Leaderboard

The discipline to exit at your pre-determined loss levels, in my humble opinion, is the best way to have repeatable long-term trading history that is positive. It's not sexy, but "managing" a trade often involes both an increase in risk and capital to mitigate a loss. Your asking about Iron Condors, so I will give general thoughts for management. 1) close the opposite short if there is little credit 2) Is there intraday support/resistance at where the short put/call that is being tested? If you are confident in the intraday support/resistance then you can consider rolling up/down the short put/call farther into the money, and/or rolling the long put farther out of the money. Your new thesis of this trade is you are now betting the trade WILL BOUNCE off this support/resitance to mitigate your loss. UNDERSTAND you have INCREASED your max loss by NEW WIDTH of the wing of the condor. DO NOT BE GREEDY if you get your bounce. EXIT if it back trades halfway in the current day swing your are hoping happens. You are trying to ideally get a smaller loss, break even, or maybe a small gain. Most often, just a smaller loss. 3) If your support or resitance breaks, exit immediately realizing that you turned a 5-7% loss into a 10-20% loss, and you would probably loose less at a blackjack table over time lol. But exit immediately, and very seriously. This is just general. Time in trade, and to expiration matters. I stand by my first comment just to exit early at your pre-determine loss and move on as the best long term stragety.

It depends on the length of time to expiry - there is a lot that can be done on solving IC positions as long as there is still time. The silent killer of ICs is gamma - a greek mostly overlooked but which will rip your IC position to threads in minutes if you are less than a week from expiry. In such a case perhaps best to close - suck up the loss and move on. When a short side is only challenged a few possibilities exist: - buy an option a month out ATM in the direction of the challenged side (put or call as the case may be). You can do so in a lesser ratio than the amount of ICs you have open - how many depends a bit on delta of your challenged position. Try and neutralise some or all of the delta and once the crisis passes sell your hedge option and wait for your IC to bring home the bacon (premium). - if you move the position - move as far as you can whilst still remaining near 0% profitability - half measures dont help and you will be able to move only inches for every yard you give on the unchallenged side. Look carefully at option calculators to determine the chance of your short or break-even being breached and move as far as you can from that.