Zac's Journal

[zacj346]

Your fine, I actually added the first part of my last post at the end so I was rushed getting it out and didn't make the most clear point. When I said I think your trading wrong I didn't mean you personally. In my mind I was talking to someone looking to trade $1000. I assume most people coming in with that amount are either new or have blown up an account or 2. To those people I think buying options is the wrong strategy and they should avoid it.

As for da-net specifically, I don't know. I looked at APA, it has something to do with oil and gas. Trump said "drill baby, drill", I don't know what I'm looking at with CCI but the MACD shows divergence in this last drop compared to the one before it could signal a reversal coming. It also has 2 good earning reports that seem to have no effect on its downward trend. What's important to look at here? This is why I don't like having to pick a direction to make money, I'm not good at it. I am interested to see how your trades do. I'm not convinced its better than selling, but I'm open to it at least being a solid producer.

Lastly, I read a lot of people are optimistic for the bull run to extend through 2025, so a Santa Claus Rally would make sense. But a pullback would be helpful for me trying to unwind my positions.

 

[zacj346]

I think I need one of those caps, you know, the ones you keep feathers in. Got a late start today, had a quarterly driver meeting at work, so this afternoon I cleared out my IWM and HOOD trades in my Schwab account. HIMS has one more week so I’m just going to let it go. So everything will be wrapped up except TSLA, it's just too big, I’m going to have to wait it out until Feb.

With IWM I ended up with a profit of $2232.63 (9.96%). Not great for 10 months, but I'm not going to complain about it. HOOD I ended up with $336.55 (12.22%) in a much more respectable 2 months. I could have kept trading HOOD and would have probably done well but I’m making some tweaks for 2025 and I’m trying to get as flat as possible to avoid interference from carryover. I finished up in Schwab with a Buy/Write, 200 shares of NVDA at $143.84 with 12/6 $143 calls for $398.66. As it sits that will be $230.66 (0.8%) come Friday and NVDA is still above $143

What else was I going to talk about? Feathers… right. MACD is still chug-a-lugging along. The outstanding CLSK trade closed. I switched over to HOOD and made a few trades over there, did a trade on NVDA, and even picked up another CLSK trade today. All of them were off the 5min. I think that’s my happy place, 5min charts. I don’t have to focus on it, but I can still find something everyday. Currently I don’t have an open trade, so far I’m up $38.65 (1.95%) I was looking into finding a bot that did this but it doesn’t seem like Robinhood is the place for that. Maybe I’ll find a programmer and have something made, but it’s not high on my list of priorities.

I'll be back Friday for more fun an adventure, still waiting on DG earnings and I'll check in on PLTR and NVDA. I think I'm closing in on 20% as well so get the champagne ready.

 

[zacj346]

So close! $13,468.55 (19.88%) I’m $149.04 short of 20%. Just got to Happy Gilmore it into the end of the year. “Tap it in. Tap Tap Tap-a-roo.” I had such high hopes for DG. When it dropped I took the opportunity to roll my strike down to $77 for $125.94. Of course, DG rallied after leaving me in a position once again potentially leaving a position below entry but with a profit. Come end of day tomorrow if DG stays above $77 I’ll exit with $410.05 (5.08%) after about 6 weeks. I bought it at $80.76 so I’m getting really good at not using appreciation. I could try and sort something out before the end of the year, but I’m above board, not interested in carrying this into next year if I don’t have to, and trying to go flat-ish. I have to add the -ish cause I also rolled SQ into March. I couldn’t help myself, it bumped my potential return from just under 18% to 26.94% for an extra 3 months. I might reverse course on that again before the end of the year.

MACD, which is a wonderful strategy and everyone should use it (that’s my new position on it). Had another successful trade Wednesday on HOOD and I missed the first trade today that was successful so I jumped into the unsuccessful as of now second trade. Looking for $40.16 to get my $2.50. Don’t worry though, I’m going to start moving some money around soon and at least get enough money in there to have a proper safety net for HOOD. I’d like to max it out (add another $6300) . I have until April to do that so I’m not in a rush, but wouldn’t $6 be more exciting than $2.50? There are open seats on this bandwagon. 2.5 weeks, $40.15 (2.08%), not even catching all the signals. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? All else being equal that extrapolates out to over 40% yearly.

