When I talk to people about my credit spread trading strategy I often hear the claim that credit spread trading works great for 5, 10, or 20 thousand dollars, but the strategy can’t be scaled up. Are these skeptics suggesting a lack of liquidity to fill bigger orders?
Here we explore the put credit spread trades I placed on the SPY durning the month of January 2015. This is my primary trading strategy for monthly income. By trading put credit spreads on the SPY I am typically in a trade for 23 days but no more than 45 days.
To study how delta affects an opening trade I did—of course—some backtesting. I took a $10,000 account and placed put credit spread trades from 2011 to current. I opened up spreads that were $2 wide, at least 4% out of the money, and no more than 45 days to expiration.
Almost all of my credit spread trading is focused on the S&P 500 via the SPY or S&P 500 futures. Why am I hyperfocused on the SPY? So I can sleep at night (well, try to sleep—I do have a young son and a daughter on the way).
Every great trader has a bag of tricks. Each of these opportunities, if you will, is a predefined market condition signaling when to enter a trade and when to close it. One that has been in my bag for awhile is buying the SPY when the Relative Strength Index (RSI) indicator hits 30.
After 10 years I still can’t fully tame my emotions, which is why I rely on mechanical, rule-based trading over emotional decisions to stay consistent.
The day I learned to pay attention to volatility was the day I started to be consistently profitable in options trading. Most options traders start out trading stocks and they learn that if a stock is associated with good news its value often increases, whereas bad news sends a stock down.
The SPY fell 5% or more in a 30-day period only 11% of the time from 1993 to 2014, and I explain why this data is the foundation for put credit spread strategies.
By my best calculations, going back to my piggy bank years, my personal spending has increased by 10% annually—and my assumption is that I will continue shelling out at this rate well into the future. Sure, I am a spender, but when you really think about it 10% is not crazy.
I run four strategies at once for diversification, and here is why a multiple-strategy approach keeps you engaged and smooths returns across changing markets.
