I’ve been ridiculously gun shy about making new trades lately for fear of losing money again. Also, I’ve been busy, but I probably could’ve made time to trade more in my own account if I wasn’t being so nervous about what could happen. My rationale is based on how far we’ve come over the past…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Options Expiration – February 2019
My one XLB February $52 covered call was my only option I had that expired today and it’s $2.24 in the money as I write this mid-morning on Friday. I’m letting it expire in the money and my 100 shares of XLB will be called away. I’ll end up with a realized gain of $218.66,…
Month End Summary – January 2019
If only every month could be as easy and as profitable as January was. While I haven’t come close to making up for my losses in 2018, I made a good step in the right direction. I would’ve done even better if I didn’t have the covered call on half my AAPL shares that finished…
Options Expiration – January 2019
I only have options on two stocks that are expiring today, AAPL and ADI. The two AAPL January $200 covered calls far out of the money that will expire worthless and give me a realized gain of $491.23. AAPL was trading at $177.41 when I sold these calls two months ago. This morning it’s closer…
Sold March IWM Covered Call
Continuing with the plans I mentioned in a recent post, I sold an out of the money covered call on my 100 IWM shares this afternoon. While IWM was trading at $145.77, I sold one IWM $151 covered call for $2.15 and received $214.33 after paying $0.67 in commission. The contract had a bid/ask of…
Sold One AAPL Covered Call
Yesterday, I wrote that I planned to sell a covered call on half of my AAPL shares along with a new naked put on MDY. The pair would set me up to be on margin potentially if the call wasn’t assigned and the put was. I decided to hold off on the MDY put part of…
Sold XLB Covered Call
Since the December options expiration Friday two and a half weeks ago, I’ve made no trades. As I mentioned in my options summary post back then, I thought stocks were oversold and I opted to wait and let the bounce play out some without selling new covered calls on the stocks and ETFs I owned…
SPY Chart – One Year Ending January 4, 2019
The chart below shows the daily prices for the past six months for the S&P 500 index, aka SPX, after closing the week at 2,531.94 on January 4, 2019. The S&P 500 fell 20.2% from its intraday high of 2,940.91 on September 21 to its intraday low of 2,346.58 on December 26. The technical definition of a…
Year End Summary 2018
Like most investors with a broadly bullish allocation, my account got spanked in December to put an exclamation point on a terrible year of investment choices for me. Actually, I only made three real mistakes and they cost me big. The culprits for me in 2018 were GS, FB, and AAPL. I took the losses…