Monday, February 27, 2012

ZB Roll

I have posted in the past that in the roughly 18 months that I've been trading ZB I've never seen a gap not get filled. This goes for anything from the 5-minute chart to the effect of the roll. So after watching this phenomenon many times from the sidelines I finally decided to jump in. It felt uncomfortable as hell going long ZB at these levels but I did so last night and woke up this morning to find my target hit. Below is the screen shot of my email confirmations, net of $777. Looks like we're in a range until broken so I'll continue to short near 146 and go long near 140. We've still got three weeks to go but I'm short the 485/490 APPL call spread which will be a loss of about -$1300. Other than that I've just got about four small $500 max risk/reward spread trades I'm playing with.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Rolling Futures

Jason,
I am currently short ZB and got an email from TOS saying I need to close or roll the position next week. I want to roll - exactly how do you go about doing that? Obviously I could just buy to close my March contracts and sell the next cycle but that might result in bid/ask slippage and random fluctuations in the price between the closing and opening of the positions. Alternatively I could try to outguess the market and close March at a perceived low and then sell the next cycle higher, but this may or may not work. My question is if I just want to maintain my same position, is there a more efficient way to roll it out at my same prices and avoid the scenarios above?