Q3'23 (Jul'23 - Sep'23) - Reflections and Results

Reflections

This single blog post will cover and summarize the details of Jul'23, Aug'23 and Sep'23.

Jul'23 was a good month, Aug'23 started to neutralize a little bit and Sep'23 we had a losing month. All in all, there were no big surprises and we will continue to do what we have always been doing -- that is to trade options safely and manage our risk.

In Aug'23, we started to notice some shifts in the market. The bullish run was losing some of its strength and the market dipped towards the end of Aug'23. Then Sep'23 arrived and it was a mildly bearish market. We ended with some losses in some really safe strategies like Iron Condor for $SNOW, $AMD, $LULU, which directionally turned out to be correct based on our trades BUT strength of the price action wise wasn't quite enough to meet out strike price targets.

What i mean by this is, the future stock price (after we entered the trade) moved favorably in our direction, but not enough for us to enter profit zone. Again this is a new lesson I have learnt this year; despite entering many positions during earnings seasons, which historically means that the stock is likely to move 5-10%, this time round due to what I believe to be macro-economic factors, the stock price moved 3-6%, and therefore resulted in losing trades.

Sep'23 was also a very quiet month because the market was sort of dipping but then rising back up again and then consolidating before dipping again. That didn't give me any confidence to enter any positions because:

1 - Directional Long Calls / Puts will likely result in a loss because the market is dipping but also not really dipping enough at each time.

2 - Short strategies -- On hindsight, would be profitable since the market took awhile to dip down and there were weeks of consolidation between a certain price channel... however too much risk exposure for me because if at any one point in time the stock decides to dip like a falling knife, it will adversely impacted our portfolio.

There were some brokerage platform changes which happened in Sep'23, forcing us to pivot away from ThinkorSwim as our brokerage platform. We will be migrating to Interactive Brokers going forward.

Essentially, TOS is charging all users $50 USD each month for retail investors to use the platform which can be a considerably big / small amount depending on your profile.

If you are just starting off and have a $5,000 account you are paying 12% annually on platform fees (excluding commission fees) which is not a smart thing to do.

If you have a $100,000 account, then this percentage reduces to 0.6% annually, which is OK.

However, Interactive Brokers is an equally good platform (I have used it before). Hence, a lot of time will be spent familiarizing and re-learning it's UI and interface in Q4'23.

Change is the only constant; with patience and tenacity we will gradually be more and more familiar with IB's interface. I see lots of people lamenting, complaining and not wanting to change, which I urge my readers to not fall into the trap of being rigid.

Why does a coconut tree not fall? That's because when the storm comes, it bends with the wind.

Oct'23 should be a better month with more activity so stay tuned.

Results

Jul'23

Aug'23

Sep'23