Monitoring Option Positions - Away from Home

I've finally found the tool that gives me freedom - I get alerts when I need them and can put on a hedge if required. It's the Samsung Galaxy Note II due out in September, according to this blog. All I need to find is a case that I can hang on my belt. My iPad is getting too cumbersome to carry. I'm day trading less. Flo and options carry most of the load these days. A couple of hours discretionary trading is what happens most days.


Samsung Galaxy Note II looks pretty big and runs IceCreamSandwich or Jelly Bean. I will be able to connect to all my brokers and my charts/FloBot through the Cloud and actually see what I'm looking at. It's going to be more convenient to carry than my iPad.


What do I alert and what can I do about them from a small device? Lots of choices.


Firstly, I alert myself for the UNDERLYING - the stock or index - hitting a price above AND below the previous close. The prices I pick are prices where I would need to do something.


OK, I get an alert - an email or SMS (I can choose). When this happens, I don't have to figure out what to do because I have already worked it out - before I left home.


Usually, I will want to go to delta neutral first. This will give me time to make any adjustments I need to make. I can go delta neutral quite easily using an underlying and I can do this with a couple of clicks even on a small device like a smartphone or Pad. For example, I may have a RUT butterfly on and I would need to do something if price goes above 858.00 or below 723.00. I know what my delta position on the butterfly would be at each of those prices because I looked it up on my risk graph or brokers greek table. I also know that I will use, say,  1 Russell future for every delta point I need to hedge.


I can execute this a couple of different ways:

1. I can leave a sell stop and a buy stop with my broker to make the trade when either of these prices are hit, or,
2. I can execute them myself when an email/SMS alert is received.

Now that I am delta neutral, I can hop into a coffee shop or Internet cafe or go home or anything else and execute the option adjustment I had worked out and simultaneously take off the futures hedge.


I have an account with TDAmeritrade and get the ThinkOrSwim software for free. This software allows trading, monitoring and backtesting although it does not carry a cumulative total of profitability after adjustments, but you can keep track of this manually. The added bonus here is the smartphone app with alerts.


This whole operation is a very rare occurrence and is designed only for black swan events. It's mainly to give me peace of mind. I usually only look and adjust my option positions once a day and usually at the same time of day and at a time when I'm usually at my workstation or my laptop in a hotel. I can travel and have a life away from my workstation and keep on earning. No daytrading but certainly option trading and managing Flo's autotrading.