My Trading > My Trading Journal > February 2, 2012

My Trading Journal

February 2, 2012

1:02 pm (PST)

EA and BMC were both up about 6% to 7% after earnings, which was good. The EA spread I sold at 0.20 is down to 0.05. Since the spread is for March expiration, I can get a better return on that money going forward by getting out and selling another spread for a 25% return so I may do that.

XHB was unfortunately up another 22 cents to 19.45.

GOOG was a little more and TLT was fine.

The only notable move was that ANF was down about 14% from 47 to 40.36 based on earnings-related reasons. My spread is the 39/38 spread so it is still out of the money. The spread I wrote at 0.18 only went up to 0.26. I had a feeling that ANF might drop on bad earnings news, which is why the spread I wrote for my mom;s account had a 3-strike difference. Instead of writing a 43/42 spread (which I probably would have done about 100-lot), I did a 35-lot in the 43/40 spread. This allowed me to get a 23% return while doing a smaller options volume. Sometimes I write a spread so large that I don't have enough money to take delivery of the stock. In specific times (like this one), I will purposely write the spread with wider strike prices and do a smaller volume in order to ensure that I have enough money to take delivery of any stock thatI get assigned.

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