IB Olympiad 2009 Day One

Closing Liquidation: $978,911.87 -$21,088.13 (-2.1%)

Here are some screen shots. About half of today's loss can be attributed to an error in the oil strategy at the open. The other half can be attributed to a SPWRA put position. Otherwise, it was a good day. Particularly for the SSO and financial shorts.

Here are the DXO trades that went awry. This occurred in the first few minutes of the day just after the market opened. The first order didn't get recognized somehow then it placed a second order, they both got reversed, it cycled another 170k shares then finally ended up with the position is wanted, about 116k shares of DXO. The end result was that effectively 500k shares were traded across the $0.01 bid/ask spread (x500k=$5,000). It also blew through $6,000 in commisions just to get a $327,000 position in DXO. I'm still not entirely sure what went wrong here but it had something to do with orders getting backed up due to slowness of execution.
Here are those trades:


A screen shot of the program at the end of the day, it had been restarted a couple times due to wireless issues:


Here is my portfolio at the end of the day, the positions which have zero size have been closed but you can see the realized profit/loss on the far right hand column. It breaks down clearly what worked today and what didn't. The SSO strategy made about $6,000 and the 52 week stock strategy made about $5,000 .

One other thing to consider is that my option writing strategy requires that all positions start at a loss because of large bid ask spreads present in the simulated market. I don't want to go into details but my hope is that the total sum of these positions will be profit come Friday when they expire. Its easy money so long as none of these positions get blown up. A SPWRA position got stopped out today for a $9,640 loss... January puts short: $59,500 (potential for a $60,000 profit if issues stay flat or go up until Friday close). My robot would like to see an up day tomorrow with declining volatility.

I will not be going into this much detail in the future, but just thought I'd get the first day on record and explain the loss. How did other's fare?