My Trading > My Trading Journal > January 4, 2012

My Trading Journal

January 4, 2012

8:06 pm (PST)

My account: VNM was down 1% today. Nothing big.

My mom's account. My trades:

  • Sold 35 of the ANF (Abercrombie and Fitch) February 43/40 put credit spread @ .57 for a 23% profit at expiration.
  • Sold 50 of the BMC (BMC Software) February 30/29 put credit spread @ .18 for a 20% profit until expiration.
The BMC spread ended up pretty much even, but ANF was down a lot for the day and the spread ended up closing at .69.

The BMC trade was a much smaller trade than I normally would have done. This is for 2 reasons: (1) BMC has earnings come out before expiration, so there is a decent chance of a large move (and therefore, large loss). (2) I haven't been in a postion to put on new options trades. After my December options expired on Dec 16th, I made a quick $18,000 or so in FSLR in about 2 days. I also wrote the following option trades for my account:
  • 12/19/2011 - Sold 450 SCHW February 11/10 put credit spread @ .20 for a 24.7% profit at expiration.
  • 12/21/2011 - Sold 500 ORCL February 23/22 put credit spread @ .22 - collecting $10,913 in premium for a 28% profit at expiration.
  • 12/21/2011 - Sold 100 FSLR February 28/25 put credit spread @ .68 for a 29% profit at expiration.
All of these positions are doing very well.

But since then, I have felt like only trading part-time. I have been busy with other things and I haven't had time to do enough research in order to find new stocks to write options on. And my sleep cycle is not correlated to the market right now. I have made the mistake of putting on some large half-hearted options trades while not paying complete attention to the market in the past and getting burned.

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