I received the following email from TD Ameritrade this morning regarding an option assignment from my naked puts on Boeing Co (BA): Date: 11-14-2007 Dear Valued Client, RE: For account ending in **** You have recently been assigned the following option position: 1 BAWT. If you don’t have sufficient cash or positions to cover this assignment,…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
How Long Have You Been Investing – Poll in the Right Sidebar
I updated the poll in the right sidebar. The new question is “How long have you been investing?” I’m curious about the average My Trader’s Journal reader and years of investing experience. This doesn’t have to be years with options investing, just total investing from when you opened your first mutual fund or bought your…
Dead Cat Bounce?
I love Wall Street if for no other reason than the sayings that come out of there. “A Dead Cat Bounce” is used when a stock or index has fallen hard and then has a short lived bounce or up tick before coming back down. Basically it means that even if a cat is dead…
VIX and VXN Making a Run
It’s been a few months since I wrote about the VIX hitting four year highs. On Friday, the CBOE NASDAQ Volatility Index (VXN) closed at 32.52, its highest point since Q3 2003. The VIX is trying to get back there to its recent highs too and if we get another 100+ point drop in a day it should reach a…
DJIA ($INDU) Chart – November 9, 2007
What a F*cked up week that was! I went back to last weekend’s DJIA chart and added in some edits in italics to highlight where the Dow Jones Industrials lost it from a technical analysis view. Throw in the news I got at the beginning of the week (which apparently shook all of Wall Street with concern) and…
Paper vs Realized Losses and Gains
Today is an important day to remember this, a gain or loss is not realized until you exit your position. I’m taking a beating today – down 3%, but only on paper. Out of the 17 positions I have open right now, 11 are down, but I haven’t sold any of these. That means I’ve taken…
Sold Naked Puts on HPQ
On Sunday, after reading most of Barron’s, I put in a few limit orders to sell naked puts on some of the stocks I liked from this latest edition. My order on DWA hit on Monday morning bounced up from there. This morning my order to sell Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) naked puts hit while HPQ was…
Selling Options Pays Off – Chart of Quarterly Returns
I thought this was cool. Last night I went back for the past six quarters (it’s counting up through yesterday, 11/6, as this quarter) in Quicken and charted my average annualized return per quarter. The quarter ending 9/06 is when I first started getting back into selling options after focusing in on family and my career and…
Updates
I’m too out of it today to make any trades, unless any of my limit orders hit. My interview went well this morning and I’m waiting for a call back this afternoon from the President to find out the next steps. My wife had a third interview at the same time which also went well. …