I had a bad run with my TLT options and short shares and then it turned in my favor, but I didn’t close (or at least roll) my covered puts in time to make up as much as I would’ve liked. I could push for a better gain by rolling my put strikes lower or I could simply exit and start over. To begin with, I decided to take the first steps towards exiting and starting over.
While TLT was trading at $121.76, I bought to close 300 shares of TLT for $121.76 and bought to close 3 TLT November $136 covered puts for $14.25 each. I paid $40,806.85 for the combination order, including $3.85 in commission.
I hate to say it, but I don’t even know what I made or lost on this series of trades. I stopped tracking each trade on my spreadsheet months ago when I had too much going on. I do know that I was forced to take losses on other positions post-Brexit due to a margin call and bought back some of my TLT shares for a loss around the same time too. So, even if I had maintained my TLT tracking, it wouldn’t truly represent my returns since TLT wasn’t kept in a silo as I planned. My account, while up more than $15,000 (maybe $20,000) from its low, is still down $9,400 from the beginning of the year. The worst part of that is that stocks are up on average and I missed out due to my poor planning/execution.
I have other limit orders in place for my 10 remaining TLT December covered puts and my one IWM November covered call. I might just wipe the slate clean before the end of the year and completely start over. Maybe I’m being swayed by my impending divorce (the urge to start over with everything in my life) or maybe I just find it easier to work my account while not being long anything. At the same time, I hate to dump my remaining IWM, MDY, and DIS shares while they are still in rally mode. On the other hand, it’ll be nice to get back to regular trading and not having my account balance hang on every tick from a single ETF (TLT).