Today was truly crazy. I had bought some Nov 230 SRS Puts. They were supposed to go up all day. But they took a serious beating. A serious beating. The market kept falling all day. And so did the SRS puts. For those that don’t know what SRS is, it’s a ProShares ETF. Corresponds to the real estate sector and trades as the inverse of DOW. So when the DOW is up, SRS is down and vice versa. So Puts on the SRS will be profitable if SRS goes down. In other words the Puts would be profitable if DOW rises.
After many days of beating, the DOW was due for a rise. It was rising but kept falling. SRS kept rising and making higher highs. This meant the PUTs were at 0 at one point.
Then finally in the last 15 minutes the puts went from .1 to 11. That’s a 99% increase! Oh well! I had already sold my position at a loss after the first time the bid showed $0.
So I’ve decided to take this a little more seriously. I will try to trade more ProShares and more ETFs if possible. I have so far lost $1400 in the market. Hardly, the serious type of loss that many many traders have suffered. Hopefully, heeding the warning by other traders and using my practice accounts’ experience, I can try to do better.
I will be trading with a $100 that I have left in the account. May not mean much to anyone. But I’d rather try to see if I can make this go to $500. Until I either lose this or reach $500, I will try not to fund the account anymore. I have refined the rules more and will update them soon.