AAPL Strangle vs Condor

So I just ran the numbers on AAPL as the current price is roughly where I put the condor trade on yesterday, about $205. Without giving buy and sell numbers for all four legs, here are the nets. At $205 the condor is a net credit of .82, the strangle is a net credit of 2.24. Even at the actual prices that I got out at, with the underlying at $209 (+5 away from where the trade was put on), the condor was a .10 credit and the strangle was a .71 credit. So from this I'm taking the following learning experience: If this is intended to be a one day trade to see if IV comes in, a condor doesn't make sense to me as you are long the wings and you are anticipating vol to come in. Why would you want to be long options for one day if you're expecting vol to decrease? Intuitively this makes no sense.

Let's look at this another way. My goal was to play an expected decrease in vol over a one day period. I was right and made .82, could have made 2.31. That's another (2.31-.82)/.82 = 181% profit that was left on the table in exchange for a defined risk. I would argue that giving up (2.31-.82)/2.31 = 64% of the actual reward in this case in exchange for defined risk does not make sense for me. Further more, had the underlying moved drastically over the earnings announcement (hence IV does not come in and possibly even increases), we would admit defeat and exit the position at a smaller loss than the maximum defined under the condor anyway. If this is the case, why go long the wings in the first place if you're not actually going to use them?

However, if your holding period is more than a day or even until expiration, then I understand buying the protection even though you anticipate vol coming down. In that case you have overnight risk. If you want to argue that being long the wings is protection in case you are wrong about IV coming in, I would counter with two things. First, is the protection really worth the expense? Second, why not just widen the range of your strike prices on the strangle instead? Sell them at strikes that make sense even if you are wrong the IV does spike.

What are you thoughts? I don't want either of us to make the mistake of thinking that since we made money on the trade that this idea as it was played makes sense and therefore we should do it again. After I've analyzed the trade I would have done it differently given my goal and time frame involved. Great learning experience for me though. This goes back to what I said about having to have at least 1 contract on to actually follow though. I doubt I would have run these numbers on a paper trade which means I wouldn't have learned anything. I'm happy with the way things worked out even though I only made $3 today.