Thursday, July 23, 2026, a 2-lot SPX put credit spread got stopped out for a real, meaningful loss. Eighteen minutes later, a new spread was open at lower strikes. No cooling-off period, no real deliberation, just the pull to get the money back immediately. It closed clean before the night was over. On paper, that’s a bad hour that ended fine. In practice it’s revenge trading, and this is the second time that shape showed up in the same week. Writing this down is uncomfortable for exactly one reason: it worked. If it had lost money the lesson would be obvious and easy to accept. It didn’t, so the account has to look at it honestly instead of quietly pocketing the win.
Thursday's stop
-$259.76
2-lot SPX put spread; the short leg was bought back near 3x the credit
The reopen
+$120.24
New spread at lower strikes, opened 18 minutes later, closed clean the same evening
Time between stop and reopen
~18 minutes
Same shape as Tuesday's episode four days earlier: stopped, reopened 19 minutes later
The trade
5:17 PM: a 2-contract SPX put credit spread, short the 7340 put, long the 7310 put, 0.70 net credit. The index kept dropping through the session, and by 6:22 PM the short put had to be bought back at 3.00, nearly three times what it sold for. Selling the long 7310 put right after, which had gained value as the market fell, clawed back some of it, but the piece still closed at a -$259.76 loss, comfortably the worst single decision of the week.
What happened in the eighteen minutes after
At 6:40 PM, a new 2-lot put spread went on at the 7300/7330 strikes, ten points lower than the one that had just been stopped out. There was no research behind that gap, no read on where support might actually hold. It was the fastest re-entry of the week, and it happened because losing felt bad and the fix, in the moment, felt like getting back in and proving the loss wrong immediately rather than sitting with it.
This wasn’t the first time that week. Tuesday, the call side of an iron condor got stopped out for -$170.72 as SPX rallied, and nineteen minutes later a new put spread was open at different strikes, the same reflex in a different direction. Two stop-outs, two reopens, both inside twenty minutes, both without a plan beyond wanting the loss back. That’s not a coincidence worth explaining away. It’s a pattern, and naming it as one is the point of writing this up on its own instead of letting it blend into the week’s ledger.
The close
The Thursday reopen worked. Both legs closed by 8:29 PM for a combined +$120.24, which on a dollar basis more than covered the stop-out from less than two hours earlier. Tuesday’s version worked too, closing for a smaller gain the same evening. Both times, the account came out ahead on the day. Both times, that outcome had nothing to do with whether reopening immediately, at hastily chosen strikes, driven by wanting the loss back, was a good decision. It wasn’t. It happened to pay off.
What it taught
The honest lesson here isn’t about strike selection or stop placement. It’s that this was revenge trading, twice in four days, and the fact that it was profitable both times is exactly what makes it worth sitting with rather than filing away as a win. A losing outcome would have made the lesson impossible to avoid. A winning one makes it easy to skip past, and skipping past it would be the actual mistake here, more than either reopen was.
What’s true, stated plainly: managing emotions and letting the ego settle after a stop-out is a real, ongoing piece of work, not something this week solved. What’s also true: since this week, there’s been a noticeable improvement, catching the same impulse earlier or not acting on it at all. That’s worth saying too, without letting it turn this into a tidy redemption arc. The full ledger for the week this happened in, every trade, win and loss, is in that week’s recap. This entry exists so the two fast reopens in it don’t just read as two more lines in a table.