The markets opened up this morning with modest gains and then traded slowly sideways and downward all day; but buyers came in during the last 30 minutes of trading and pared back some of those losses. RUT closed essentially unchanged at $634 while the SPX gained a little over $1 to close at $1128. I took this morning's trading as a sign of the bullish support underlying this market (and the last half hour confirmed that observation). So I decided it was time for some major adjustments for my condors.

For the 570/580 and 630/640 condor, I closed the 570/580 put spreads for $0.50 (gain of $1600) and opened new put spreads at 580/590 for $0.61. I closed the 630/640 calls for $5.43 (loss of $2880) and opened the 660/670 calls for $1.10 (all ten contract positions). I also sold the Feb $630 call for $23.80, a $400 gain. This position closed the day at a P/L of -$1220 and a delta of -$42 with a theta of +$95. So these adjustments moved our theta/delta ratio back to a better neighborhood, albeit at the expense of much of our potential profit.

For my 20 contract condor, I had closed the 500/510 put spreads Friday and only had the 650/660 call spreads on this morning. I closed the call spreads for $2.35 (a loss of $2560) and opened 20 contracts of the 660/670 call spreads for $1.10. I opened 20 contracts of the 580/590 put spreads at $0.61 and sold the two Feb 630 calls for $23.80 for a gain of $800. These adjustments moved this position to a P/L of -$940, delta = -$84 and theta = +$191.

So now my two iron condors have merged into the same position of 30 contracts of the RUT 580/590 puts and the 660/670 calls. We now have almost $300 of theta decay per day, but we are playing pretty close to the fire. I have contingency orders entered to protect the downside. I will continue to report these as two separate trades, since they will be entered in my trading record as two trades, one started at 51 days to expiration and one started at 31 days.