Early exit of a mover and the stock comparison

I exited a trade today that came within 50 cents of the target... bought 4 contracts at $2.20 and sold at $3.50 instead of $4. The end of day produced a large move down that netted one individual $3.70 for 20 contracts but I was a few minutes later looking at it. I managed to squeeze it from $2.90 to $3.50 within the last two minutes of the day. This bumped all of my averages up a bit and skewed my forecasting model heavily in my favour. Perhaps had I had held it it may have cleared the $4 target...or perhaps it would have bounced and headed back under $3. I'll see tomorrow.

There is one problem with setting automatic cross referencing spreadsheets, I lose the old numbers quickly so now I am not certain what my average was prior to that trade...although my average after today should count the whole day... it doesn't really matter then.

I am tracking the stock entry and exits, as I mentioned before, and comparing the performance between trading the stocks and options. The cool thing is that stocks can get me into more trades as I can just hit market on a stock that the options might run away on us and set a VTSO and let it go... those are gravy trades and I would have had two of them today.

All in all I am comparing trading 4 contract option trades to stocks to produce an equivalent profit.

This month I have a realized profit of about $2400. I would have to have traded 115 shares per stock trade to come up with the same $2400 profits. As much as I would love to be able to just trade in 100, 200 or even lots that may be a stretch cash wise.

Oh, taxation....the daytrading is tax free but the stocks would be taxable, particularly the short selling as that is all we have done this month. So I would need 185 shares per trade to come up with a pre-tax $4000 to yield the net $2400.

Here is the kicker. Based on the entry prices of the stocks and the concurrency of the trades this month I would need $51,000 to just cover the trades in cash. That means I am using $152,000 total so I would be margined out with no buffer at $51,000.

The secondary kicker is that in order to continue to match, dollar for dollar stocks vs options, I would have to continue to grow my account larger proportionally which means I would be no farther ahead trading stocks until I max out the option sizing and run at full trade size for long enough to grow the cash to cover and then some the stock trades. The exception might be to start trading the smaller priced stocks when I can to work my way into it... but that has it's own set of problems and I wouldn't do that until I had more trading under my belt for managing the multiple short term trade types and related styles.

Jeff.