I have reached my sixth month of my safe investing journey. I have learned a lot in the six months. 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 February 2021.
I have included my trades below. For the month I did 20 trades and a total of 25 contracts. This is the most trades of any month. The average trade was $90.43 and the total for the month was $1,808.65. I did trades on sixteen securities and five trades were more than a single contract. I did do my first Iron Condor this month on KO. An Iron condor is a four-leg option trade. You can think of it as two vertical spreads. It includes both a call vertical credit spread and a put vertical credit spread. I included a video below on how an Iron Condor works. I was able to close the short put and call before expiration for a $57.75 profit. I can also sell to close the two outer legs but for now decided to hold them.
I did not have anything assigned this month and still have not had a losing trade for the entire six months. The saga with ARKK continues. The market did have a correction in relation to Tesla and ARKK is back near the money. I was able to sell two put contracts and got my highest premium of the month with it. Also, the ARKK trades were also very near-term expirations. The first trade I got a premium of $94.35, and it expired in only two days. The second trade I sold a put that was two weeks out and earned a premium of $185.35. As of writing this post the second trade should expire out of the money.
Another important trade was my rolling of Intel. I was able to roll Intel out to June 18 and gain $351 in premium. Intel is one stock I want to keep. This month I have been surprised how much premium I could get with rolling. I also rolled my Microsoft vertical spread and gained $52 in premium. However, since I do not own the shares, I did not want to take any chances. Since rolling MSFT is now well out of the money.
For the six months of trading, I have been amazed how much more there is to trading options. For the six months I have had a total of 99 trades for a total of $9,235.05. I have had only one contract get assigned and currently do not have any high-risk trades that are deep in the money. These trades are in two accounts that at the start of September were valued at about half a million. The two accounts also contain a lot of cash that I consider my emergency fund. On a yearly basis this constitutes nearly a 4% return. These accounts currently distribute about 4% in dividends. So combined this Is an 8% return for the two accounts. I have read a lot of posts that suggest that doubling your dividends is common. However, seeing it happen is amazing.
Some of the takeaways for this month are the following. First, I had more cash secured put options and none were assigned. I wanted to own some of these stocks and would have liked to have them assigned. I might going forward take a bit more risk so that I do get assigned. Another observation is that I am doing a lot of trades and some are way more profitable. I am going to try and do fewer more profitable trades. I may try to accomplish this through doing more contracts on a trade and by taking more risk with cash secured puts. Also, I am going to focus a bit more on rolling existing trades instead of finding new trades. Some of my most profitable trades were the ones I rolled. Also, I am going to increase my monthly income goal to $2,000 a month and improve the way I track the trades by creating a new and improved spreadsheet journal.
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.
This is an explanation on how an Iron Condor Option strategy works from Option Alpha. They have both YouTube and a podcast. They are one of my favorite resources for learning options.
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