I've been dealing with Internet connectivity issues, so I apologize for the delayed update.

The last two weeks action was certainly stirring, to say the very least. Last Thursday, doing some research, the charts showed three areas of apparent support. 8300, 8200, and most significantly, 8000. Being that it was just in front of a holiday weekend and knowing how those sparkling characters in the New York markets behave, I decided on a number of actions. Assuming that there would be a run on the stops, I placed an order to buy 2 futures at each of the first two support levels. Two at 83.10 and two at 82.10. Having these in-the-money puts with what is now becoming a large profit requires a different manner of dealing with them. They're not the most liquid of positions. I mean like, who wants to shell out more than two grand per? I'm cool with that. So by putting on futures below the strikes in anticipation of an upward swing, the futures will react where the options won't. I had/have the choice to stay with them or punch out at will. It remains to be seen the inevitable Fibonacci reaction. I haven't yet calculated where that might take us to. The ideal would be for the 82's to get triggered and then to see a 50 or 62% correction. Most likely two would come off at the 38% and the other two later. If it works out that way, there will be free market money to pick up some cheaper 78 puts.

A confession--I didn't handle the greed factor well. Expecting the Friday action, I placed an order to short 3-8000 puts (the middle of the butterfly) at 2.05. As the market dropped, the puts worked up to 1.99. Here's the greed bit. I did a cxl/repl and moved my sell order to 2.15, virtually taking me out of the cost of three of the 85 puts. The market traded up to 2.11 and no further. The futures then turned and shot up from about 8260 to over 8440. The 80 puts fell back down to around 1.78 or so after the run up. I wasn't in front of a screen and can't say if I would have taken the profit or not on the futures. Didn't pre-think that one and have a resting order in place. Besides, the Fib re-tracement is the real reason behind it. Oh well.

So that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Stomper