My three options set to expire in October are all out of the money (two are far out of the money and one is close to the money) and I really should’ve traded these two earlier to roll them higher, but I haven’t put the focus needed on my own account much lately. That brought me to today, three days from expiration with a bunch of unused cash on the sidelines. Since these October naked puts are so far out of the money, I opted to leave them alone and will let them expire worthless on Friday. In the early afternoon, while QQQ was trading at $149.08, I sold one QQQ November $149 naked put for $1.90 and received $189.32 after paying $0.68 in commission. I can make an annualized return of 14.87% on this QQQ put, but QQQ can’t lose more than 1.34% before I take a loss.
Just a few minutes later, my other limit order hit. While IWM was trading at $149.70, I sold one IWM November $149 naked put for $1.70 and received $169.32 after paying $0.68 in commission. I can make an annualized gain of 13.27% on my IWM put, but only have a cushion of 1.65% before I take a loss. I’m counting on the usual end of the year strength in small-cap stocks to pull me through the next four and a half weeks, but after such a great run since the August low, I won’t be shocked to see a little dip.
I still have my AAPL naked put to roll and entered a limit order to sell a calendar spread (buy the October $160 naked put and sell a new December $160 naked put). The October contract still has $0.55 of time value left in it, so I’m trying to wait it out some to maximize my profit. If AAPL drops in the next two days, the December puts will go up in value more than the October puts decrease in value. If AAPL pushes higher, I might not do as well, unless it’s only a slight increase and then the time value will melt away on the October strike and the December strikes will be close to the same.
I’m still under-invested overall, even with these new trades and the upcoming roll of my AAPL naked put. I’ll get some more trades in soon I hope, but also want to keep some dry powder available for whenever we get the next correction.
You can see my trade video on YouTube here: