Predictions for Friday, February 25th 2022

Affected significantly by the war in the Ukraine

NOTE: If you wish to get our updates immediately on Wednesday as the market opens, make sure to fill out the prediction survey on Tuesday (and leave your email WITHIN THE APP - click on the link to see how). We reward our participants with early indications of where the market will end up. Everyone else gets the results a day and a half later.

Thanks for following us, feel free to share to your friends:

Our weekly predictions are here, available exclusively to our subscribers (competition participants get it a day and a half earlier if they leave their email), for Friday, February 25th 2022 (4pm EST; at market close). Keep in mind that our accuracy is much better for low volatility assets, so interpret the predictions with caution. For an overview of our accuracy thus far, see here.

Today's unfortunate event - the start of the war in Ukraine - triggered a massive sell-off, continuing the one from yesterday. We expected a reversal from yesterday's lows, but this is not likely to happen after the war started today.

This means all of our positions have already been affected, and stop-losses were triggered.

Attached is a table of our initial estimates (all of which took losses) plus the revised estimates for the rest of the week (today & tomorrow).

Yesterday we opened the following positions:

A SPY iron condor, 426/427 to 441/442 SPY 25/02, and given our directional prediction, we bought 426 SPY 25/02 calls. Also we got an iron condor for AAPL, 157.5/160 to 167.5/170 25/02.

Each of these positions triggered a stop-loss. Specifically, the SPY iron condor lost $120 (sold at $0.41, bought back at $0.53), the SPY call lost $334 (bought at 7.84, sold at 4.5), and the AAPL position lost $240 (sold at $0.62, bought back at $0.86). The total loss was therefore $694.

To make amends we will use what's left from our positions plus profits from before to buy put options today as soon as the market opens.

We are obviously including these losses in the portfolio (and this week will be accounted for as a miss), but hopefully we will manage to reverse them today and tomorrow.

The price targets for this week are therefore already broken. The revised expected directions are all pointing lower (except obviously the VIX which is going higher). Note that the revised targets are non-specific because the survey data for this week is obsolete.

A good strategy would be to either sell call options for this week's expiry where the strike are the levels given in our prediction (e.g. 425 for SPY), or buy puts with the same strike (again with take-profit and stop-loss orders as usual).

However, if inexperienced in options trading, we recommend you take the losses triggered by the stop-loss and bear out this week. We continue next week.

DISCLAIMER: This prediction survey is still in its testing phase. Neither the survey nor its results act as investment advice of any kind, nor should they be considered as such. The results of the survey need not correspond to actual market preferences or trends, so they should be interpreted with caution. Oraclum bears no responsibility for your investment choices based on these predictions.

Keep following us on Twitter to stay informed about the weekly survey each Tuesday.