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Greetings nexusfi.com (formerly BMT) members. This is my trading journal. I have a nice base of knowledge for trading and investing, so my continued growth in trading will come from new experiences. I just opened a new account at Interactive Brokers last week and I am ready to begin. After reading the "Options education" thread, I have decided to play it safe in a very uncertain world and downloaded the options strategy book from post #5 and the tracking speadsheet from post#14. I am interested in income and trading so I put together an option collar strategy on XLU, the SPDR utilities ETF. XLU has a quarterly dividend with the ex-div date each quarterly witching day (easy to remember) and a monthly options series.
I expect to receive two quarterly dividends with this strategy in the first phase. About $ 0.70 per share.
I did an option collar because of the downside risk represented on the daily chart.
My Trades:
I bought 600 shares of XLU and bought Six 15JUN12 37 puts. For these puts, I am paying $1.00 in premium over intrinsic for five and a half months of protection. I immediately sold Six 17FEB12 36 calls to start and offset the put premiums.
As part of the strategy as explained in the Options thread, I am ready to buy 600 more XLU to keep the strategy whole. I have experienced in the past how portfolio managers and market makers like to capture dividends from the naive investors who think they can outsmart them.
I am starting slow. I need to get a smart phone so I can download the IB app. I am a part time investor, but a full time watcher. I will develop a couple more trading opportunties for my portfolio.
The market is rallying today. My XLU is also. I am watching the 36 line on the chart as to protect my strategy position. I will just buy another 600 shares and sell the 37 calls or maybe 36 again..
I just read post#15 on the "options education" thread and thought I would give this a try. I decided to alter the short options to InTheMoney also.
I understand options and all, but I decided to play it real safe and go for the option premiums. I used the spreadsheet from post #15, but it makes no sense to me right now. I will have to adjust it after I flip this Friday's options to the following Friday.
SPY closed up a little today about 129.25. The adjustment points for me on the STUUD are about 126 to 127 on the downside and 131 to 132 on the upside.
I did a GDX STUUD strategy trade today. $1400 Intrinsic value trade. I bought the Feb17 options and sold the Jan20 options. Each short option was 2 points OTM. And with the volatility beefing up the premiums, I was able to achieve the full intrinsic value and 2 points OTM. And I figured out how to score the trade and use the spreadsheet. I split the diagonal spread in half and recorded the legs. This trade is suppose to achieve 5% a month.
Yesterday when I did the GDX STUUD, I noticed I did the SPY STUUD wrong. I had the short options ITM instead of OTM. I am new to IB and these option strategies but ................ So I reversed myself yesterday, wow, just in time because the market is much lower today. I still made a net profit.
I closed out the two STUUD trades. I was going to have to adjust the GDX one if GDX went lower. I could see on the options list that would have to buy back my short options too rich and sell the next series too lean and create a much larger loss. As the spreadsheet shows, I had a limited loss.
Being GDX was a loss, I could see SPY was a gain. Net net I wanted a plus+++++.
I included the spreadsheets for any readers usage.
