Up, Up and Away?

The market managed to finish in positive territory near its highs after spending most of the day negative. The nice thing was that all my positions initially were working, my put positions were down and my calls were up, which is exactly why I had the hedge on. Throughout the day however IYR got very strong and it seemed like it would continue so I cut that position loose with a small loss. This was good as it continued its move upwards and would have resulted in more of a loss had I waited till the end of the day. I kept on my other position as it failed to participate in any rally throughout the day and I hope the weakness continues into next week and will help hedge against any pull backs.

One position I debated before was Visa which broke out huge today, sucks to be me but I'll wait for a pull back just like RIMM and look to get in there. I was tempted to add another put position at the end of the day but I think it would have been unnecessary to lose that time decay. I'll reassess next week. The interesting thing is just at the end of the day the VIX finally broke down below 40, albeit slightly which breaks its 200 day moving average. This generally should point to higher stock prices and easier option trading but we have yet to see many earnings releases. The dip is MS came and went today and I didn't get in unfortunately. I feel like it could run for the next week or so into goldman sachs earnings but I'll look at it next week.

I possibly should have taken some of my ACH off ahead of Alcoa earnings on monday however ACH already had their earnings so I don't see why that would really matter to my position. The ideal scenario is they are better or less worse than expected and ACH catches a bid.

All my positions are working nicely however we are reaching an oversold level in the markets so I am reluctant to take more risk to the long side right here and am more likely to take some profits or add some hedges. The dilemma I face is I have July dated options and I could just let them go but it is generally beneficial to roll them as they get deep in the money to lock in profit and have less delta in case of a pull back. I was unable to break the 100% barrier today but hopefully if things work well next week I can. That will be a nice mile stone but I still have a long way to go to recover from before but I'm definitely on the right track.

Total Return for 2009: 99%