January was not an easy month to stomach, but it really wasn’t as bad as many investors might feel. The first couple of weeks were gut-wrenching for bulls, but we ended with a nice rally to cut losses in half. My account looks worse than it really is. That is to say my account balance is…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Options Expiration – January 2016
January has been even worse than most bears expected. I’ve been in the camp that we’re oversold and the mass selling should subside sooner than later. Apparently, we aren’t there yet. I regret not adding more long puts like I planned to do after closing my last ones for a profit. I also regret being overly…
SPY Chart – January 8, 2016
The chart below shows the monthly prices for the past 10 years on SPY, an S&P 500 Index ETF, after closing the week at $191.92 on January 8, 2016. Stocks have been in a sustained bull market since bottoming in March 2009 and have traded within a broadening trading channel for this seven-year period. So far, each move to the…
Rolled TLT Naked Calls to March
TLT has been creeping towards my January naked call strike since the day after I sold this lot of calls. I waited out the peak in December when TLT hit $124.10, but decided to take a profit today and roll the position out to March at a higher strike too. While TLT was trading at…
End of the Year Summary – 2015
Once again, I proved that selling options can beat buy and hold investing. 2015 was an even better year for me than 2014 and it was more fun since the major indexes did very little to please investors. I finished 2015 off of my highs reached a few days earlier and below my ending balance from…
Taking Profits on IWM and SPY
As expected, stocks rose this morning and then faded. I expected the fade to come later in the day or maybe even tomorrow. When I saw sellers coming in to take over the bulls’ fun, I decided it was time to take some profits and start setting up my end of the year payout. I…
Options Expiration – December 2015
Today’s option expiration was easy. It wasn’t fun, but was certainly easy since I didn’t have to do anything outside of see my balance drop again. I thought my SPY covered call might get assigned by the end of the week, but it didn’t. I had one of my clients in the same position and…
Closed TLT December Naked Calls
What’s cool is that the S&P 500 is down 32 points (1.55%) as I write this and my account is up over $1,000 for the day. The limit order I had on my TLT December naked calls hit today. While TLT was trading at $119.97, I bought to close 10 TLT December $126 naked calls…
End of the Month Summary – November 2015
Even with the S&P 500 finishing November almost dead flat, I had another great month. General time decay on my options, especially on TLT, helped my account do so well in addition to small and mid-cap stocks outperforming larger stocks. I’m up over 18% for the year and have to start planning to lighten up…