ABNB short term short & a trading system development ride alongSo I'm not one to short. For a lot of reasons. I HATE margin. It's like a credit card where the things you bought can go up in price after you buy them, you're charged interest on them immediately, and the "credit card" company can require you to pay your bill early. As someone who has never in my life carried a balance on a credit card except accidentally, that is 100% NOT my style. Margin creates an added layer of complexity and difficulty to any trade it involves.
Add to that, shorting is potentially infinite in the losses it could create, whereas the gains are capped at 100%. Others may use it, but it's not for me and it is ESPECIALLY not for those new to trading. It is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode your finances and knock you out of the game, and possibly your home. To be honest, (unpopular opinion alert) if you can't afford to be trading your own money and have to borrow money to be able to trade, you probably should NOT be trading. OK, I'm done ranting.
What I am about to describe has to do with the process of how I decided to do this trade. I'm going to leave out some of the details, because
a) a trader's gotta have his "secret sauce"
b) a lot of you are new to the game and if I told you all I know about what I'm gonna do, and especially WHY, you'll take it the wrong way.
DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRADE THIS WITH ME.
This is an unproven system. My regular system works great on long trades, but historically not that great on shorts. That's not entirely surprising since the market has a general upward bias to it. There's more reasons why, but you don't get to know those (secret sauce).
The system I'm working on for shorts did evolve out of my original system, though. I am a person who when something I try doesn't work, I have to know WHY. And I think that's good advice for traders developing a trading system (or more importantly, following someone else's fancy charts that you don't understand).
If you make a trade and it doesn't work, you should make sure you know WHY. Don't blame it on the market or the Fed, or shorts, or whoever. If a trade goes wrong, YOU potentially made a mistake somewhere. And that's ok. Sometimes they are unavoidable mistakes. But sometimes they aren't, and you owe it to yourself and your system, to understand what went wrong so you can fix it if it's fixable.
So this system I'm testing "live" in front of you, began as I tried to answer the WHY of my system not doing well on overbought calls the way it did on oversold. I noticed a curious feature of the overbought calls it made, and asked "is that consistent enough to be tradeable?" If not, I had to go back to square one. If it was, the only way I'd know for sure is to backtest it to death. And I have been, for months.
I had to tweak some things, but here we are, so obviously it passed that test. The next question became HOW to trade it. I started with a rant about margin and that's the simplest way to trade shorts, in many ways. I knew that was not for me though, so it left me two options. Pun intended.
One was inverse ETFs that move the opposite direction of the underlying stock or ETF. The problem is that not all stocks have them and the ones that do, often trend HARD and that's not good for what I'm trying to do. For some of the ETFs it works OK and I'll probably use them from time to time here as I work out the kinks of my system.
The other option is put options. Both inverse ETFs and put options do something important for shorting, and that's limit your losses. You can only lose 100% of an option or ETF, and that levels the odds out a little bit with shorting. Options, however, introduce TIME as a variable, making things much more complicated. Now, in addition to being right that the stock is going down, I have to know WHEN as well. That's why ordinarily I don't use options as much.
Sometimes the market has ideas for a stock that are VERY different from my own and trades that normally work out in a few days, end up taking much longer (see my idea on NYSE:BROS as an example of that happening).
With options, every day that trade takes costs me money because of time decay. But I'm going to use options here, because my backtesting tells me that 1) time usually shouldn't be a factor and 2) the leverage in options (in THIS case) can help minimize the effects of the times a trade doesn't go according to plan.
My backtests on ABNB and other stocks, tells me how long a trade will likely take to work out. That's important information to have when choosing WHICH put option to trade. It also affects the strike price I choose. I'll be honest when I say I'm not sure I have chosen the optimum options strategy, expiration and strike here - and that's a big reason why you shouldn't trade this with me. If I make mistakes it will cost me money. You can learn from my mistakes for free by just following along.
So for ABNB, in its albeit short entire trading history, the short calls my short system made worked out positively the vast majority of the time and the trade generally took less than a month to play out. For this reason, I chose November 15 expiration. It gives time for the trade to work out before time decay really starts costing me money, since decay accelerates closer to expiration. I could have gone out further to avoid decay, but nothing comes for free in the markets - I'd have to pay more for the option.
I chose puts as close to the current price as possible, because the trades I'm looking to make aren't 20 or 30% moves in the stock. They are relatively small gains like my long system that pay off in volume rather than size of the wins. I won't go into a full discussion of options pricing. I'm not the guy for that anyway.
The mechanics of the trade are different than my long trades. Here, only one lot will be purchased. I will hold it simply until the stock price is lower than when I originally made the trade. If it never gets lower, I could lose 100% of the money I spent on the option unless I cut the trade short - and that is a non-zero possibility that I understand going into the trade. But like my long system, the winners should collectively compensate for those and interestingly, that was part of the reason I choose options. That would be much harder to do here with just shorting the stock because the changes in price here are smaller than with my long method. They will be shorter trades as well, in most cases.
So today, at the close, I purchased the November 15 $130 put on ABNB for $6.90 ($690 dollars). As soon as ABNB stock is below 131.18 as it approaches the close, I sell it. If that's Monday, it's Monday. If it's a week from now, fine. Longer than that and I'll start getting "nervous" because if it takes longer than a week, things become a little bleaker for the trade's prospects.
So there it is. Good luck to me, not you because you're just spectating. I'll update things as the trade plays out and will do a post-trade analysis however it turns out. Enjoy your weekend!
If you have questions or comments about anything I've written here, feel free to comment and I'll answer them as soon as I can.
This is obviously market-based financial edutainment and is aggressively NOT investment advice, as I think I've made clear here. Not only do I not encourage you to trade it, but if this trade works as expected, you won't be able to successfully at this point. Just enjoy the show, everyone. 🍿🥤