4th/5th April 2020

Worth a look:

• Brief thoughts on the loss of 701,000 jobs in the US. Credit Writedowns newsletter. Good on the market being in denial.

There are comments.

22nd April

Overview

Equities up a bit. No real direction. Commodities calming down, but Brent dragged down by WTI.

You tried to reduce your margin. Big use is a massive hedged short put in SBUX. Put a limit order to close this out at zero. Can’t even remember how …

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21 April 2020

What’s happening?

All the press is discussing the fact that the settlment price for April WTI was negative $37! Seems amazing, but of course when there is no storage, you may have to pay for the privilege of delivering to someone.

As always, a green print …

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Your stop order bought 2 ES overnight, and you added one, as the trend is still relentlessly bullish in the US. To balance up, you sold one FTMIB. You trimmed your gold holding, but bought one SI contract. It’s very volatile, but Fleck suggested there would be delivery problems …

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About

I was pretty busy today. I had to have my French conversation class at Maggie’s house and I also went to the Club to listen to Partho Shome talk about taxation and India.

Looking at the opening and closing trades, it’s not at all what I was …

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Trades

Opens

Futures: SPI, FTMIB, GC, MPC (ASSIGNED), HSI, MXEA, ESTX50, 9434(SOFTBANK). All sales except GC

Options: Z June 18‘21 5600 Call (sale)

Closes

NQ, GE, Z CALL, all stopped out

Summary

Got a bit carried away with profits yesterday and decided to increase exposure at time of …

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No trading today (obviously). Ridiculous ramp by Donny yesterday evening, announcing huge stimulus package. The FED has restarted QE and has pumped unprecented quantities of cash into the banks via repo madness. There seems to be some evidence that the virus is fully under control in China. In Europe, the …

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Monday 16th March

Emergency rate cut by the Fed again, 50bp, down to 25bp. Smells of desperation.

Lost some money on UB but panned out.

Trades:

ESTX50, FTMIB, N225, K200, Z

All sales, all futures.

Options markets now getting very illiquid. No quotes in OOM puts in most things including …

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Starting to be fearful of any continued (short) equity exposure. Markets have gone down 30+%. At some point they will bounce. Still short, and with loose stops because intra day fluctuations are large. Covid-19 is a severe headwind for the global economy. The big worry now is that markets will …

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Note that I didn’t make any contemporaneous digital record. I did make some notes on paper with a pen though, and that’s what I’ll use as the basis of this note.

Early

• Sold ESTX50 and ES via stop,
• closed UB, DX at profit via stop,
• closed FTMIB …

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