I placed a limit order for an XLB (Materials Select Sector SPDR ETF) naked put one week ago when XLB was trading at $62.92, but XLB was still coming off lows from a week earlier at that point and the VIX was 3-4 points lower than today. So, when XLB climbed to $64.17, I figured…
Month: January 2018
Sold GS Naked Put
Barron’s cover story from this weekend was on Goldman Sachs Group ($GS). While I try to read most of the articles in Barron’s every weekend, I rarely read more than half of them. This past weekend I made it through more than usual, including the bullish article on GS. Not every cover story speaks to…
Option Trades on UUP and TLT
The last time I traded UUP I lost almost $279. That was in August 2011 and haven’t thought of the PowerShares DB US Dollar Bullish ETF since then enough to make another trade, until yesterday. I’ve been watching the US dollar lose ground and finally decided I should try to make a profit on it, but…
Sold IWM Naked Put for March
My account was void of any index funds and I was looking for another individual stock to sell an option on, but felt I had been waiting too long and opted to come back to the easy trade on an index ETF while I continue to look for individual stocks. QQQ and IWM are usually…
Options Expiration – January 2018
I only had two options left to expire today, one IWM January $148 naked put and one QQQ January $153 naked put. Both are far out of the money and will expire worthless. I’ll have a realized gain of $340.32 on the IWM put and $286.32 on the QQQ put. IWM was trading at $148.59…
Rolled NFLX Naked Put
I sold a naked put $10 out of the money on Netflix ($NFLX) on December 12, while NFLX was trading at $185.70 and on January 2, NFLX gapped higher and has barely hit a speed bump since then. It finished $0.30 higher today, but that was $4.54 below its intraday high. I’ve been hesitating to…
DIA Chart – 6 Months Daily Prices
The chart below shows the daily prices for the past six months on DIA, an ETF that tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average, after closing the week at $252.72 on January 5, 2018. DIA finished Friday within a few cents of its all-time high set only five minutes before the close. Such a strong close at the end of…
End of Year Summary 2017
Bullish investors made a killing in 2017 and I made a decent gain (when not comparing myself to the benchmarks), but I didn’t keep my focus on trading last year as I wrapped up my divorce and dealt with my mom’s death. I highly recommend avoiding a divorce and losing a parent in the same…