While FEZ was trading at $40.92, I bought to close my two FEZ September $40 naked puts for $0.10 each and paid $21.58 including $1.58 in commission. I entered this order late last week and it hit in the first three minutes of trading today. The same contract ended up trading as high as $0.20…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Sold BA November Naked Put
Sometimes, I make good trades and sometimes I make bad trades. I rarely know which it’ll be within the first week after the trade. I made a new trade today that I’ll be wondering about for weeks to come, but I think I made the right decision. While BA was trading at $126.82, I sold one…
End of the Month Summary – August 2014
August was a good month for me. I started to write that it was “fantastic” since I hit a new monthly closing high for 2014 in this account, but then I just noticed how much better the broader indexes did. It highlights how much I’m underinvested and could take more risks. Then again, just because I…
Sold YHOO Vertical Put Spread
After getting the suggestion from a reader in comments section of my last post, I started looking at YHOO this morning. The stock has a forward P/E ratio greater than 28 and has a lot of change on the horizon. Part of that change is causing the misleading P/E ratio. Alibaba is scheduled to go…
Dropped SPY Hedge & Exchanged AAPL for DIS Puts
I’ve been thinking about closing my SPY October $160/180 vertical put spread for more than a week. SPY recovered nicely from its recent decline and I didn’t feel like it was giving me the protection I wanted. With the long puts being nearly 10% out-of-the-money, I don’t think I was protecting much. I don’t expect to…
Options Expiration – August 2014
Sideways moving markets can be great for option sellers and can be somewhat boring sometimes too. Option sellers have the advantage of making a profit (or a reduced loss) in a sideways (or slightly down) market if the premiums were traded at the right time and strike. I haven’t made a trade this month because…
End of the Month Summary – July 2014
July ran fairly flat for me until the 31st when the S&P 500 fell 2% and the Russell 2000 and the MidCap 400 fell even more. By the close of July’s trading my account finished lower for the month. As I’ve been expecting, a weaker month was due to hit. Thankfully, I’m not close to…
More UWM Naked Puts
When six of my UWM July puts expired (four short, two long) last week, I mentioned my attempt to sell some August $75 naked puts. The order didn’t hit and I didn’t go after it again during yesterday’s dip. Maybe I should have because the small cap index gapped higher today. At the same time,…
Options Expiration – July 2014
I’ve been using a steady plan of dumping far out-0f-the-money (OTM) naked puts once they got cheap enough and was planning to stick to that with my July UWM positions. Instead, UWM moved so much higher so quickly, that I didn’t react when the option prices first dropped and then I figured they were so…