Holidays

As I prepare for leaving on a bit of a vacation I thought I would drop into my trading account and set up some VTSOs and close any active buy orders. I am reasonably pleased with my portfolio thus far as there is lots of green even in the stop ranges, profit is stopped out is a good thing.

I have long positions in MS, ABX, IPI, TCO, CVA and AEO. My shorts are MWW and GNK...although GNK is likely stopped out already at a loss. I'll start tracking my performance on the home page of my blog once I get more positions that are based on my final plan and stock selections closed.

I started looking at the "greeks" of options last night while working on something else. The new one is the THETA which indicates how many cents per day the extrinsic value decays based on the current numbers. I also noted that the extrinsic value, which is commonly called the time value, is in now way tied only to the time decay. It has as much to do with volatility as some of the options that I have been looking at have had the extrinsic value change in the opposite direction than I would expect after a few days passed. higher volatility has a higher expectation of price moves which can make the option more valuable to traders which basically raises the premium they are willing to pay for them. Interesting stuff and one more reason to watch for options with a small extrinsic value.

I tried placing an option order after setting my accounts up for options trading and the order was rejected...I guess I need to fill out some more paperwork to activate options in the registered accounts. I'll mail this today so that I can activate my options level first of next week and be able to trade options upon my return in mid August.

This summer is disappearing rather quickly considering that we, here in the Ottawa area, have not really had many days that we could call "summer".

Jeff.