So that was interesting. The open was about as close to a flash crash as you can get. The market fell from 2000 at about 3pm on Friday to 1820 or so on Monday 2 min after open invoking various halts. That’s about an 8 percent fall. To witness and experience that was something else. The decline triggered 1200 halts in the first minutes of trading as SPX liquidity disappeared. That obviously hurts all of our market neutral trades significantly. You couldn’t see MIDS and fills were tough to get. Probably the worst day I’ve experienced in the market yet. But I’ve learned a few things and will be better for it. It was my first flash crash like condition and I feel like I need a t-shirt saying I survived it. Today the market is up almost as much as it was down yesterday. Again, not great for market neutral strategies!
Back to back 90% down days happened 8x in the last 5200 trading days. It happens 0.2% of the time since 1931 and the speed and magnitude was on par with the worst.
Look at that drop
Hello
Found out a few days ago your blog. Very interesting! Keep publishing 🙂
how did you end up in august? Could you get out of trouble?
Would be good if you could give more details about your MIC and M3 trades.
Thanks
The M3 trades handled things well. The MIC did not 🙂 The M3 is a trade designed by John Locke. I highly recommend him and his strategies. I’ll be trading mostly the M3 going forward.
Did you have to make many adjustments on the M3 trades? If so did it take a lot of additional margin compared to initial margin need when first entering the trade?
yeah, it took a bit of adjusting. The M3s did decent. I know a lot of the guys are up like 5-7% now. Insane. I also know some max lossed out on the Monday/Tuesday but you really have to kinda give yourself more room on those days as option pricing is out of whack and most of it is volatility pricing issues. I got out of some things on the Wednesday and wish I hadn’t