To initiate and manage your own trades, you first need to determine your Risk/Reward by asking yourself how much are you willing to risk losing in order to profit? You want to Risk a minimum $1 to make $2 on trades. The ideal set ups are risking $1 to make $3+. This is what many refer to ask Risk Manage. Risk managing is where create a gameplan, enter and then exit trades based off of that gameplan.
To enter or exit a trade in every scenario you have to determine the size of your position and timeframe of your trade.
Everyone has a different style and approach to this. Some add more capital to trades as they begin to work others go all in from the get go. Some target intraday (day traders) and others target a nice trend lasting days or weeks(swing traders).
In this Case Study we will show you how to approach an Option Swing Trade with a weekly timeframe and entries and exits. The ticker is $ZM and the Trade Alert Initiated is below:
Buy April $330 Puts was alerted prior to break of $331 with a weekly stock PT of $194
Now scaling in is the approach we took here because this particular name is headline driven based on past price action and news releases. We were also risking to lose entire capital in options to earn close to 400%! Risk/Reward is Risk $1 to potentially make $4
So the scaling in approach taken on our end was 1/4 at break of $331 then adding another 1/4 at 11% option profit leading us to be 1/2 in. Our next target was another 1/4 at 23/24% option profit. We didn't reach this 23/24% profit point and began to see a bounce:
20% profit shown below:
But what do you do when you experience a bounce? Nothing goes straight up or down so how do you handle this?
The first answer is you should have set stop losses in place to protect your gains thus far and your capital to re-enter. Here we laid out the first resistance that occurred on the 15 minute which would be the first stop loss for 1/2 of your position. The next would be the other stop loss close to your entry point when you first entered the trade.
Lesson: You can get stopped out with some gains and loses several times before the trade continues to trend towards your price target. If you lost 15% after getting stopped out numerous times until the trade finally works and you make 380% return total. That is totally worth it!
Bad habits: The worst case scenario that you can happen is you decide to just stay in the trade and are confident no matter what the price will "drop on Monday or Tuesday after news comes from...". Have seen many times where expected news comes out and the price gaps up instead. You now have blown past your stop loss set and are down 30+% on the trade after you were just up 20%! Of course the price can gap down and you would have been up an additional % amount. However, this is where you need to approach the market with little emotions and stick to your set rules.
What to expect moving forward: No system is perfect and no one has a crystal ball. However, as swing traders we try to approach trades when they have the highest probability of working. Below is the price projection we have set for this name. We expect July lows from last year to be tested at a minimum per below projections. However, there are expected bounces that will occur. The overall trend is down.
This is also the reason why we selected April Put Options as we wanted to have more time for this pattern to play out prior to the next expected uptrend in equities that will shortly follow.
More to follow - until next time!
-J
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