Trading liquidation

So the first round I fired at the market has been largely a dud. Several wins with unacceptable losses.

The remaining positions will all finalize over Fri/Sat and I don't expect to have enough left in the account to maintain margin capability after that. So it looks like it's back to saving up my pennies. I call it educational expenses.

Note from Flight# WN5627 from AUS -> ATL (2 hours and 15 mins.) Layover of 1 hour and 1 mins. Flight# 5535 from ATL -> TPA (1 hour and 25 mins.)

It always amazes me to look out over the wing and watch as the only thing between me and the ground becomes a bunch of physics and engineering. Oh, and air. That the air seems less substantial than the physics (simply knowledge) and the engineering (put into practice) is somehow deeply mystic.

Post- The title is copied directly from the Evernote entry that I used to record the thought in the moment. I have no idea how Evernote 'knew' that much about my location and itinerary. I guess it's been snooping in my gmail and put a lot of bits and pieces together before I turned off the wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, and cell signal?

Creeping me out here guys. >.>

On Brokerages

ETrade is crap. I'm sitting with a threatened credit spread that I want to butterfly further OTM. There's no way to do that in ETrade's interface. What a crock. Because I have a small account I don't have the capital available to do it in two trades and there's literally no way to put the trade in as a butterfly because their interface can't understand that I'm selling 2 of the same option to close and open position at the same time.

I hate this brokerage.

Live trading strategy

So far my trades have been exclusively iron condors on underlyings with high(ish) IV rank at 65+% probability OTM on both sides. I've done a couple of re-wingings (re-opening a closed vertical on the untested side of an existing IC).

The procedure is roughly as follows:
Look at Dough for interesting products (could be replaced with a stock scan if  my TDA account were funded, but Dough's curated list is faster at the moment).
Load up the option chain in TOS and look at the proper OTM strikes. If the credit is >50% of the width then proceed. Otherwise go back to Dough.
Put the credit and BPE (which is the strike width - credit received on a symmetrical IC) into my spreadsheet and let it calculate my exits. If I like the exits (which are calculated based on a %age of max profit) then I'll put the trade on.

The formulas in the spreadsheet are built around getting a high return on the risked money which I use the BPE for. Since it's all melted together (and assuming my formulas are correct; which I've checked a bajillion times) I just select a target % of max profit from the automatically calculated 25, 30, 50 and 75% and nearly always come out at least 20% return on BPE with all commissions calculated for. So I can just plug in the strikes (or manually copy BPE into the spreadsheet from TOS) and the price I'm contemplating selling the IC for and look at where my exits would be.  Often they're negative which just means there's not enough premium to sell to overcome my commission cost. Sometimes the exit price will be a couple of pennies and I'll usually skip those because I expect I'd have to wait on the trade for too long.