I have reached my eighth month of my safe investing journey. I just want to remind everyone that I do not offer financial advice, this an opinion blog about money. The main emphasis of this site is that you can earn easy income through dividends and safe option strategies. Below Is the review on how I did and what I learned in April 2021.
At the end of my first six months, I decided to increase my goal for monthly income. I increased it from $1,500 to $2,000 a month. I kept most of my other guidelines in place but decided to do fewer trades but more contracts per trade and in doing so increase my trade average. I also created a new monthly trading spreadsheet. The new journal has more details that should help me both identify trends and refine my trading strategy.
For April I had 14 trades with 19 contracts. You can find my trades below. My average trade was $130.88 and the total for the month was $1,832.30. I only traded seven stocks. Six of the trades were ARKK Vertical Put Credit Spreads. For these trades I earned a total of $987 in premium. Going forward I am going to do a Put Credit Spread trade in ARKK weekly. I also rolled a Call credit spread in MSFT and gained another $75 in premium for the trade. However, I was able to move the strike price from $245 to $250 and the expiration date out another two months. I believe MSFT will come down to around $240 in the next couple of months. Everything has gone up to high valuations. I think we are going to have a correction at some point. Most likely a 10% one.
I had 9 put and 5 call options. However, this is because of so many trades with ARKK. The other trades to note this month was a put credit spread in ABBV. This is another Dividend Aristocrat that I would like to own. If I can get it at the $100 strike price it would pay a 5.2% dividend. I also sold a long term covered call on KO that expires on 6/17/22. Because this contract is longer than a year it is considered a long-term equity anticipation security (LEAPS). I am fine with getting $65 for KO in fourteen months. This would be more than a $10 increase or a 19% return in little over a year.
April was kind of a crazy month due to spring break and other events during the month. Found I did not stay on top of my trades. I did not do any trading during spring break which was the first week of April. Also, I was not finding good value in some of the value stocks that I like to trade. Some of them have increased a lot and reached new highs. I am looking forward to a bit of a correction so that I can find some better value.
Things I learned this month. I still have more work to do with increasing the number of contracts per trade. This is especially true of stocks or ETFs that are not so pricey. I am having to do a lot of rolling and adjusting some of my positions each month. I have found that if I buy myself some more time the values will revert to the mean. However, I always try to earn more premium and improve the strike price. For these trades I do not worry so much about Delta.
Thank you for joining me on my journey. Please let me know if you have any questions by adding a comment below. Also, join my mailing list to be notified of new posts and changes to the site. I also wanted to mention that I recently setup a YouTube channel that goes along with the Easy Investing Income blog. You can find it Channel Link. Finally, I have setup a Patreon membership where you can get early access, special content and live events. As always contact me if you have any questions!
Thanks, and happy investing!
Jim Adams
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