Seriously though, I think I can set it up with IB (I think I have an account over there already) and use webhooks from Tradingview to automate this. I just don’t have the time to invest in sorting out the details. I haven't looked into why it closes some trades as losses, and I have no idea how to fix it. I’d have to either sort that out or study the logs and figure out exactly what its doing so I understand whats going on before I release something into the wild like that.

Tomorrow I might try and trade with the MACD, I’ve been dragging my feet with work in the garage because I don’t like the cold. I may just set my options and work out there, I only have until June to button that up. That’s all I got.

 

[da-net]

Closed the APA trade; APA $20 put Jan 17, 2025 $0.52 x $0.57 STC at $0.56

I could have waited and possibly gotten more, but I'll gladly take a profit and walk away.

After reading the "Brett Bot" journal in the forum and was curious about options plays vs stocks. Today he posted about Smith & Wesson, I looked at the chart and it looks like it was a knee jerk reaction by the market with a strong possibility of a pin bar as well as other things I look at. So I bought in;

SWBI $11 call Jan 17, 2025 $.045 x $0.50 BTO $0.47

 

[zacj346]

How many Old Fashions can I drink (I use 6 oz pours at home) and still trade effectively? I feel like this and other important questions along this line aren’t being properly answered. Maybe one of these Fridays I’m not running a Swap I’ll look into it. I leave at midnight tonight so it's not today. Its on my mind since I was trying to make a bottle of Old Fashion for Thanksgiving, but I waited until day of and ended up not having enough simple syrup. I made some but it was still hot and I didn’t want to mix it hot, probably wouldn’t have affected anything. So I still have all that chilling in the mini fridge. Anyway…

I looked at rolling DG and I just didn’t want to. I should try and stop making midweek adjustments. I think my track record on midweek adjustments is pretty bad, especially rolling down. Still walking away with a profit, so I can’t complain. I also looked at SQ but I’m still fine with it. Over in Schwab I rolled NVDA up and I looked at PLTR but the gap is too big so I’ll be doing something with it Monday. I could have waited and did the same thing with NVDA but I try to limit what I need to do with options to my days off. This lets me at least look at charts and see where I am as far as cost basis.

But since I am also a successful day trader on top of being a successful options trader let's talk about my MACD strategy. It was an extra special payday Friday this week, and the first payday I am not hoarding money for the garage. I put $350 into the Roth IRA that is the MACD strategy account from my paycheck and I moved another $3000 from after tax Robinhood over to the Roth as well. I’m breaking this down and sharing this so I can tell you money I add goes to the bottom line. $350 was added to the money I started the year with for purposes of giving my YTD performance. I think that’s fair. Right now this only applies to the MACD strategy because I mostly want to max that Roth account out every year. But it will be the same standard I use with all the accounts. The $3000 is one account to another so it doesn’t change the bottom line. I’m not going to tell you everytime I add/move money around, but you’ll be able to see it when I do screenshots and I want to be transparent about how I am tracking my performance and try to be as fair as possible.

Before I did all that I did open a second trade off the 5min chart for HOOD. I’m going to treat this one and the one from yesterday as 1 trade if it isn’t filled today. 5min is currently above the zero line so I jumped down to the 1min chart and took a trade there. I decided I wanted to establish a limit to keep away from choppy markets of 2 trades opened a day. Previous days trades don’t count, and to extend this somewhat halved the position size on when trading the 1min chart so 2 trades there is 1 of the 5min chart trades. I think that’s a good balance of being able to play with the 1min chart on my days off and still add some limits. Right now, Im looking at the idea of combining trades over the weekend to whatever robinhood says my average is and set one take profit for the whole lot. That’s the most convenient way for me I think.

Well, I forgot to post this earlier. Plus I bought 200 shares of HOOD in Robinhood and sold one $40.5 call and one $41 call for 12/13. I did this on margin anticipating most of that will be wiped out when DG is assigned. PLTR I bought the Call and sold out replacing it with TOST.

 

[zacj346]

Score one for the 24 hour market. MACD sold a unit at 11:39pm, still one open. I’m a little bummed, I was excited that HOOD was pulling back cause the premium is pretty high. Just itching to dig myself out of a hole. Oh well…Goal for tomorrow is to NOT roll anything. HOOD and NVDA options trades are down about 4% and I am just going to ignore them until Friday.

