Patience in trading is hard to manage sometimes, but when we have patience, we can often squeeze out an extra few dollars from a trade. That’s what worked for me today. I saw the premium for my July Facebook option was getting close to worthless, I figured I should roll it out and up. (Out…
SPY Chart – 3 Months Ending July 6, 2018
The chart below shows the daily prices for the past three months on SPY, the SPDR ETF that tracks the S&P 500 Index, after closing the week at $275.42 on July 6, 2018. After a couple weeks of SPY hinting that it could roll over and have a healthy new mini-correction, it found its footing two Mondays…
Month End Summary – June 2018
June was a dud month for my account – partly because the market was wonky and also because I was out of the country for half of it. I lost a few dollars in June, basically splitting the difference between the S&P’s 0.48% gain and the Dow’s 0.59% loss. I have some trading to catch…
Options Expiration – June 2018
The only option I had expire today was on UUP. My five UUP June $23 long puts expired worthless and I lost my full investment of $141.86. I’m actually out of town today, taking advantage of the strong dollar while I’m in Greece. UUP was trading at $23.26 when I made my trade in late January,…
Sold XLB Covered Call
My XLB naked put was assigned in March at $63, but the ETF was down to $59.16 at the close that day and made it as low as $55.21 on April 2. I didn’t expect the weakness to continue, so I sat on what felt like dead money until today, two and a half months…
Month End Summary – May 2018
I pulled out a little gain in May, but my account trailed the indexes for the month. If GS could recover, I’d have a decent year to date return for this market. I need to roll some of my July options early that have already pulled in decent returns and that early roll could help…
Sold ADI and FEZ Naked Puts
After the last options expiration, I planned to jump right back into naked puts on ADI and FEZ, but I got caught up on working other accounts and this one was pushed to the back burner until today. The good news is that FEZ dropped nearly a dollar and a half from its intraday high…
Options Expiration – May 2018
I had a mixed options expiration for May. While two of my naked puts finished with a full profit, the third contract lost more than I gained on the first two. My one IWM May $159 naked put expired worthless and since it wasn’t close to being assigned, I left it to devalue without closing…
Closed WMT Position
Last week, I mentioned that I planned to close my WMT position consisting of 100 shares of WMT and one out of the money covered call. I entered a limit order at the end of the week to sell my shares and buy my covered call when the time value dropped more. I didn’t expect…