I pulled out a gain in a relatively flat month. It wasn’t much, but better than the major indexes. I had realized gains on only two positions, AAPL and NFLX options and have paper losses that will hit in May, unless I accept the option assignments and write covered calls to delay the pain. That’s…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Options Expiration – April 2018
I came into today’s options expiration with only two naked puts in place, one AAPL April $165 naked put and one NFLX April $235 naked put. APPL was nearly $14 out of the money earlier this week, but got hit hard the past two days, which helped me tremendously. Since I expect this decline to…
SPY Chart – 3 Years Weekly Prices
The chart below shows the weekly prices for the past three years on SPY, the SPDR ETF that tracks the S&P 500 Index, after closing the week at $259.72 on April 6, 2018. One of the best methods to remove the “noise” of near-term volatility is to stretch a chart to multiple years and switch the bars to…
Month End Summary – March 2018
My account value dropped again in March, but less than the major indexes. The gains I took on a few of my options, ADI, IWM, TLT, and GS helped cut my losses as did my far out of the money position on NFLX, but I had some painful positions in WMT and XLB that continue…
Sold Walmart Covered Call
The best move I could’ve made would’ve been to buy my WMT naked put before it expired and since I didn’t, I had to decide if I should dump the shares or sell a covered call. For the past couple of weeks when I needed to make a decision, I didn’t, and it cost me…
Sold FB Naked Put
Facebook has taken a beating lately and I believe it might be a little overdone. Based on that belief, I sold a naked put on FB this afternoon. While FB was trading at $172.44, I sold one FB May $160 naked put for $4.25 and received $424.32 after paying $0.68 in commission. FB made it…
Options Expiration – March 2018
My March options were mixed. I took an early assignment on my WMT naked put as I wrote about yesterday. I’ll also take an assignment on my XLB March $63 naked put. In the positive column, I’ll take a full profit on my GS March $265 naked put to give me a realized gain of…
WMT Option Assigned
As I mentioned in a recent update, I expected my Walmart (WMT) naked put to be assigned since it was deep in the money and its ex-dividend date was coming up before March options expiration. Sure enough, I woke up to a notification that I was the new proud (?) owner of 100 shares of…
Closed ADI Naked Put
I have a meeting on Monday morning and thought I’d be smart to place an order this afternoon before I forgot in the hopes it might hit next week if ADI’s price improved a lot. Instead, stocks had a strong afternoon and ADI moved higher with the tide. While ADI was trading at $89.48, I…