Hey Guys,
The market is still cruising upward. It probably goes without saying that we're still in a very volatile environment, but this week the market has been showing strength.
There are no new positions today. I have buy limit orders in for all the the tickers on the watch list, but not have been filled yet.
I had a handful of positions close recently. I manually closed my stock position for KHC this morning since it reached its time limit. It was five cents below breakeven. My position for ROL reached its profit target yesterday. I also closed out my expiring options positions yesterday. The SPY naked put was a full-sized profit, and the other two positions were barely above breakeven.
The two breakeven options trades were actually nice in one particular way. Those both involved deep-in-the-money simple call options. The underlying stock for each (KHC and WMB) had hardly moved since I bought the options. It was nice to walk away with a breakeven rather than a loss. When I do my option spread trades, on the other hand, if the underlying stock doesn't move much, I typically walk away with a noticeable loss.
There is a tradeoff though. As nice as it with trades like this to walk away unscathed, the tradeoff is that the profit multiple is lower when there are victories. The option spread trades regularly have 100%+ returns when the profit target is hit, whereas the deep-in-the-money call options might have a return in the range 50-75% in most cases. Both have a back-tested edge though. They just have different profit distributions.
I earned a dividend overnight. Anyone who owned HPP stock as of the close yesterday and into this morning is on the books for the dividend of 25 cents per share. You don't need to do anything to receive it. Most brokerages will automatically credit it to your account in the coming weeks at some point.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.