I am about to board a 24 day cruise and am preparing all of my trades.
I have this on right now:
250 units of HS3 (spread between ES @ EDF and SPX @ IB) (2.5MM planned capital)
20 units of Campaign style STT (1.5MM planned capital)
34 units of X4V14 (Locke style ATM BWB) – (765k Planned capital)
50 units of KH hedge (Black swan lottos)
So that’s quite a bit!
To prepare I have 2 sim cards (local EU with roaming and a CAD world wide roaming) as a reserve. I have unlimited internet on the cruise and I brought a portable monitor and laptop. I’ve entered GTC orders for every HS3 and STT so that they’re there for me. I’ve got all my models ready and none of these are particularly exposed to a BSH as they’ve all got BSH built in. Most of the work is entering, and I am fully entered. I’ve got the GTCs so I can close in crisis (hopefully at profit). The market opens here at 3:30pm-4:30pm depending where you are, so I am usually done my tours etc by then so I can attend to trades in the evening or early afternoon.
I’ve done this before and guess what, it was during Aug 24 2015 crash 🙂 Suffice to say I was tied to the computer for the last 4 days of that cruise. The internet handles IB with ease. Haven’t had an issue. It was different them, I was trading rhinos and Modified Condors. I needed to adjust.
Lately, skew and vol has increased due to trade war rhetoric and i’ve noticed my Decembers take a vol hit. Not a big deal but could have had better entries.
I wish you & your family a very enjoyable cruise.
It seems on the very first day of your cruise you rocked the market with around 1.4% down move.
I would like to know if the problem you experienced with IB during the first week of Feb 2018 caused you to split your HS3 trade between EDF and IB ?
my understanding is that /ES is half the size of SPX so you would have been forced to do twice the number of contracts at EDF (if you did it in the ratio of 1:1) .
How did the commission on contacts maths work out ?
Lol, yah, the vol expansion and issues w EDF broker made for an interesting few days. I’ll explain more in a post
With the new setups for SPX re HS and a new version of STT, I’ll probably move back to IB for the most part because they’re predictable (relatively) and I prefer the software
ES needs double the contracts (ratio 2:1). The commissions are more than SPX with that all told, I think I pay total $2.30 per SPX contract equivalent. @ EDF, I pay 25c plus brokerage fees per ES contract. SPX is cheaper but ES allowed single order fills and better margin.