This cycle closed for a $126.96 loss, the first of the record, and it closed at one o’clock in the morning. Losses get published with the same detail as wins. This one gets published with something extra: an honest admission that the person closing it didn’t fully understand, in the moment, why it had to happen.
Result
-$126.96
2 contracts, held 12 days, Apr 8 to Apr 20, 2026
Entry credit
8.20 pts
The richest entry of the record to that point
Exit debit
9.30 pts
Paid at the Sunday-night reopen, after canceling a 3.10 target
The trade
Sold April 8, 2026, hours after the biggest win of the record was banked: 2 contracts of the /ESM6 May 29 strangle, short the 4750 put and the 7650 call, 8.20 credit. War-inflated premium again, the richest entry yet.
What happened while it was on
The market rallied for nearly two straight weeks, a 13-day streak the Nasdaq hadn’t matched since 1992, which steadily leaned on the 7650 call side. Then came the weekend of April 18 and 19: U.S.-Iran tensions escalated sharply, a ceasefire deadline loomed, and Sunday night’s futures reopen was the first chance anyone had to react.
The log’s timestamps tell the story with unusual honesty. At 12:51 AM Monday, a resting buyback order at 3.10, the patient-target kind that closed the two winners before this, was canceled. Nine minutes later, at 1:00 AM, the whole position was bought back at 9.30, three times that canceled target, a full point over the credit collected. That’s not an exit strategy. That’s paying whatever the market asks to be flat, at the first available minute.
The close
9.30 against 8.20 collected: a $126.96 net loss. By that evening a replacement strangle was on at wider strikes and a much thinner credit, covered in the week’s summary.
What it taught
Here is the trader’s own accounting, given months later. This was early in the journey, and mistakes were being made without always being recognized as mistakes while they were happening. The best reconstruction of that night is that it was a buying-power problem specifically: a position whose margin requirement had grown into a real constraint on a small account, closed under pressure rather than by plan. It gets framed here exactly as it was, an early-days mistake, not fully understood in the moment, survivable because the size was small. The later entries in this journal about position sizing exist because nights like this one happened first.