Despite the major indices falling between 2% and 4% last week, we managed to close 15 winning trades across our services, pocketing nearly $4,000 in cash in the live account. Here are all of the closed trades from the week of March 24-28:
As we discussed last week, we’ve been adjusting our tactics and trades to the current market environment. This includes utilizing bearish-leaning strategies, such as bear call spreads on indices, ETFs and individual stocks, and bullish-leaning strategies on gold-related equities like SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and miner Newmont (NEM).
We closed back-to-back one-day winners in the 5K Challenge program on the Russell 2000 (RUT) and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) last week, earning hundreds of dollars apiece in less than 24 hours.
This was our third profitable bear call spread in a row on the small-cap Russell 2000 since mid-March. We booked $930 in the live account from this strategy in just over two weeks.
Across our services, we also found success with some beaten-down individual stocks. This included Nvidia (NVDA), Netflix (NFLX), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), and Apple (AAPL). We kept our expirations relatively short and our target exit prices tight, looking to move quickly in and out of positions to reduce our risk of getting caught on the wrong side of a market sell-off.
This sort of short-term trading is at the heart of Income Madness, regardless of the broader market environment. But we knew heading into the latest round, which began in mid-March, that we would need to make some adjustments. In fact, some members questioned whether we should hold off on the event. And their concern was valid and something that we discussed.
But rather than sit on the sidelines, we opted to trade through the market turbulence while making adjustments to mitigate our risk and increase our chances of success.
Between March 17 and March 20, we put on 12 trades. This is fewer than the typical Income Madness, but the market rout required us to be more selective with our trades. Yet, the income we have generated thus far is on par with other recent rounds of Income Madness.
So far, we have closed 10 of those 12 trades, booking more than $2,000 in cash.
We still have two trades open, one of which we’ve had to manage since the stock went against us. But that is to be expected given the recent market tumult, which has forced us to manage positions across all of our services, rolling them to buy time for the underlyings to recover.
In the cases where it has cost us a debit to roll, we’ve also added call spreads as a way to generate income and offset the cost of rolling.
This has clearly been a challenging market, testing traders’ patience and resilience, and that doesn’t seem likely to change in the near term. It’s also required much more active management and a willingness to adapt. But as the results of the past two weeks have shown, the steps we’re taking are yielding measurable results. We’ll keep at it, adding new trades and continuing to manage our ongoing positions.
