I pulled the prices for all of my short puts and their underlying stocks during the last 10 minutes of the trading day today and entered them in the latest version of my tracking sheet I’m using. This week has been rough on me, but I’m down less than the indexes so far. Having the cushion from my puts helped save me some money. A few stock picks stand out as some of the most painful while a few others are down, but still above my strikes.
GES just fell off a cliff when the company’s president announced he was leaving. I think it’ll find support soon and I’ll plan to continue to hold for now. When compared to its competitors GES still seems like a good buy. If retail continues to slow that comparison will be moot. JPM has been down before this week hit and I expect it to rebound sooner than later. INTC will continue to be a core hold for me, so I’m being patient with it too. ITRI dropped has dropped hard, but I like it long term. One of my puts is in the money now and the other still has a 10+% cushion. The rest aren’t too bad. UCO would be, but my hedge is saving me. I’m down $900 on my current puts, but up $600 on my hedge. I could close that position now for a profit on the series of trades, but I’m waiting it out longer.
I’m currently down a few thousand from my high a couple of weeks ago and I’m down more than $1500 on what I’ve sold if today was expiration day and there was no longer time value left in my positions. I have $2,000+ of time value that still needs to melt away by expiration and more in intrinsic value that I could gain back if the market recovered. The trouble is I can see a couple of more weeks to the downside. I won’t be shocked to see the SPX hit its 200 day moving average within a couple of weeks. I’m being patient during this correction and waiting to see a more dependable area of support than we’ve seen so far. I shouldn’t be forced on margin with my current holdings and can continue to hold for much longer with what I have right now. Once the markets turn I’ll be set to dive back in head first.
You might need to click on this screen shot to open it big enough to see it, but I wanted to include as much as possible.
