender trades are used if you think the stock price will consolidate and move sideways. Click on the “scan” tab in the TOS (think or swim) platform and use the following scan options.
-Market Cap (stock) – Look for highly traded stocks.
-Days Till Exp (options) – Enter an amount that will look for stocks that have “weekly” options.
-IV_Percentile (stock) – You want to list stocks that have a low IV% (implied volatility)

Here’s what it looks like.

After scanning I’ll look at technical analysis, industry & market conditions, earnings dates, and chart trends before entering the trade. One of the most important things is the IV%.  You want to get in with low IV so that the pricing will be cheap. As the stock moves  toward another earnings report the IV will increase and thus making the value of your positions go up. You make money from time value and the directional movement has no benefit. If it moves too much in 1 way then you can lose on this trade but with a choppy sideways market it’s great.
Calendars have been working nicely for me recently. Hope this helps find you some great trades!