WMT – 10/12/18 Iron Condor

Normally you can count on WMT to trade in a relatively predictable manner, but not always which is what I ran into on this trade.

On 10/12 with WMT trading at $94.52 I decided to place an Iron Condor trade. I sold the 11/16 $100 Call and purchased the $105 Call. I completed the Iron Condor by selling the $85 Put and covering it with the $80 Put.

WMT had an Implied Volatility of 69.49 when I started the trade which was pretty high for WMT. My probability of success was 62.49% when I started the trade.

On 11/9 WMT was trading at $105.52 which put both my short and long Call in the money and me at a loss. I started working on a roll out for a couple of more weeks provided I could do it for a credit. After a lot of playing around with weeks and strikes I was finally able to roll out the position using the same strike to the 11/30 expiration.

Since I had the adjust the trade I moved my GTC order to break even to just close the trade and move on.

On 11/15 my GTC finally hit and I closed the trade for $1.00 or .27% over 34 days. WMT had moved back to $99.54 which enabled me to close. This time the probabilities with a little help from a roll made the trade work.

Ironically, if I had just waited to the 11/16 expiration instead of trying to roll this trade would have hit my initial GTC order and I would have made closer to 11% on this trade. Oh well, sometimes trading works out that way. You think you are doing the right thing but make it worse. Sometimes it is just better to let these types of Iron Condors play out win or lose.