Recently in Intra-Day Update Category

I'm feeling some decent pain on my current trade. The market had a rough start this morning and my position was getting down to a 25% loss. At 10AM the market seems to have found a short term bottom and the Q's have been moving up for the last hour to almost green on the day.

As I stand now I'm now only down 10% and I'm trying to decide if I want to hold for the upcoming 3 day weekend. I still think we will see somewhere close to $31 over the next couple of days and my charts are telling me we are in an oversold condition. So charts are telling me we go higher from here.

As a side note, I started to use another account with this same trading methodology. In that account I have 200 contracts of the same trade. So I'm feeling more pain in that one compared to this account.

I'm glad I picked the March options, that gives me plenty of room to let the trade play out.

I'm back from my meeting and the congress still hasn't voted on the bailout plan. I'm very tempted to buy some puts on the Q before the vote.

If it doesn't pass we are heading down big, if it does pass I think we will have a slight bump up but we will still close on the lows of the day.

This morning I opened a long position right before the markets decided to roll over. I'm currently down over 20% in my current open trade.

The market up move this morning appears to be just a head fake and it looks like we still have some downside left in this current move. We have blown right through support 1 and 2 and it looks like we may end up around $46.95-47 before we make the next move up. The monthly trend is still pointing up and we are getting close to getting a sign of a bottom on this current weekly trend down. I'm thinking we will see somewhere above $50 on the Q's before the September contracts expire.

I'm currently not going to sell my open position since we are very close to this short term bottom and we still have plenty of time left in these September contracts. I will probably also purchase more once I see a change in the trend on my charts.

This is another example why if you are not watching the market on a regular basis, you can easily get fooled by these types of moves. I'm glad I went in light on this trade.

On an unreleated note, I have been testing the Think or Swim platform recently for my trading. ToS currently powers the OptionsXpress charting platform, so the change to this platform was an easy move. One added benefit is they make it very easy to generate charts that I can post on the website. Here is the chart I'm currently following. I'm closely following the Stochastic now to see it make a change in direction towards the upside for my next buy.

Wallstreet opened sharply lower this morning. Bad reports from Apple, American Express, and SanDisk put some huge selling pressure this morning. I took the opportunity to lower my cost basis on my open calls and bought 20 additional contracts at the open.

I bought 20 contracts of QQQQ Aug 46 calls (QQQHT) at a cost basis of $0.55. I now have 40 contracts with an average cost basis of $0.70.

As this market opens I'm currently down 21% on this trade, but all of my indicators are showing we are now extreamly oversold and we should be heading higher from here.

I decided to not take the stop once the Q's hit the $50.50 level. They got as high as $50.61 on the day and are starting to retrace a bit now. For my current play on the puts I think we will re-test the $49.90 level again over the next couple of days. I do expect that it should hold and we head higher from there. I expect that we should see some downwards movement to digest the strong gains we have had the last couple of days and this is the short term trade I'm playing now. I'm resetting my stop to $0.60 on the Jun 50 put contracts (which would be a 20% loss.)

The one thing is that the Q's are acting strong right now and the other indexes are not participating as much. If we get some participation from the Dow and S&P then we could see $55 on the Q's fairly quickly.

Both the ISM and construction spending reports are due to hit the markets at 10AM this morning. The futures are telling us they are expecting some negative numbers today since the futures are currently trading down.

S&P 500 (JUN) -6.25  | Nasdaq (JUN) -6.25  | Dow (JUN) -55

Any positive news from these two reports could drive this market higher. I currently hold puts on the Q's and I'm already in positive territory. I will be keeping an eye on the markets when these reports are released to see if I need to take action on my open positions.

The Q pivots for today are as follows:

R2	R1	Pivot	S1	S2
50.49	50.25	50.00	49.76	49.51

I suspect we will open up and test S1 on the open today and I expect we may also visit S2 sometime today if the reports at 10AM are as expected or worse than expected.

Last night we had an earnings palooza with Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple reporting. SBUX missed and is currently down 11% pre-market, AMZN warned about future earnings and they are down 5%, and Apple didn't beat by a wide margin and they are down 1%. So it looks like we are going to be seeing a rough patch over the next couple of trading days. FFIV did beat and they are currently trading up over 8% so it is not all gloom and doom. The volatility and earnings fund will continue with Microsoft reporting after the market closes today.

I'm still holding my puts on the Q's and I'm currently at break even. I should see some green today on this position at the open.

I still feel the general overall trend of the current market is UP and we will see the Q's at or above $50 by the middle of May.

Premarket the futures are pointing to a lower open and the Q's are currently trading down 0.85% in pre-market.

S&P 500 (JUN) -7.25  | Nasdaq (JUN) -12.50  | Dow (JUN) -61 

The pivots for the Q's today are as follows and it looks like we will open up today right at S1 and I wouldn't be surprised if we see S2 sometime today filling the gap from Monday.

R2	R1	Pivot	S1	S2
47.52	47.19	46.73	46.40	45.94

I just added 20 additional contracts to my current May 45 puts on the Q's at a price of $0.49. I now have a total of 40 contracts with a cost basis of $0.54.

The Q's went up and reach a high of the day and went above $47. They have now retreated a bit from that high and all of my signals are flashing over bought conditions. In theory they can stay overbought for sometime, but eventually they will have to go down.

I just sold half of my June 50 calls on the QQQQ with a 100% gain. I was thinking I would be able to close out half of my contracts on the open, but the market didn't gap up as much as I expected. So it took a little time to get to my price targets.

So for a recap I was in 100 contracts of QQQFX at an average price of $0.23. I just sold 50 of the contracts at $0.47 for a better than 100% gain on the trade.

The Q's are now trading near the high of the day and are showing some decent strength. The charts are now telling me that we are way over bought and we should start to see some downside over the next couple of days to consolidate some of these big gains. I was thinking of holding the rest of my Jun contracts for a little while, but may just close them as well depending on the state of the market over the next couple of days.

The Q's had a big gap down this morning and have been steadily spending the day trying to fill that gap. As I type this that gap is about 6 pennies from being filled.

I'm now looking at going short once this gap fills. My charts are telling me we are at the top of the short term trend channel and I estimate we will see the Q's near $41 sometime next week.