Current Positions – January 30, 2014

Much like the way I ran my portfolio for most of 2014, I’m finishing the year without owning any stocks or ETFs.  I’m short eight different puts and have a vertical spread using two different calls.  I came into the year without wanting to own many stocks so I could avoid the paperwork hassle of accounting for naked put and covered call assignments.  Still, I took a few assignments, but was able to work my way out of them for a profit as the market maintained a fairly easy path higher.

As I do every year, I’m going to pull out whatever cash I have in my account that pushes me beyond $100,000 and will move it to another account that I don’t write about.  I should end up with a withdrawal of around $12,000.  I would be on margin if every option was assigned, but some of these puts listed below are worth only pennies and I’ll close them soon.  I’m going to take some profits during the first week of January to lock in my gains.  I’m only waiting to delay paying taxes on the gains until 2016.

I started to sell a new DIS put today to replace the January $90 put I’m short now, but decided to wait to see if DIS can draw in a little closer to its 10-day moving average first.  I have four UWM naked puts and will probably close these four and replace them with two UWM puts at a higher strike.  I plan to let the rest of them run a little longer in an attempt to squeeze out some more gains.

The chart below shows what I have in place right now and the room I have from assignment and from a loss.  As of late this afternoon, I stand to make a full profit on most positions and would only have a small profit on BABA and BA if the time value were already eroded away.