May 2 and Weekly Recap

I wrote in todays plan "Bullish bias. Dips into the ribbon are buyable. However, there is divergence and we are consolidating at the 618. If we can't make a higher high, this is not the worst place to short down to the ribbon."

It's not often that it goes according to plan, but even if it does, it can still be hard to profit if choppy. Choppy is what we got. Which makes sense because we had already moved up 1.5% from yesterdays close, so probabilities of continuation were lower. But, hard to short given how strong the move up was.

Trade 1

We were consolidating at the important level of previous months high and the daily atr level of 618. The 3m chart showed pushes slightly higher into the supply zone, but with bearish divergence on the stochastic. This gave confirmation to look for a deeper pullback into the ribbon before considering calls. I took the opportunity to short down to the ribbon and was reminded of why I don't like to counter trend scalp. While price could've continued down, and with vix rising, premiums could've have ripped, but the probabilities - and the trade I was waiting for - pointed to calls in the 10m ribbon. I smartly took profit quick. Managing to short a quick, 10 point move down.

Trade 2

Once we couldn't break the ribbon down much further, it was clear to me to consider calls. The 10m 21 was holding nicely as support, we retested the morning resistance turned support, and created a bottoming pattern that were all nice confluences for entry.

My entry was amazing with no breach of my entry on the underlying index. The slowness of the move however deteriorated my premiums... And, in the process of simply trying to stack small wins to build consistence and confidence I took profit. I also think it was prudent given we were really just headed into the previous resistance level and again already up 1.5%+ on the day. Yes, we did move a bit higher and as I'm typing it looks like we're trying to break the key psych level on SPX of 5700, but I've got to be content taking my win - ending the day green - and ending the week green!

This week I took 14 trades vs only 6 last week. I profited on 10 of 14 for a win rate of 72.4% (5 of 6, 83% last week). I ended with 4 green days and 1 red day. I returned 8.1% on the portfolio this week (vs. 16.9% last week).

While I'm working incredibly hard on choosing to focus on the positives, I am disappointed with my red day - NOT because it was red - but because a major contributor to the red was an oversized position. This continue to be my achilles heel. But, by being open about it, I hope will set me straight sooner than later.

I also took 3 End of Day Trades. As a reminder, IF there is a system setup, I use no more than 10% of the profits in any given day to place a FULL RISK 0dte trade in the last 15ish minutes of the day. As I continue to track these trades, we'll see if I continue this practice going further. But, ultimately I do this because it's a risk free way to really juice gains. If it goes to zero, I still end the day green. Returns on 0dte contracts in the 15 minutes can very easily 10x. Some days my EOD trades can exceed my days gains.

Not great on EOD this week, but luckily the two losers were very small. The 3 EOD trades detracted only .19% from this weeks performance. I can live with that.