I made a dumb decision the other day. With all the Trump tariff chaos, I wanted to put on a bet that SPY would head lower over the next couple months. Fine, but I was anxious and careless. I did it in a very dumb way. I was in degenerate gambler mode. I wanted to go big, and nothing was going to stop me. Big for me here is risking ~$10,000. I bought 50 3 delta puts. Then SPY floated higher the rest of the day, and I was left looking at a paper loss of ~$2000.
After some looking into it I fussed with actually displaying delta, theta, and vega on positions in the platform. I discovered I have something like -200 theta on the position. Ouch. Even worse is there’s a much better way to make this bet. I could have bought a deep in the money put and gotten somewhat ~similar delta exposure for way, way less theta exposure. Something like -20 theta instead of -200.
I have to eat this loss and feel the pain of it. Hopefully then I’ll learn not to make a dumb mistake like this again.