Matt's Trade Log - 9/15/08

Today was a very busy day, with expiration approaching on Friday:

• Buy 4 RIG SEP08 125/130 vertical put spread
• Buy 1 RIG SEP08 120/130 vertical put spread
• Buy 1 GOOG SEP08 460/480 vertical put spread
• Buy 2 UA SEP08 30/40 vertical call spread
• Buy 2 FSLR SEP08 250/260 vertical put spread
• Buy 2 USP SEP08 91/93 vertical put spread
• Sell 2 SPY OCT08 116/119 vertical put spread

All of the buys were exiting positions, at losses. I had been holding these in hopes of good news going into expiration week. However, extensive bad news in financials is bringing everything down today. With only four days to go to expiration, it is time to get out of these before things get really bad.

With SPY down today it made a good day to sell more premium on the low side. Again, this is giving me more positive delta in SPY than I like, and it is certainly not representative of how I feel. I'm hoping for any sort of a rally in SPY to balance my delta out on the high side.

As for everything else: Well, it has been a very painful month, but I'm out of a lot of the positions I'd gotten myself into. This should simplify my portfolio management, and hopefully we can recover from a bad month or two and gain our losses back as we move toward the end of the calendar year.