 

[zacj346]

What did I do today…Whole lot of nothing…I wanted to, but I left my options alone. Looking at cost basis TOST is still in the green, NVDA came back up to around -1.5% and HOOD is down about 3.5%

Added a couple trades off the 1min on MACD might add one more off the 5min today, but I don’t want to watch it much more today. Currently sitting on 25 shares at $38.70 1min TPs are at $38.26 the holdovers TP is $40 something (my screen is cutting it off and I don’t remember off the top of my head. I’d really like to get this sideways and worked back out to have as a proof of concept, until then my back of the napkin guesstimates says its going to work. So i’ll just keep plowing ahead, a Titanic looking of icebergs.

What I really wanted to talk about today, cause I always need something to talk about, is a conversation on a different post. So let me get out my soapbox, and if your just here for my trades you can skip the rest of this entirely. I’ll be back Friday with more trading. Orginally I was going to resize everything and make it look prettier, but…yea, i’m not going to do that.

This is a response to this post on a different person's journal. I am moving my response over here out of respect to the OP of that journal. I don’t want to hijack his thread, and this could go around in circles for awhile. Here’s the original post

Here’s my initial response:

And here’s a picture I borrowed for soapbox rants:

That’s a face for radio if I ever saw one, but a beard on him and glasses and he looks just like me. Anyway, the conversation went sideways after that about Blackrock and what constitutes their performance. Then Steven jumped to the performance of Delta One traders at Goldman and Morgan and asserted they make 2 Million/YR starting salary. I can’t find any data supporting that claim, but it's also irrelevant to the argument. What does the salary of derivatives traders at different companies have to do with Blackrock? And it proves nothing. So let's circle back all the way to the beginning and look at the arguments this post was originally presenting.

1. OP has poor RR profile
2. The risk regime is obvious
3. His risk is intraday
4. Institutions are interested in liquidations
5. His strategy is simple AND would reduce OPs downside
6. Institutions use his method
7. His method has much better success rate
8. OPs strategy is a coin toss
9. Large institutions rarely lose money

And he added some chart examples, but they weren’t trades of his, they were just examples of what his strategy looks for and they were hourly S&P minis I think. While OP is trading a 52 week low strategy on stocks.

I stand by my original post. If you want to compare your strategy to someone elses you should at least make an apples to apples comparison. Otherwise you're just saying “If you would have done something completely different you would have gotten different results” Which is true, but that doesn’t mean anything. Steven replied he wasn’t didn’t want OP or anyone to trade like him, which is weird considering his entire post is about trading like him. I started attacking the assertion that large institutions rarely lose money, and I brought up blackrock and its performance in 2022. I did this because everything is conjecture without data. And if one claim can be disproven all claims should be set aside as false until there is some kind of data to support them. Backwards looking examples can be set aside for the same reason. I have this strategy I’m working on called the Plutus Strategy. Every full moon I take a Ouija board and channel the greek god Plutus and he gives me stocks to buy and hold until the winter solstice. I can give you some charts where this strategy did unbelievably well in the past. I don’t have any forward looking data, but just looking backwards this strategy can be phenomenal when applied to the right stocks. Anyway, I don’t want to trade the Plutus Strategy, that's why I told you about it.

I did wrongly argue Blackrock was negative in 2022. I pulled up something that said Blackrock funds lost and average of 14% in 2022 but that was just AUM. Steven added this article

https://www.thetradenews.com/blackr...-2022-but-still-exceeds-analyst-expectations/

I conceded that I had a poor argument, but my point was the funds themselves. He wasn’t making a case that institutions don’t lose money because they are structured in a way that they make money in all markets through fees. Stevens original assertion is they have strategies much like his and that's why they don’t lose money. So either the argument is they don’t lose money because of business structure, or they don’t lose money because they trade a certain way. Conflating those and say it proves your point.

I added this:

https://www.blackrock.com/ch/profes...asc&dataView=perfCum&style=44341&pageSize=100

It shows from Blackrocks own data they have over 400 actively managed funds that have a negative return since inception. That’s institutions losing money. And I looked at actively managed because someone or something at that institution is directing those trades, it's not a basket that's just following the markets.

