Rolled MON Covered Calls

I wasn’t planning to roll any of my calls, but that was yesterday’s plan.  Monsanto (MON) came back to life since I wrote that plan.  It might be short lived considering that MON couldn’t stay above its 10 day moving average after breaking through intraday.  It did stay above its 20 day moving average.  To the downside, I like the trend line that offers support around $75.00, but not enough to sell a new naked put yet.  I want to see what price action Monday brings first.  I was definitely happy to see my February 70 naked put expire worthless.

At 3:51, while MON was trading at $79.56 my limit order hit and I bought to close my MON February 80 (MONBP) for $0.10 and paid $10.75 and sold to open a new MON March 80 covered call (MONCP) for $4.50 and received $439.25 after commissions.  That gave me a net credit of $428.50.  Since I entered my order at a credit spread I didn’t pay overall commission on the Feb call, just the order as a whole and $0.75 per contract.  If the order for a $4.40 credit didn’t hit I was planning to wait until the last minute and try to sell a new call if MON was far enough below $80.00 for me to feel confident it wouldn’t tick up in the last second.  Around 3:59 I saw MON at 79.78 and the bid/ask for the March put was 4.40/4.60.  An order popped in at $4.50 ask and hit immediately, so I couldn’t done better by 10 cents, but it would’ve taken some luck.  $4.40 seemed to be a good price to get.

I finished the day down only $6.50.  I was down closer to $1,000 around mid-day and then was up over $300 for a few minutes.  I knew it’d be an interesting day, so I’m happy to be flat at the end considering the Dow and S&P were down over 1% each for the day.