Ordinarily, if you're a price action kind of trader, you are generally looking for a series of lower highs/lower lows (in a downtrend) or the converse in an uptrend ... Or price's adherence to previously tested areas of support and resistance within a range.
With SPY (SPX500 shown here), long term anything (i.e., up, down, or sideways) is unclear since the 8/20 break of long-term resistance at 2041, after which price dramatically plunged to the swing low at 1835, which I have labelled as the first "lower low," bounced to 1994 ("lower high"), after which it dipped to 1904 and then bounced to 1976. So what's going on here? Is the "lower high" now a higher high with the dip at the "?", a higher low? From a purely price action perspective, direction is unclear, since I don't know the answer to these questions.
What I do know is that (a) 2041 was long-term support (now resistance) and (b) that 1815 is long-term support. And since I can have virtually no supportable directional bias here (except, perhaps, on time frames less than the Daily), is there an options setup that is not directionally biased but that uses the common sense levels of 2041 and 1815 as guidelines? Glad you asked ... . There is: an Oct 16th expiry SPY 177/180/206/209 Iron Condor, which currently goes for an .88 credit/contract at the time of this writing.
Now, truth be told, I don't look at this as a run-of-the-mill IC setup. After all, I ordinarily shoot for 70% probability of profit (this one's at 57%, a bit more aggressive than I would usually go), but it does make some common sense in light of where support/resistance is at. Naturally, you could go wider on the low end to steer even more clear of, for example, the obvious wickiness that, for example, occurred on the 8/24 low ... .
With SPY (SPX500 shown here), long term anything (i.e., up, down, or sideways) is unclear since the 8/20 break of long-term resistance at 2041, after which price dramatically plunged to the swing low at 1835, which I have labelled as the first "lower low," bounced to 1994 ("lower high"), after which it dipped to 1904 and then bounced to 1976. So what's going on here? Is the "lower high" now a higher high with the dip at the "?", a higher low? From a purely price action perspective, direction is unclear, since I don't know the answer to these questions.
What I do know is that (a) 2041 was long-term support (now resistance) and (b) that 1815 is long-term support. And since I can have virtually no supportable directional bias here (except, perhaps, on time frames less than the Daily), is there an options setup that is not directionally biased but that uses the common sense levels of 2041 and 1815 as guidelines? Glad you asked ... . There is: an Oct 16th expiry SPY 177/180/206/209 Iron Condor, which currently goes for an .88 credit/contract at the time of this writing.
Now, truth be told, I don't look at this as a run-of-the-mill IC setup. After all, I ordinarily shoot for 70% probability of profit (this one's at 57%, a bit more aggressive than I would usually go), but it does make some common sense in light of where support/resistance is at. Naturally, you could go wider on the low end to steer even more clear of, for example, the obvious wickiness that, for example, occurred on the 8/24 low ... .