Geographic Independence

Belated: Covered call with MBI

davmp — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:38 +0000

And yet another catch up on trades completed but not yet blogged about. A position using MBIA Inc (MBI) as the underlying is the last of my covered calls done within the GI portfolio for November expiration. Sadly, it's been too long since I initiated the position for me to remember exactly why I went ahead with this trade. Which is really another way to say I may be doing too much experimentation and not enough of sticking to a plan.

Belated: Another dance with AFL

davmp — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:00:18 +0000

Continuing my catch up on recent trades, I did another covered call against AFLAC (AFL) for November expiration. This time, I stepped back from using a screening tool and simply looked for an opportunity where the underlying position was something I'd feel more comfortable holding for a couple months if I got caught holding it past expiration.

Belated: New EK calls sold

davmp — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:08:53 +0000

I've been *real* busy the last couple weeks and am finally getting a chance to catch my breath and post a few things to my blog. Since I'm trying to use my blog as a record of my attempts to grow my "Geographic Independent"-qualified income, and I'm still selling covered calls in my quest to learn about options trading, that means I should have written about my recent trades already. Better late than never I guess.

AIG long put example plus thought process

davmp — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:00:17 +0000

In yesterday's post, I wrote a little bit about what I've learned while researching an options strategy of trading long puts against high volatility equities. Today, I'm providing a concrete example of the strategy and my thought processes along the way.

Some thoughts on trading long puts

davmp — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:28 +0000

As I've recently posted, I've expanded my trading strategies to include using long puts on range-bound equities exhibiting high volatility. Even though I've only completed two round-trip executions of this strategy, both using AIG, I've already come up with a few notes that I want to record for the future.

October ‘09 option expiration summary

davmp — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:40:15 +0000

October's option expiration was this past weekend, and like last month, we had three covered calls in play that ended with this month's expiration. Two of those got assigned (AIG and Intel) and one simply expired (Eastman Kodak), thus we did reasonably well in matching our maximum profit. But before I provide that summary, let me digress with a little summary of what we've learned so far in trading covered calls.

Learning to apply long puts using AIG

davmp — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:11:31 +0000

So I've been watching AIG pretty closely given my current in-play covered call trade, and I've noticed that the daily highs and lows can be pretty large swings. I've also noticed that, over the last few days, it seems to be swinging through the same range of prices over and over again. Having just read about trading puts, I decided to dip my toe in the water by doing a long put with AIG.

My IRA: goodbye Fidelity, hello ThinkOrSwim

davmp — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:49:49 +0000

As you might gather from reading this blog, I've been doing lots of research into options and options trading strategies. I've just recently decided that it was time to position myself for the next step: putting what I've learned into use on more of my family's investments. A large chunk of our portfolio is in Fidelity IRAs, so for me, this meant completing the paperwork to move over to one of them to a ThinkOrSwim IRA.

Trade: Eastman Kodak (EK) covered call

davmp — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:29:47 +0000

Continuing my series summing up my covered calls done for October expiration, the last trade done was against Eastman Kodak (EK). I found EK as a result of using TradeKing's option strategy screener, where the primary filtering criteria was to stay within the limits of the unallocated cash within our GI portfolio, and secondary criteria where profitability vs. risk analysis.

Trade: AIG covered call

davmp — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:30:59 +0000

Continuing from yesterday's post, I'm now discussing the second trade completed this past Friday, part of three trades I've done for the October expiration period. In this case, I'd discovered that the premiums on AIG were huge, and that meant getting a decent profit while still being cautious. But was I too cautious?