DailyPlay – Closing Trade (XOM) Partial Closing Trade (HLT) – September 22, 2022

Closing Trade

• XOM – 92.46% Gain: Buy to Close 4 Contracts September 23, 2022 $95/$100 Call Verticals @ $0.15 Debit. DailyPlay Portfolio: By Closing the remaining 4 of the 6 Contracts, we will be paying $60. 

Partial Closing Trade

• HLT – 55.56% Gain: Sell to Close 4 Contracts October 21, 2022 $135/$125 Put Verticals @ $6.30 Credit. DailyPlay Portfolio: By Closing 4 of the 8 Contracts, we will be receiving $2,520. 

Investment Rationale

The Fed spoke, and they found a way to still surprise investors with even a more hawkish stance, ultimately sending the see-saw post-announcement trading session into a closing dive.

SPX 1-day 5-minute

This now puts the SPX a full 100 points beneath our key 3889 level, with only today and Friday for it to recover most of it for us to potentially not get the breakdown signal I had been looking for.  Therefore, I’m going to have to think in terms of “it has broken”.  Therefore, it will keep us leaning more towards buying puts and selling calls than the other way around, at least until I have a sense that there are opportunities to successfully buy.

We still have on 4 of 6 short XOM $95/$100 call spreads that expire on Friday. (We took two off on Tuesday.)  Make sure you exit the balance today and/or tomorrow.

XOM – Daily

We also have on a long HLT Oct. 31 $135/$125 put spread that we are up ~56% in.  We are going to take half of that off today, too.

HLT – Daily

As I’ve been saying for months, use rallies to trim your portfolios of the non-performers and names that you can also sell out of to offset taxable profitable gains you’ve had, too.  I suspect that although many will look for a test of the June lows to be a place to buy, that they will more likely give way and that we won’t really get a more reliable bottom in until the SPX achieves a weekly Setup -9 count some four weeks from now.

SPX – Weekly