DailyPlay – Closing Trades (SPY) – May 18, 2023

Closing Trades

• SPY – 36.55% Loss: Sell to Close 1 Contract (or 100% of your Contracts) June 16th $410/$385 Put Vertical Spread @ $3.49 Credit. DailyPlay Portfolio: By Closing this 1 Contract, we will receive $349.
• SPY – 32.01% Loss: Sell to Close 1 Contract (or 100% of your Contracts) June 16th $411/$385 Put Vertical Spread @ $3.76 Credit. DailyPlay Portfolio: By Closing this 1 Contract, we will receive $376.

Investment Rationale

Investors came back strongly yesterday, bidding stocks well higher on hopes of a debt ceiling deal coming sooner than later (albeit only 14 days remain till the deadline), but the hope of it happening reversed Tuesday’s seeing bidders disappear – the opposite happened yesterday. The SPX, NDX and Dow all closed up about 1.2%, and again find themselves nearing their best levels of the year.

Rates are also moving higher, with the TNX reaching 3.58% and honing in on last month’s high print of 3.64%. Why stocks are moving higher with rates moving up – the latter indicating that traders are less convinced that the Fed will be done raising rates at their upcoming June meeting – is as silly as it was seeing stocks rally 1.2% yesterday. There is certainly little rhyme and reason in the equity market for what we’re seeing occur, and you can be sure that the computer algos are doing more daily push and pull to stocks than it is big institutional money getting in or out.

Position-wise, we were able to get into selling the ARKG June 15th $30/$31 call spread on yesterday’s rally at about 45 cents. We’ll stop ourselves out of that trade on a close (or two; your choice) above $31.35, and look for the stock to potentially get to the $28 neighborhood.

ARKG – Daily

Given more losses that I like that we’ve recently had, let’s remove the SPY $410/$385 and $411/$385 put spreads we’re long to cut those losses now. A Friday close above 4155 in the SPX will also then take us out of the $412 and $413 spreads, too.

Personally, I have not put on any new trades this week. In fact, I’ve trimmed a bit in one of my large cap tech holdings. Otherwise, I am content on waiting for more clarity to come from both Congress and the Fed, and given the lack of clarity evident in most of the major asset classes’ charts right now, the big money managers are doing the same. And the way I look at things with my 40+ -years of trading experience eyes, if the big boys and girls don’t want to be playing these markets – and they minimally are – why should we?