Trail stops don't always work

So the lesson of the day was be careful when using trail-stop orders! As I posted right before market open, I replaced 3 of my limit sell orders with 5% trail-stop orders. The idea was to allow for more upside movement, while ensuring at least a certain level of profitability. It really backfired :-(. The problem was two-fold. First of all the stocks gapped so much that both options did not adjust together, causing the strangle prices to drop very fast. The second problem was that a trail-stop places a market order when the order is triggered. Bad idea when the markets are that volatile! I got some pretty sorry fills. Thankfully the one loss I had was fairly small. My broker also has a trail-stop-limit order, so I will have to check into that some more. I played with it once and couldn't really get it to work, but maybe it would help eliminate problems like this. Overall it was a very busy day ...

Today's Activities (Friday)
Sold AMZN Jan 45P/75C - 1 contract for $7.96, a net loss of $0.217 (-2.7%)
Sold SLB Jan 55P/80C - 1 contract for $11.90, a net profit of $0.582 (4.8%)
Sold RIMM Jan 50P/70C - 1 contract for $14.15, a net profit of $0.332 (2.3%)
Sold AAPL Jan 85P/110C - 1 contract for $25.85, a net profit of $2.632 (10.1%)
Sold COF Jan 30P/45C - 1 contract for $12.40, a net profit of $1.182 (9.4%)
Bought AMZN Jan 40P/65C - 1 contact for $9.20
Bought FDX Jan 60P/80C - 1 contract for $10.00
Bought SLB Jan 55P/65C - 2 contracts for $18.00 each