After a few days of thinning my holdings this week, I came into options expiration day with only one April option position remaining. My three TLT April $134 calls will expire worthless, about $2.60 out of the money. This trade gives me a realized gain of $312.99. I mentioned yesterday that I planned to sell…
Roll TLT Covered Puts to May
A couple of days ago, I mentioned my plan to stay patient and wait for my new trade on TLT. Yesterday, TLT started to improve for me and today I pulled the trigger. While TLT was trading at $129.88, I bought to close seven TLT April $128 puts and sold to open seven TLT May…
Closed XOM and SSO Puts
I closed out two sets of April options this morning with limit orders as the market moved higher. My XOM April $85/90 put spread was down more than $250 not long ago, but I let it run in case oil recovered by the end of this week. I sold the spread for $192.81 (net after commission)…
Rolled DIS and IWM Naked Puts
We spent most of last week in New York (Manhattan) for spring break. It felt good to get back at my desk and find some normalcy in my daily routine yesterday. I made it back to my account this morning and rolled a couple of options that were set to expire this coming Friday. I…
SPY – 1 Year, Daily Chart
The chart below shows the daily prices for the past year on SPY, an S&P 500 Index ETF, after the ETF closed the week at $206.44 on April 2, 2015. A horizontal trend line has emerged close to $204 that has acted as both support and resistance multiple times since mid-November. This horizontal line and the ascending trend line of…
End of the Month Summary – March 2015
March was an up and down month for my account, but I still had less volatility than the major indexes and finished up for the month while most indexes lost ground. I started to hedge late in the month and hope to see the benefits of the hedge later in the year. My TLT short…
IWM Option Combination
I’ve been working on hedging one of my client’s accounts this week with various option combinations. After the market closed yesterday, I realized the IWM trade I made for him could be a good trade for me too. I finally found time this afternoon to focus on my account and made the following trades. While…
Options Expiration – March 2015
I only had two options left by today’s expiration and both expired worthless. My one MDY March $165 naked put was nearly $15 out of the money by today’s close. Knowing that it had a very small chance of being assigned, I sold a new MDY put to replace it a couple of days ago at…
Updates on MDY, TLT and UWM Short Options
I cancelled my limit order to roll my MDY March $165 naked put before the Fed’s announcement yesterday afternoon. I decided I would try to wait for an opportunity on an MDY dip post announcement to sell a new MDY put and possibly let the March put run until expiration for the last two and…