That’s when Steven switched to derivative traders in different companies.

So that’s where it's at. I’m not endorsing a 52 week low strategy, it seems really risky to me and would require fundamental analysis of companies, and I’m not about that. I want to see where he takes it though. I’m not against Steven either, I have no idea how good or bad a VWAP strategy is, I've never even put it on a chart before this week. What I am against is asserting your opinions as fact without any data. You have a better strategy? Cool, show me the results. If you're just “trying to help” start where they are, not where you want them to be. I stated the same thing when the Sultan of Saltiness stated my Buy/Writes were inferior to synthetic straddles. Maybe that's true, but if I can’t trade them in my account that information isn’t valuable to me and I’ll just have to make do with my inferior means.

Bottom line, everyone is a Charlatan until there is data. And you shouldn’t listen to anybody who has an aversion to providing data. For funzies I googled " what percentage of stock traders use meth" and I was not disappointed.

Vice TV already found a guy. Who knew? I now have more data suggesting meth is the key to institutional trading success than I do Stevens strategy. Not really, I just wanted an excuse to share that.

 

[zacj346]

Well, it still works. $23.70 so far this week. That’s only 0.44% now that the account is $5k but that’s one trade away from 0.5% and that’s right around where I would like it to be to hit 20% a year. I remembered one of the reasons I started this was to add a journal somewhere that only had a journal option in their Day Trading section. I don’t remember where I saw it now, so I’ll have to look for it. So far up $77.30 (1.44%) with 26 shares outstanding with an average of $39.72. Robinhood is saying my average is $38.91 but I don’t know what it's factoring in to get that number. YTD profits across all accounts is down to $12997.77 (19.08%) TOST and HOOD options are positive, NVDA is down 2.5% That’s what I’m looking at heading into Friday. HIMS is expiring as well, I haven’t even looked at it.

 

[zacj346]

I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out if I could write off a hot tub as part of a home office. I can calculate its square footage, and laptops are fairly portable devices. So does working from a hot tub make part of a home office? It's not a flat out no, surprisingly, I would just probably have to have some schtick where I made youtube videos trading from a hot tub so I could make a case of it being necessary.

Anyway, I sold out of SQ.

$1283.18 (16.07%) profit, had it open since 3/15 so 9 months. That’s decent, I’m happy. I rolled HOOD, both calls are now on the $41. I forgot to fill that out so I'm not sure where I’m sitting.

Over in Schwab I rolled NVDA and rolled 1 TOST and sold out of the rest of it. I looked at HIMS but I'll be letting it get assigned. I also had a few successful trades in MACD. I forgot I had an appointment today so I’m late so I’ll have to get figures up later this weekend. That’s my bad. I’ll be back sometime to go over the rest of it.

 

[zacj346]

Oops..forgot I had stuff going on Friday and ran out of time altogether. Sold SQ but I didn’t get back around to replace it. I still got $144.94 from rolling HOOD that will give me $502.82 (6.16%) if HOOD moves back up above $41 next week. Maybe I’ll add to it Wednesday, I like that idea better than trying to find something and find time to open a trade on the go Monday. That would fill the slot left by SQ, but maybe something else will pop up. I am looking at the idea of taking half of my positions on Monday and half of Wednesday. This would theoretically reduce my exposure, and if I’m targeting 0.5% a week and continue targeting options trades over 1% I can keep more of my money in cash and still hit my 20% target for the year.

That’s at least the idea why I chopped TOST down from 3 contracts to 1. 3 was just too many, it only left $500 in that account so I didn’t have the flexibility to buy back options. Two leaves me a buffer, and I like keeping 10% of each account as a buffer. That’s just a test run though, the Schwab accounts are IRAs so it makes more sense to have the most amount of money possible working in those accounts

TOST is currently sitting at +$240.55 in equity, with a potential of +$270.55 if TOST rises above $38.50. My percentages are wonky on this one because I started with 3 positions and now it's one, and I haven’t sat down and worked on a fix for that.

