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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Iron Condor Losing Trades - 80 DTE

At this point, we now have baseline "no touch" iron condor (IC) backtest results for the Russell 2000, S&P 500, and Nasdaq 100.  Before we move on to modifications of the basic "no touch" IC strategy, I thought it would be a good idea to look a bit deeper at the losing trades in the backtest results.  Be sure to check the archive section of this blog, if you need more details about the backtests.

In this post, we will look at the losing trades for the RUT and SPX "no touch" ICs at 80 days to expiration (DTE).  The chart below overlays the start dates of the losing 80 DTE RUT trades with the RUT index.  The start dates of these trades are shown as a bar graph overlay, with the four colors corresponding to a different delta variation of this strategy.  The red bar segment corresponds to the start date of the 20 delta variation, blue with the 16 delta variation, green with the 12 delta variation, and orange with the 8 delta variation.  Recall that the delta number mentioned, is the delta of the short strikes (calls and puts) in the IC.  For all of the "no touch" IC trades, the RUT had a wing width of 20 points while the SPX had a wing width of 25 points.

In this chart, it is interesting to note that the losing 8 delta trades always coincided with losing 12 delta trades, the 12 delta trades with the 16 delta trades, and lastly the losing 16 delta trades coincided with the losing 20 delta trades.  With the start dates of the losing trades overlayed on the RUT index, it is pretty easy to guess which side of the IC caused the loss for a given trade.




The table below provides more detail for each of the bars shown in the chart above.  Each row in the table is analogous to a bar in the chart above.  This table lists the start, end, and expiration dates for the losing trades.  After these three date columns there are four groups of three columns, with each group representing one of the four delta variations of this RUT "no touch" 80 DTE IC (8 delta, 12 delta, 16 delta, 20 delta).  Each of these four groups shows the percent return of the call credit spread (CCS), percent return of the put credit spread (PCS), and the total percent return.  With this information we can see which side of the IC caused a trade to lose, and by how much.




The next chart, similar to the RUT chart above, overlays the start dates of the losing 80 DTE SPX trades with the SPX index.  Unlike the RUT trades above, the SPX trades do not follow the same delta pattern for the start dates of the losing trades.  The pattern is loosely followed though.




Similar to the RUT table above, the table below provides more detail for each of the bars shown in the chart above.  Each row in the table is analogous to a bar in the chart above.  With this information we can see which side of the IC caused a trade to lose, and by how much.




With this information, it might be interesting to review the market conditions on the start dates for these losing trades, as well as the market conditions during the period between the start and end dates.  These conditions might give us a clue as to when and how to adjust these trades.

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