Recruiting Thoughts

Ok. It’s been a little more than a month since my last update. Here’s the rundown of what I’ve done since Feb 3rd: Before getting into the new stuff, just a backtrack to Feb 3rd and selling my GE 3/19 calls. In hindsight, I got my decision wrong. I was completely wrong. GE had multiple 3, 4, 5% gains. These options, that I sold for $0.39 closed March 8th at $2.22. A couple favorable announcements and GE closed $14.17 that same day. As you can see above, I’ve sold 2 of my GE 6/18 calls already to capture those increased …

I figured out what to do with my calls. But first, since the Jan 26th earnings, GE’s price performance has been weak. After it’s initial bump, GE had a few losing days in a row, bottoming out to less than $10.70 on Jan 29th. At this point, I’m a little more than 45 days to expiry and I know time decay is going to eat away all my extrinsic value. But I didn’t really have a reference for how much. Not until I plugged my option into an options profit calculator to visualize the potential outcomes: Effectively, I needed GE …

GE announced it’s Q4 2020 earnings prior to today’s open. While a $0.08 earning per share was just shy of expectations, the real news was FCF and forward guidance. This lead to 10% gain just after the opening to just over $12. This was the news I’d hoped for when I made my GE 3/19 and 6/18 calls for $12. Then the remainder of the day eroded the initial gains, closing at $11.29. With little more than a month and half remaining to 3/19 expiry, those calls are going to start losing value quickly. I haven’t yet decided how to …

As of the close Monday Jan 4th, I should have waited to roll my CC, instead of doing so on Dec 21st. On Dec 21st, I bought-to-close for $0.37 and sold-to-open for $1.40, for a net of $1.03 (without commission consideration). At close Jan 4th, buy-to-close Jan 15th $30 has a mid-price of $0.33. Sell-to-open Feb 19th $30 has a mid-price of $1.80. This is a net of $1.47. As of Jan 4th I would be better off waiting, with additional $0.44/share. The rates on Jan 4th would meet my criteria for rolling my call forward, so I don’t think …

It was a quiet week to close out 2020 and my first month or so of options investing. Very little to report, but here’s what I’m looking forward to next. Currently, my account market value sits at $2,613, down 4.1% from the week prior and +4.5% overall. My GE call options have a current value of $550.50, ~21% less than my cost basis. VLDR closed the week down at $22.82, putting my value ~14% above cost. With VLDR’s entire week’s daily movement between $21 and $25.50, there was nothing much for me to watch each day. As my current CC …

This week was a wild ride. Not only did I pull the trigger on rolling my covered call too early, then the news about Apple making an autonomous vehicle broke. On Monday morning, VLDR was trading around $20-$21, then at 3:30p, the news breaks and 20% later, closes the day at $24.63. Then Tuesday morning is more of the same. Jumps to $30.60 just before 11a before stair stepping down the rest of the week to close today at $24.68. I had to continue to remind myself that it’s ok for VLDR to trade above $30. On the one hand, …

In yesterday’s catch up post, I shared my next actions this week. So here’s what I did: First with GE, I took current cash holdings and doubled down on GE calls 3x 03/19/21 12.00 and 2x 06/18/21 12.00. In this morning’s trading, GE was initially down and I know this is still a position I want so I bought in again, at a lower cost the my initial. Ok second is VLDR and this was a little nuts. Trading mostly flat through the day and my prior CC has 1 month remaining and $35-40 of extrinsic value. So I rolled …

I’m starting on a new journey into stock options – that wild world of bets and speculation, fast money and faster losses. I started by officially opening a new brokerage account week of Dec 7th. My intent is to document my experience, lessons, trades, and what I’m thinking along the way. Here’s the catch up… I started thinking about options this past summer, but was frustrated by my current broker preventing me from trading options. Finally early in December, I decided to open a new account and apply for approval from scratch. At this point, I did three things: I …