A Look At a Few Charts: Revisited

As a follow-up to the charts I posted before my annual August hiatus, here’s what happened for each of those names. The yellow line in each of these charts is July 17, when I posted the charts before.

SPY:

The broad market ended up having a big drop as August started, but mostly recovered since then. If you tried to trade breakouts you got chopped to pieces. If you tried to fade breakouts you had to take a lot of heat during the chop for not a lot of benefit. This chart is textbook for how I used to give away a lot of my gains for the year by forcing trades during this time. I’m happy I sat this out. Things seem bleak for the markets going forward with global slowdowns and recession indicators flashing. I’m leaning toward taking more defensive long term positions here.

AAPL:

Earnings were good, AAPL spiked and then sold off all the gains. Then it dropped, and shorts got burned in that chop. In the end, it’s at the same level today as it was when I posted the chart before. Nothing but pain in August.

ROKU:

ROKU was the exception to my August rules. After some contraction before earnings, it popped and didn’t look back. If I weren’t sidelined by rule, I would have gone long on the Swing VWAP breakout at about $135. I have liked ROKU all year and in this case, breaking my rule would have paid off. Missing things like this and accepting it are important to having the right trading mindset. There have been so many good setups in ROKU this year, and I’ve been able to catch a few of them. It’s ok if I don’t get every one. Greed is a killer, as is fear of missing out, and begrudging any moves you may have missed.

TSLA:

TSLA ended up being pretty volatile with the earnings report and different news stories during August. Any of my typical setups would have lit me on fire. Lots of chop, lots of heat whether you traded breakouts or faded them. The only edge was in knowing the news and earnings beforehand, which is basically impossible unless you are cheating with inside info. Another good chart to watch rather than trade.

Going into the fall, I’ll keep an eye on any setups that may occur. I’m biased toward the bearish side, but we’ll see how things pan out.

Options Open Interest Over Time

As I’ve been collecting data from the OCC, I’ve created a database of the daily open interest numbers in all calls and all puts for each of the S&P 500 names. Now that I’ve got almost a months worth, here’s a couple of charts I found interesting. These show the open interest numbers for the September expiration, coming up this Friday. The first is for AAPL, which shows call OI accelerating over put OI over the last few days:

Compare that with the daily chart over the last 30 days, which has steadily fallen:

The next is for GOOG, and it shows that call and put OI’s crossed over at the end of August:

At the same time, GOOG was trending upward:

As with all data mining, I’m scratching my head to figure out what it means and if there’s any alpha there. It looks like you would want to fade the increases in OI from these charts. Leave a comment if you have any ideas of the meaning of these charts or other data that would be useful to mine out.