I don't like how I had to do it but I've finally gotten off that old school, outdated brokerage. I've lost a month or so. Two or three weeks because I stopped adding on due to a very exciting job opportunity. Sadly that fell through but it's a mixed sadness since it would have put a major damper on my trading. Lost a week trying to get permissions on the broker I wanted... damn it. It made sense to go ahead with the move since I had nothing open in ETrade due to the aforementioned and it made so much sense (and I hate ETrade so much) that I finally 'forced' the issue (sort of >.> ). Then I lost another week to get the money transferred ffs. Damn slow ACH. IT CAN BE DONE FASTER YOU LITTLE SHITS, ASK THE EUROPEANS.
So I've lost a month or so. But now I'm where I feel I need to be and it's time to start laying on the trades again. Huzzah!
In the interest of complete reporting at the end of Feb I was down about $750. Which is bad, but it can be traced back to 2-3 serious losers where I had more risk on than I should have had in any one trade. If I eliminate those outliers then I'd be net positive. And those are clear outliers losing me $300-$550 each when my other losers (and I had several more besides the outliers) all lost me <$100.
One one of my outliers... oh hell, just call them what they are. One of my mistakes was to put on 3 lots of a $100 spread. I had to put on 3 lots to make profits outweigh my commissions, but unfortunately the position was a loser. So a loser with, obviously, marginal premium taken in on $300 risk was a serious mistake in an account my size. Doh. Another was a $500 spread. What was I thinking? Clearly whatever was in my head it wasn't sufficiently focused on the level of risked capital. The other major loser is similar, just too wide a spread.
But I topped up the account and I've moved to it TDA, where I can operate with a lot less friction, and now I'm in the game again. Let the fun begin.
Today I've put on a 7->15 calendar (that's 7 DTE by 15 DTE, very short term calendat) in GLD, and two 7 day iron condors one in PCLN and one in SPX. Waiting for the morrow.