NVDA I staggered as a way to balance out chasing premiums and maintaining a little more flexibility if price rebounds. Still targeting 0.5% a week and just dividing that between the 2 prices, the average assignment price is now $142. NVDA is currently -$1,176.65 (-4.09%) in equity with a potential +$373.35 (1.30%) if it rises above $142. I haven’t decided if I want to run a large position like NVDA or break that into smaller positions, I do want to try and run 2 contracts on my positions in 2025 and see if that provides more flexibility and help with my biggest shortcoming this year of not catching rising prices in my underlying positions. That and changing how I roll positions, I think, will help me. That’s the reason I wanted to be flat going into 2025 to see how the changes play out over the course of a year.

I’ll also be referencing 0.5% a week and 20% a year a lot. Yes, I know 0.5% a week is 26% a year, that is not a poor grasp of math. I am just assuming there will be some slippage (like NVDA currently) and I’m just guessing 0.5% will naturally put me closer to the 20% mark than the full 26%.

MACD is still going, its back down to 13 shares outstanding with a TP at $40.56. I jotted down some stats, percentages are less impressive now that it's based on the 5K balance, but still solid. Been running 3.5 weeks.


MACD $12.87 on Friday 12/13
$43.07 (0.79%) for week
$96.67 (1.79%) since starting

And finally YTD performance dipped. Currently sitting at $12,366.52 (18.12%) so the champagne is going to have to wait. We have what, 11 more trading days this year? I’m basically tying a bow on it after markets close on 12/27. I’ll reference those amounts for my 2024 performance and use them to base my percentages of my 2025 performance.

 

[zacj346]

This is the second time someone has said something like this since I started posting publicly in Oct. This particular exchange ended when they made a bad argument that I would be better off saving for retirement for 30yrs than trading. I responded that's basically using my argument about using the long term average of S&P because that's what your going to get with 30 yrs in a retirement account. I'm keeping their name out of it cause I think they just didn't really think through their argument, and its made in good faith. Different than the one before.

Soapbox time! I love this little guy.

Figured I’d just post this to reference back to. This is the second time I’ve fielded a comment about the performance of the S&P this year compared to my performance. I keep saying it's a silly metric, and it comes back anyway. I think it's some sort of Dogma from the professional side where that metric would be more meaningful. If you're just an average joe trading your own money there is no reason to use it if you don’t want to. A better metric, in my opinion, is the long term average of the S&P which is 10% to 12% but really depends on what specific time frame you look at.

If you're going to suggest I am doing poorly because I’m not outperforming the S&P in a specific year you need to offer a better metric. Otherwise you're just repeating dogma. Square this circle: I didn’t beat the S&P in 2024 so what should I do? Stop trading and go back to saving in retirement accounts (401ks, HSAs, IRAs, etc.)? Well then, isn’t that just relying on the long time average of the market? Okay, but if that’s the case, then why shouldn’t I just ignore year to year gains in the market now and focus on beating the long term average? That kind of circular logic doesn’t hold water. If that’s the alternative then why should I use a different metric for my performance now? I’m not a rocket surgeon, and even I can look at that and see it's a dumb argument.

I can even make a solid case for a different metric:

If you are working and decide to trade as a side hustle type of situation it would make sense to look at it as a business. One common line of thinking on new businesses is that it takes 4 years to break even. Another is you’ll probably have to add money to keep the business afloat until it is profitable. So if you make the case that you should give yourself 5 years of actual trading and start averaging from year 5 forward. If your mindset is more in line with Robert Kiyosaki from “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” I can see that making sense. That’s just an example. I'm not totally sure if that’s the mindset taught by him. The point is if you start trading from a different mindset it is completely logical you would judge your performance differently.

And another:

If you are trading for income and your metric is X dollars/yr. Let’s say $100K just to keep it simple, but X can be whatever you think a sufficient income is. If your goal is $100K for income then it doesn’t matter if that’s a 20% return or a 5% return because that’s determined by the size of your trading account. The bigger you account the smaller return you need. A 500K account needs a 20% return, a $5M account just needs a 2% return. In that case are you going to tell the person trading the $5M account that his metric of 100K is bad because the S&P did better than his 2% return? What if he made one trade that year to get 100K? Does that change the idea that he should quit because he didn’t beat the S&P. In that case he might not even know or care what the S&P does as long as he has his income for the year and his account balance will be the same or better. This is a very stripped down example not factoring in a lot of things but the principal of the argument is someone would care less about percentages if their goal was a specific dollar amount.