In spirit of the irony post I just wrote, I'll sell my weeklies now to ensure the success of our trade by regretting this decision tomorrow, but I'll survive this regret with my other calls lol
191x weekly calls up +200%.  Still holding month out 191x up 85%.

BUT... I also have a fresh position in 197x calls at $.30 (now $1.01).  Fate won't see it coming if we rally crazy tomorrow.

Here's a review of where things are at.  Tech Trader did end up taking a hit (largely Monday) and is down 5% off the highs of 20%.  Markets are off about 12% from the highs, however, and SPY is actually negative for the year now.   The playbook currently is in ETFs and market timing.  Positions in individual names remain very neutral as a portfolio thanks to the large exposure cutting that Tech Trader did in July.  Tech Trader is getting longer on each sell off day but only in increments where it thinks might be the bottom, leaving a lot of dry powder to average down.  As the market bounces, Tech Trader will scale some out, and if we go lower, it will average down again.  It will do this until we get back into an uptrend of sorts where market timing signals will then recede and individual names start coming back into play.

Currently it is 112% long by 24% short, with 30% of that long exposure just now being added from Tuesday's close.  If you look at exposures below, you'll see that long is slowly increasing but in the sector charts, all the exposure is coming from ETFs (n/a) which is dwarfing any contribution from individual names right now.  



As usual, a YTD chart of SPY for comparison always highlights how stable Tech Trader's performance is compared to the market despite being largely net long most the year (let's not kid ourselves, SPY looks like a nightmare).

Prodigal signal returns again.  Let's see if it can finally hold into the close.

Update: No bottom signal per se but Tech Trader bought anyway at the very last minute at $187.41 due to the volume and severe price decline.  Fingers crossed; didn't take a bottom signal to bounce from October.  Very last minute (literally) buy though at the sudden plunge below $188 and only possible because Tech Trader is fully automated.

Lost the SPY bottom at close.  Those last minutes really matter.  The signal eludes me yet again.  Fingers crossed we get it tomorrow.

What's even more amazing is how all the intraday signals just sidestepped today's action and stayed quiet to let the big daily ones take over.  None of this is coded.  Freaking swarm intelligence at work here lol

Days like this are a beautiful example of how Tech Trader is NOT quant or conventional algo trading and definitely not mean reverting. All the other quants I know of started scaling in last week and got hit big time, unlike Tech Trader aiming for precision with technical analysis to figure out the exact bottoms (or at least pretty darn close).

Starting to get longer with some intraday volume exhaustion again, starting with XLU.  I expect we might see more names over the next couple trading days though.  This is Tech Trader's way of scaling in lol

Trendlines killing it again today up 2% on average across its names.  80% of them working in its favors and majority of them short signals.  Really regret not seeing the DIA short yesterday; need to not neglect my older strategies so much.

UNG flagging some intraday seller exhaustion... I'd much rather see buys on the main US indicies though; still waiting on the huge cluster of bottom signals on those and preferably on the daily chart (haven't had one on SPY for almost a year).

Very strong outperformance in Tech Trader again by the end of day.  SPY is down 3% at the end of the day.  Tech Trader is down only 1%, again while gradually covering shorts and adding ETF names (currently 82% long by 24% short).

Well this is a bit unsettling.  Trendlines might short SPY which is breaking its uptrend (depending on end of day).  Pretty scary given the high hitrate of Trendline breaks. Would be an interesting match up if RSI2 took the other side with a long signal.

Totally forgot to follow up on the SPY trendline break to the downside.  It definitely broke.  What would be most exciting now is if we can open down next week and then get the RSI2 bottom on SPY to flip long.

For those curious on what these trendline breaks look like over longer horizon, here's every break from 1998 onwards.

Saved 2 cents on XLU calls thanks to the option pricing mechanism lol

2015-08-21 08-02-48: TTFund_TDA_Options: Checking for fair value of XLU Sep 11 2015 46 Call...
2015-08-21 08-02-48: TTFund_TDA_Options: Spread too wide.  Basing price on midpoint $0.37 between 0.35x0.38
2015-08-21 08-02-48: TTFund_TDA_Options: Comparing extrinsic value $0.37 on XLU Sep 11 2015 46 Call with $0.28 on XLU Sep 11 2015 46 Put...
2015-08-21 08-02-48: TTFund_TDA_Options: Buying at cheaper price $0.36 for XLU Sep 11 2015 46 Call
2015-08-21 08-02-48: TTFund_TDA_Options: Fair value check complete: Best price at $0.36 in spread of 0.35x0.38

XLU bouncing already.  Calls that TT bought up 20% month out and 30% weekly.  The bounces from the capitulation point almost always happens, but it's hard to tell for how long and how high.

A lesser talked about strategy for Trendline Breaks is also killing it this week.  This is the one that a friend and I used to trade around manually because it doesn't have automated exits.  The paper portfolio just gets out on the first day of gain or after 1 stdev loss.  It's a good gauge for where things are at though, especially if it's >100% short and making 4% in a few days.

Updated the last post to include percentages on the column charts and a second chart showing how no single name lost more than .1% of the portfolio.

What's interesting to note is that Tech Trader isn't buying the dip today; no bottom or RSI signals on the major indices.  There was one yesterday and a leftover from last week, but not the usual 3-5 cluster or more with aggressive averaging down.  Again, exposures are at year lows of 65% long vs 28% short.

Pretty much every time we have a big sell off like today, we're seeing Tech Trader yet again hold up fine despite being more than 50% net long.  Right now SPY is down 1.2%, IWM 1.5%, and EEM 2%, but Tech Trader is only down 0.5%, which is basically a normal fluctuation on any given day.  On the performance chart for the year, it's barely a blip whereas you see SPY chopping up and down below.

IWM already up 0.7% from Tech Trader's bottom call this morning.  Don't even have to wait for the Fed.

Looks like the algos were expecting the news not to come out until 2pm EST and are just now reading it lol.  IWM surging above $120 now.  Well over 1% from the bottom signal on IWM

It turns out Tech Trader would have bought these months ago if we just had the stocks in the scan list.  Unfortunately, Tech Trader is only looking at top 1000 stocks right now; need to have much more capital before we can think of increasing the universe, else the size of each position will be too small.  Just something to keep in mind for the future as far as capacity for Tech Trader is concerned.

Clarification on GRUB - Not trading this specific strike/contract.  Just wanted to show how TT would price a wide spread.  Sorry for the confusion.

Seeing some slight rotation into other sectors like XLP and XLF while QQQ and XLK retreat, which is great since QQQ and XLK were sold yesterday while XLP and XLF are still being held.

HIG, older position from a month back, now ripping on speculation.

Tech Trader barely took a hit during the market sell off and is now outperforming the market again on the rally.  SPY only up .3% and QQQ up .5%, but Tech Trader is up over 1% with only 68% net long exposure and no leverage.  Both the market timing ETF plays (QQQ, etc) and idiosyncratic stock picks (GPRO, HIG, etc) are contributing significantly today.

Every pullback and higher low we get reduces the desire for Tech Trader to sell.  If anything, we'd want a slow grind up here to really squeeze as much gain as we can from this trade.

Tech Trader finally out of QQQ at $111 (just take a guess for the reason).  One-month out ATM calls up 85%.  Still holding the other ETFs, which seem to be playing catch up now.
Edit: XLK out as well; basically the same as QQQ.

Market closes down 10-20 bps.  Tech Trader is up 80bps end of day.