An honest one from Friday
An honest one for today.
I spent last week watching for a zero DTE opportunity and only took one.
Friday it finally lined up. Dealers looking long gamma. A cluster of long strikes around where I thought we might pin. The setup was there.
But the setup lining up is only half of it. You then have to actually be there to manage the position, and I don't have a bot doing that for me (yet!).
So I put on a 0DTE iron fly with a tight stop, because I didn't have the luxury of letting it run for the whole day.
Got stopped out fairly quickly. Then the market mean-reverted. On a slightly wider stop it would have been a perfectly good trade.
Which is the thing worth sitting with.
My stop was determined by my availability that afternoon. Nothing about the trade itself said "use a tight stop." Two different inputs, and only one of them should have been in the decision.
Everyone finds their own sweet spot on stops. Too tight and the noise takes you out. Too wide and one bad move costs more than the winners brought in. I don't think there's a universal answer.
But you should at least know which one you're solving for. The trade, or your afternoon.
Which is the actual point I want to leave you with.
The trade has its own inputs. Setup, vol regime, structure, stop size. You have your own inputs too. Time available, focus, other positions to watch. Both matter. Both belong in the decision. What doesn't belong is quietly using one to substitute for the other, or letting one masquerade as the other in the post-trade review.
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Imran
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