TIB: Today I Bought (and Sold) - An Investors Journal #419 - Healthcare Software, US Index Hedges, Ethereum, Oil, Corn, Bitcoin

in #investing5 years ago

Markets shrug off bad retail sales data. Action in my portfolios is about replacing hedges due to expire this week and driving the crypto momentum - back to reversal trading on the way up. Corn price tells me how the China trade discussions are going - all good for now.

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Portfolio News

Market Rally - Trade War

Markets rallied on better trade news to do with autos.

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US Markets started lower on the back of bad retail sales data and then climbed on news of the postponement of auto tariffs deadlines. We have to keep reminding ourselves that US economic data is solid, says Jim Cramer over and over. The rhetoric is just that: rhetoric - whether it is China, or autos, or Iran or Saudi oil = just rhetoric. Watch the video or just read the post and make up your own mind.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/cramer-wednesdays-crazy-session-reflects-the-markets-new-normal.html

Lurking under the surface are signs of real trouble - Europe

May15Bund.JPG

The chart is Euro Bund Futures (i.e, price of German Government Bonds) reaching levels not seen since 2016. No surprise in my portfolios to see European banks dragged down (again). The strong rise in crypto and corn is shielding my IG markets account from margin calls on Euribor Futures.

Crypto Craze

Bitcoin price rise slows and attention shifts to altcoins - especially Ethereum.

may15BTCNews.JPG

Someone (sort of) agrees with me that they think it comes from China - terrible article demonstrating how little the writer actually knows about markets

https://micky.com.au/china-theory-did-this-cause-the-bitcoin-price-explosion/

Bought

PKS Holdings Ltd (PKS.AX): Healthcare Software. Received an allocation in IPO for this Australian healthcare software provider. What I liked was high operating margins, geographic spread and returns somewhat uncorrelated with market returns. Listing opens June 6.

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IPO access through an Australian platform - join here https://mymark.mx/OnMarket> Here is a snippet of current IPO's

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Sold

Corn Futures (CORN): One contract closed for $9.65 (2.7%) per contract profit. See how price has passed the level it was at before the Trump tweets back into normal 2019 trading range.

May15Corn.JPG

Shorts

Bought ratio put spreads to hedge the portfolios. Process was to calculate 5% and 10% drop and buy puts at the 5% drop level and sell 2 puts at the 10% level with 2 months to expiry. The risk in the trade is price drops more than 10% and I am forced to buy back the uncovered puts or get exercised and have to buy one unit of stock for each contract at 10% down with price even lower.

Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ): Nasdaq Index. Bought 171/162 ratio put spread with July 2019 expiry. Net premium was -$0.02 per contract (i.e., negative). This offered at trade time protection for between 5.58% and 11.44% drops against opening price of $180.54. On close of day one, that margin rose to 7.07% and 13.02%

SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY): S&P 500 Index. Bought 268/254 ratio put spread with July 2019 expiry. Net premium was $0.14 per contract (i.e., positive = paid for protection). Easy enough to make this a net negative - chose one strike higher. This offered at trade time protection for between 5.75% and 11.57% drops against opening price of $283.40. On close of day one, that margin rose to 6.40% and 12.26%

Income Trades

SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP): US Oil and Gas. Sold June 2019 strike 31 calls for 1.73% premium (1.29% to purchase price). Closing price $29.47 (new trade). Price needs to move another 5.2% to reach the sold strike (new trade). Should price pass the sold strike I book a 22% capital loss.

My model is to use a 10% margin for stocks that are currently not profitable - got it wrong here and did 5% = the price of working in front of the TV. Looking back over the charts I see that a monthly move is anywhere between 7 and 10% and sometimes more - the chart shows last month was 9.98%. I will watch this trade and adjust it as prices move.

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Cryptocurency

Bitcoin (BTCUSD): Price range for the day was $462 (5.9% of the low). Price keeps pushing to test the next resistance level at $8400 touching it in May 16 trade today.

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This level above $8400 is of note in my portfolios as I have trades placed in 2018 around these levels which I have been holding all this time. Current exposure is 4.2 BTC

Two contracts closed for $327.14 (4.1%) and $485.02 (6.2%) per contract profit. Added one new contract on a one hour reversal. Chart shows 3 reversal trades - all fitting the rules.

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Ethereum (ETHUSD): Price range for the day was $33 (15% of the low). Ethereum is now beginning to run as hard as Bitcoin did racing past the resistance level I drew in yesterday and reaching up to an old level at $277 (top dotted green line)

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One contract closed for $19.61 (9.7%) per contract profit. Added one new contract on a one hour reversal

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CryptoBots

Profit Trailer Bot Five closed trades (1.70% profit) bringing the position on the account to 7.71% profit (was 7.59%) (not accounting for open trades).

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The big ETC win came after Binance was closed for 9 hours doing maintenance tasks. I took the bot down. The coming back to life messed up PT Defender settings. Will have to reset all that again (2nd time this week)

New Trading Bot Trading out using Crypto Prophecy. No closed trades

Currency Trades

Outsourced MAM account Actions to Wealth closed out 1 trade on AUDNZD for 0.2% profits for the day. Trades open on GBPUSD and EURUSD (0.51% negative)

Cautions: This is not financial advice. You need to consider your own financial position and take your own advice before you follow any of my ideas

Images: I own the rights to use and edit the Buy Sell image. News headlines come from Google Search. All other images are created using my various trading and charting platforms. They are all my own work

Tickers: I monitor my portfolios using Yahoo Finance. The ticker symbols used are Yahoo Finance tickers

Charts: http://mymark.mx/TradingView - this is a free charting package. I have a Pro subscription to get access to real time forex prices

Bitcoin: High Bitcoin price is a great time to get started with mining Bitcoin for as little as $25 http://mymark.mx/Galaxy

Trading: Binance offers a wide range of coins to trade, tight spreads and low fees if you use BNB to pay https://mymark.mx/Binance

Tracking: Keeping track of your crypto trades is a whole lot easier with CoinTracking.info. Get 10% off all your account upgrades https://mymark.mx/CoinTracking

May 15, 2019

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I like how you always share your trades here. Very transparent. Too bad you sold alts, they skyrocketed over the past few hours.

Posted using Partiko Android

Thanks. Writing stuff down helps me learn. If I can help others learn too that is a bonus. And I get paid in Steem especially when I use bidbots to lever up the returns. They make more in percentage terms than most of my trades. On the alts, the trading bot sold those. I have plenty of holdings across a wide spectrum inside and outside the trading bots. I am still trying to dig them out of a hole before I scale up the bot activity.

Besides with 4.2 BTC and about 40 ETH in open positions I do not have to focus any attention on alts. That is what the bot does = unattended trading

Interesting that you are still using bots, hope they work out. I find Alts are best to go in and out of quickly after a bitcoin run.

Posted using Partiko Android

Bot works on a whitelist of less than 15 coins. I do have a bunch of bags that date from the last collapse. I am not going to bail out on them as they are all valid propositions and time will tell. The idea of a bot is to harness the volatility in an automated way. I do not have the psychology to make a great trader - machine can do better than me once I sort out the parameters.

The altcoin market seems to be awaken again which could mean some fireworks could come over the weekend when the weekend comes and volumes dry up. Could take out some resistance levels.

Posted using Partiko iOS

There is always a delay when Bitcoin or Ethereum runs for alts to catch up. The FOMO crowd dump alts to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum on the rise. When the rise proves it has legs the FOMO crowd buys more alts (mostly from Bitcoin or Ethereum profits) = my observation from writing about this for more than 12 months now.

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