August was an incredible month for my account thanks to the drop in TLT’s price and the rise in QQQ’s price. I’m still short 500 shares of TLT and have short options on both sides. I’m also long 100 shares of QQQ with no covered call. I’ve planned to sell a new covered call on QQQ for months, but I haven’t seen a reason to cut off my gains yet. As I’ve said a few times earlier, that day seems to be getting closer. My account ended August with a Net Asset Value (NAV) of $108,108.24 according to Interactive Brokers (IB) after ending July with a balance of $99,283.20. I had a gain of $8,825.04 (-8.89%) on paper for August (better … [Read More...]

My plan was to sell five TLT naked calls at the same $170 strike I used in August. Instead, I sold three calls a few weeks ago and waited to see how TLT would behave for a few more weeks.  TLT appears to be trending lower again, but still needs to break through support around $163 to confirm the longer-term move is lower. I was thinking about selling two more October, or even November, $170 calls, but I saw the $165 strike calls were price double the $170s. While TLT was trading at $163.82, down $0.84 on the day, I sold one TLT October $165 naked call for $3.25 and received $324.33 after paying $0.67 in commission. I decided the risk of being short another … [Read More...]

I had two legs of options on TLT that expired worthless today. Both gave me a full profit. My two TLT August $170 naked calls finished with a realized gain of $403.36. My five TLT August $145 covered puts brought in $320.55 when I sold them, but I paid $190.90 in dividends in July and August on top of the $39.34 in short interest I paid. The net total gave me a realized gain of $90.31 on these puts.  I didn’t sell the puts with a focus on bringing in another profit stream, but instead was only trying to cover my costs of holding the short position. So, the puts did what I hoped and left the door open to profits if TLT had fallen quickly … [Read More...]