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My Live Trade on SPX

As promised here’s the trade I made today.  I wanted to make the option trade that would give me a nice 5-6% for the monthly February 2017 options on the SPX but I didn’t like how close it was to the money for only 22 days out.  So I’d rather take a weekly option which expires in 7 days (Feb 1, 2017) for about 1.5% after commissions.
The trade I made was SPX SELL PUT SPREAD @ 2230/2225 for .10 Mark with the current Strike @ 2292.12
Why did I like this trade?  Well the monthly was around 2170 for 88% out of the money and about a 5-6% return with 22 days left.  That was roughly 4+% away from the money and I felt it was to close.  With the current heavy bull market today and yesterday, the premiums were closing in.  Though a weekly with only 7 days until expiration was over 2% away which I felt was safer.  The Kelly formula disagrees telling me to only put about 5% of my bank on it, but I went with 100% of the bank.  I’ll let you know how it works out on February 2nd, 2017.
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Day 1 – New Guy to Rich Guy Promise

Hello, and welcome to my blog where a new guy, the clueless investor, me, will strive to be rich in a time frame of 5 years.  Why 5 years?  Well it’s a promise I made to myself.  Why have a goal when promises work better.  The wording is more of an affirmation to me.  It’s even a affirmation to you.  I promise I will walk you through my steps, as I learn them or if I already learned them so people can follow along.  A promise just feels more reassuring.  Imagine, being in a relationship and the person getting down on their knee looks up at their loved one and says, “My goal is to never be with anyone else!”
I plan on covering a lot as I learn it.  The pitfalls, the workarounds, they real life lessons as I learn them against the markets.  Most of this isn’t new in the world of investing but it’s new to me.  Can’t really say it’s even a secret.  This knowledge is freely given at any library.  Warren Buffet gives it away if I listen.  What I want to do is read books from anywhere I can give them and see if I can apply it to my investments.  I’ll even let you have a point of view perspective into what I’m doing, I’ll even put down my results so that we have an accurate record into what I’m doing.
As of today none of my open trades went through.  I wanted a certain price for some options but the market really ran away today gaining +14 in the SPX (S&P 500) and + 21 in the RUT (Russel).  This caused my mark price to float away.  I’ll resubmit my offers tomorrow morning, to see if the market opens down and causing the marks to fill back in where I’d like them.
But during this process over the next week, I want to get you check lists I make before going through the actions and even share some of my home grown formulas.  These may not be right for what I want to do, but they’re my formula.  I’ll share thoughts with you and some thing I come across.  I’ll do my best not to speculate, which means I’m failing.  I’ll even get into some high frequency trading since I am a software engineer by trade and find that to be a dark recess of my brain that must be scratched.
Until the next post, I hope we stick around and have fun together.