Through very little effort in my account, I was able to pull out a little more of a gain again. I fell below the major indexes further, but hopefully I’ve had my last major event pulling me from trading for a long time. After fighting cancer for more than two and a half years, my mom died the week before Thanksgiving. I spent the last week of her life with her and my dad and Thanksgiving week with family. I didn’t think about investing much at all during those two weeks. My options expiration post consisting of six sentences was my only focus on my own investments for almost the entire month. I’m caught up on my clients’ accounts through yesterday and plan to devote more time to my account again now. That said, I know I’ll have a busy two months with client meetings since so many people like to do year-end or beginning of the year reviews and planning. I can’t really do less than I did in November, so I’m excited about being back in front of my screen and focusing on something fun (and preferably profitable).
My account ended November with a Net Asset Value (NAV) of $106,555.24 according to Interactive Brokers (IB) after finishing October with an NAV of $105,711.65. I had a gain of 843.59 (~0.80%) on paper for October and had only $311.97 in realized gains from my two closing trades on my IWM and QQQ naked puts. I received $54.17 in interest, but no dividends in November since I’m not long shares of anything yet. Quicken reported that I have an account value of $106,503.81, which is the same as what IB says I have with the $51.43 in accrued interest that IB is crediting for me.
I’m 79.93% invested in this account, 1.64 percentage points above the end of October. The slight change comes from my simply rolling my November options to January at higher strikes. My three December naked puts on ADI, MDY, and AAPL are all far out of the money and need to be rolled, but it won’t be today. Maybe early next week I can get back to regular trading, but I’m also worried about a sell on the news type of event following any tax bills passed.
This is my asset allocation in my IB account as of the end of November:
- Large-cap ETF: 0.0%
- Mid-Cap ETFs: 30.05%
- Small-Cap ETF: 12.90%
- International: 0.0%
- Individual Stocks & Other Sector ETFs: 35.43% (pretty much large cap really with ADI, QQQ, and AAPL included here)
- Bonds: 0.0%
- Short ETFs: 0.0%
According to Morningstar, here’s how I compare to the major indexes (including dividends) through the month’s last trading day, November 30, 2017:
- Dow Jones Return: YTD change +25.69%, 1-year change +30.02%
- S&P 500 Return: YTD change +20.49%, 1-year change +22.87%
- NASDAQ Composite Return: YTD change +27.69%, 1-year change +29.12%
- Russell 2000: YTD change +15.11%, 1-year change +18.34%
- S&P Midcap 400: YTD change +15.99%, 1-year change +18.53%
These are my returns according to Quicken from February 1, 2017 (when I established new account, albeit with very few trades for a few months leading up to my divorce in June) through November 30, 2017:
- YTD Return: +6.55% (not annualized)
- 1 Year Return: +7.48% (annualized until I have a year of data)
The VIX ended the month at 11.28 and the VXN ended at 15.93. The VIX is 1.10 points lower than at the end of October and the VXN is 0.87 points higher than the end of October. The VIX topped out at 13.13 on November 15. The VXN made it to 16.38 on November 29. Both are on an upward trend through today since bottoming on November 24. It’d be nice for me to have higher volatility to make my next trades, but I have to be ready to act on dips like today’s short-lived drop. I had a few orders hit for clients this morning, but I don’t have any limit orders for my own account in place to take advantage of mini-panics. Hopefully, that changes soon.