Thanks for your feedback Donna, here are my responses.
My first advice is to never, ever end the day with only one side of the iron condor. If you want to split the orders up that’s fine but iron condors are meant to be more of a non-directional bet. You ended up in a position where you thought if you started with the call side you could profit more because you thought the market would go lower… and then the market ripped up to 1950. The market eventually reverted but if it hadn’t, it could have been worse.
Also I’m a little confused by your “lingo.” With iron condors we are *selling* spreads, so when you say you bought more contracts of calls, I’m guessing you mean that you sold more call spreads than you had wished.
To answer your questions:
1. This is in hindsight of course, but your best action plan would be to get some short put spreads on the table to make it look like an actual iron condor. Also, a “handle” refers to a point in the SPX. 1 handle = 1 point.
2. You don’t want to second guess yourself. Iron condors are non-directional trades so you want to have both sides on at the same time.
3. Point here still stands… if you’re going to leg into an iron condor it should all be done on the same day. You were expecting the market to crash so you chose instead to put on an aggressively bearish bet.
4. A “blast all” order is a kind of order ticket you can use on the option exchanges.
5. With income trades we don’t really try to guess where the market is headed. Our goal here is to expect the profits to come through the time decay of the short options. Because of some voodoo in the options market, the call spread side will tend to be closer to price and carry more premium, which is why I unbalance the call side.
Hope this helps!