Getting Tonied

How to trade headline hockey

March has been dominated by headline risk, making it unusually difficult to play out the multi week trades we tend to take. A lot of traders have had their risk cut and market liquidity is razor thin. On top of that, getting accurate information around the conflict is nearly impossible with so many actors censoring what gets out. Filming attacks in Dubai and other regions is now illegal. The Israeli government is running its own media playbook and Trump clearly has an insider trading his tweets.

The right approach here is simple: don't play hero. You've either got to tighten your stops and stay nimble playing both sides of this ping pong show, or give yourself enough room to breathe and widen them out. At my very first prop desk we called it "getting Tonied." This guy Tony sitting next to me would always get stopped out right before the move happened. Don't get Tonied. Lower your risk on every trade, improve your entries and widen your stops.

In this post I'm going through all my current positions, assessing the size I've got on and the stops I've set.