End of Month Summary – November 2012

I found my way higher again in November, but what lies ahead could be costly.  The cost could come from not being invested enough or not being hedged enough.  The good news is that I did better than the indexes for another month.  That pulls me ahead or at least even with the major indexes for the year-to-date and the past 12 months.  Of course I’ll be paying more in taxes from the higher realized gains instead of a buy and hold strategy.  I’m comfortable with that thanks to the reduced risk I’ve taken throughout this year.  The older I get, the more downside risk affects my decision making over upside risk.

I ended November with a Net Liquidation Value of $112,467.72 (and a Net Asset Value of $112,359.03) according to Interactive Brokers after finishing October with a balance of $110,740.22.   That gave me a gain of $1,727.50 on paper (~+1.56%) for November and a realized gain for the month of $28.85.  I received no dividends in November.  Quicken reported that I have $112,358.73.  The NAV is within a few cents of the Quicken balance.  I didn’t take the time this month to double check which option reported differently in Quicken than IB.  It’s close enough not to matter.

If all of my naked puts were assigned, my spreads all lost 100% and my covered calls expired worthless, I’d be only 81.63% invested in this account.  That’s lower than I’ve been in years, but is a little misleading since my T and VNQ spreads could become long positions.  I just have them hedged for now.  If I take the assignments from the short puts on those, I’d be over 105% invested.  My spread percentage dropped from 9.93% to 2.85% since I’m using some positions that are smaller and closer to the money (if not in the money).  I started adding a little more exposure, but since I’m hedging, the effect is small.  I plan to stick with the hedging strategy, at least through the end of December and maybe deeply into next year.  If this continues to bring in decent low risk returns, I see no reason to change this new plan (for part of my account) until we get a reasonable correction that removes some of this jittery risk and opens the door to a better entry point.  The majority of my account is not hedged and that might be the wrong decision, but I’m OK with some risk.  I just want to keep it in check.

This is my asset allocation in my IB account as of the end of November.

These are my returns according to Quicken through 11/30/12: