Hello Friend. Trading a bit of $SPY today and doing a bit of housecleaning.

So, I’ve begun watching Mr Robot from the beginning. I’ve already seen Season 1 and 2 but forgot enough that I need to re-watch before seeing Season 3. Damn, it’s a good show. BTW Season 1 and 2 are on Amazon Prime Video. Should you need some entertainment. During SXSW in 2016, the show came to Austin setting up a ferris wheel downtown for a week. 

Today, Jerome Powell, testified before the House. During that testimony he sounded a bit more hawkish than his predecessor, Janet Yellen. That was enough to get the credit market’s panties in a wad, or I should say it set off the algorithms to sell the $SPY. We gave up a good bit of the gains made yesterday. The VXX shot up 9.5% and SPY was down 1.25%. After hours the SPY took back 0.32% but before you get too comfortable, the futures are down 0.21% tonight. 

I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed. I think this was algo driven. The market changed too quickly and there was no other real news to drive it.  

In my less risky, SPY trading account I did very little, getting a little bit longer and trading out of some put spreads at a small profit. 

In my speculative account I added just a few new long positions in AMZN and opened a few put calendars in AAPL and GOOGL. 

Mostly I just did some housecleaning. 

One technique I use is selling a credit spread for the following week if I am short either a put or call that expires this week and its close to the strike. This way I can close it out on Friday and sell the long call or put I bought this week to offset it.  

I’ll try to give a real-world example of this in the next few days.