On Friday, I decided to add a little up-side protection to my December Iron Condor. I'm trying to act when delta starts getting out of whack, and after a few days of stock market rallies the Dec IC was looking at a delta of about -20. Sadly I can't be more precise on this because I forgot to jot it down (mental hand-slap). Anyway, I decided the adjustment that made the most sense was to buy a Dec 760 call. With my IC strikes at 610/620/770/780, this puts the naked-long call just one strike below my short call. This adjustment brought my delta up to about +4 as of now, and didn't hurt the theta too much - still nearly 21. It cost me 9.50, which is a big chunk of change, but I expect it to be the only upside adjustment I'll need to make to this position.
QQQQ Collar
Also on Friday, my October covered call on QQQQ as part of the collar trade expired in the money and I was assigned on the call. Pursuant to the rules I set forth in September, I bought QQQQ back this morning at 51.50 and sold calls against it with a strike price of 53 for 56c. Here are those rules again, since I keep having to search Facebook Notes for the numbers:
1. Monthly calls to be about 3%, and no less than 2.5%, out of the money.
2. 6-month put to be 8% out of the money.
3. No rolling prior to expiry.
Gold Leverage
I am still long-term bullish on gold, and I express that by being long GLD, GDX, and AEM. I also currently have some Dec calls on GLD that are so profitable that I have sold off enough to cover my original investment and the remainder are worth almost twice what I paid for the whole stack. Nevertheless, I'm becoming concerned with the borderline irrational expectations for QE2 lately, so I'm ready to take some profits. I started working a fairly distant sell order on the rest of my GLD calls this morning. Hopefully it will reach my target price and I'll exit there, but I also have a time limit on this trade; I'll exit when that time limit expires regardless of the price action.
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