Trading recap Friday 29th of July

see full trading log here

Wow, what a day, big swings in both directions and lots of news.
It is amazing how the politicians are once again able to mess things up. Instead of getting things done in time, they wait to the last minutes and play their games, so actually things fall out of hand. Seems like they like the drama and attention that they just cannot miss that by doing things uncomplicated.
It is not strange the approval rating of Obama is at an all time low.
http://www.businessinsider.com/barack-obamas-approval-rating-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2011-7

Back to the markets. We gapped lower by 13 point at the open in the S&P 500 futures, but we saw a solid reversal after breaking below 1280 support to a low of 1278,50.
Buyers stepped in and we saw a rally to 1300,75. One thing I like to point out, we often see reversals when the daily bar reaches more than 500k contracts traded in the S&P500 Emini futures (ES) and the 2nd hourly bar of the day had 580k traded contracts. We should now have potential for a bounce up to 1311 or so at least at the start of next week. All the short calls for expiration today expired out of the money and I kept the premium received, very nice!!!!

I did buy EURCHF as we are at the bottom of the playing field and should see support down here. Another point is that the CHF has outperformed vs ES, see chart below and there is a clear disconnect, something has to give. My bet is that CHF is overvalued at this point and should drift back towards 1.20 where we have the 55 day exponential moving average. Another point is that I am short ES at the moment with the negative delta, meaning it also serves as a hedge trade.

Added a small VIX trade, sold 20 Aug puts and bot 22,50 Sep puts. My thinking is that VIX will drift back below 20 in a few weeks, meaning that we want to be around 20 level when it expires 16th of August. Then the 22,50 would be in solid profit.

Closed the gold futures and sold some more puts and only short 1550 puts, will keep that bias unless we break below 1580.

Also sold October 600 puts in the Corn (ZC) contract at 11 per contractm meaning break even is 589. That means we have to break that key low of 602 to lose money. Good volume down there, so expect that to hold well.

Have a nice weekend