| NEW POSITIONS/STO | NEW STO | ROLLOVERS | CALLS ASSIGNED/PUTS EXPIRED | CALLS EXPIRED/PUTS ASSIGNED | CLOSED |
| 3 / 3 | 4 | 3 | 11 / 0 | 1 / 0 | 1 |
Weekly Up to Date Performance
June 16 – 20, 2014
New purchases for the week trailed the unadjusted S&P 500 by 0.2% and surpassed the adjusted index by the same 0.2%
The market finished higher for the 6th consecutive day, which is often a difficult situation to compete with, but it wasn’t one in which anyone was left in the dust.
New positions were 1.2% higher while the overall market was up 1.3% on an unadjusted basis and 1.0% on an adjusted basis.
Existing positions lagged the S&P 500 by 0.4% for the week, with many positions having reached their strike levels, after having out-performed the market by 0.9% the prior week.
Performance of positions closed in 2014 continue to out-perform the S&P 500 performance by 1.4%. They were up 3.4% out-performing the market
by 69.7%.
Lately I’ve found plenty of reason to be dis-satisfied with the process of looking at the week just passed.
I tend to dwell on those things that didn’t go as planned and usually gloss over the things that worked or did go as expected, or more accurately, hoped.
Typically, I try to remind myself that the process doesn’t really matter, it’s the bottom line each week, as well as the ability to put the portfolio to work and by doing so keeping me from having to work. I’ve grown accustomed to having positions function as my annuity and don’t even mind having to work at it to make them keep doing so.
Sometimes, getting my hands on the premium and dividend cash makes me temporarily look the other way if the bottom line wasn’t as healthy as I would have liked, although then I remind myself that its performance shouldn’t be measured in a vacuum.
When doing that, I usually feel better, even though there are those frustrating individual positions that often don’t seem to be getting better.
This week I’m actually pretty happy.
It was another week of very few new positions being opened and I’m actually not thrilled about that, but now that it’s all said and done I can live with the lack of activity, as it did at least keep up with the overall market.
What I’m happy about is the number of assignments that occured, as that helped to meet one of my goals for the past few months, which was to decrease the total number of positions in the portfolio.
The assignments also helped to replenish the cash reserve that had been getting drained the past few weeks and to some degree was also responsible for a deliberate decrease in purchase of new positions.
There was also the opportunity to sell some new cover for existing positions, as well as the chance to rollover a handful of positions.
Maybe best of all was seeing the assignment of Weyerhauser. I’ve been anxious to see that go for quite a while, but crazily enough, once it finishes its spin off of its housing and real estate unit, I may want to add it right back.
Go figure.
But really, most of all, it’s still the bottom line.
So for next week there’s cash in hand and already a number of positions with June 27th expiration dates, so the emphasis should be to look for diversifying those expirations by looking for some expanded weekly options.
With the volatility still being so low those expanded weekly options aren’t always very appealing, but perhaps combining them with dividends may work to get an ROI that has some reason to take the associated risk.
That’s what continues being the issue at hand as more and more record closes come and then get surpassed.
It seems that while the account grows, so too does risk.
Because of that I’m not entirely excited about re-investing too much of the significant piece that is being returned over the weekend as all of these positions are being assigned.
But as always also seems to be the case it’s hard to completely remove yourself from the equation or not take part of the activity.
So I expect another week or relatively slow personal trading trying to get a feel for whether to try and balance new positions with short term and longer term expirations in order to protect against any short term downward movement in markets.
That seems to be an unending objective, but for some reason feels more so to me, as this nice week has come to its end.
This week’s details may be seen in the Weekly Performance spreadsheet * or in the PDF file, as well as as in the summary.below
(Note: Duplicate mention of positions reflects different priced lots):
New Positions Opened: LOW, LVS, MA
Puts Closed in order to take profits: none
Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into the next weekly cycle: none
Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into extended weekly cycle: HFC (7/3), LVS (7/3)
Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into the monthly cycle: none
Calls Rolled Over, taking profits, into a future monthly cycle: LB
Calls Rolled Up, taking net profits into same cycle: none
New STO: BMY, EBAY, HFC, PFE
Put contracts expired: none
Put contract rolled over: none
Long term call contracts sold: none
Calls Assigned: BX, CY, CY, FAST, GME, IP, LO, LOW, MET, RIG, WY
Calls Expired: DRI
Puts Assigned: none
Stock positions Closed to take losses: none
Calls Closed to Take Profits: SBGI
Ex-dividend Positions: LVS (6/18 $0.50)
Ex-dividend Positions Next Week: none
For the coming week the existing positions have lots that still require the sale of contracts: AGQ, BMY, C, CLF, COH, EBAY, FCX, HFC, JCP, LULU, MCP, MOS, NEM, PBR , RIG, TGT, WFM, WLT (See “Weekly Performance” spreadsheet or PDF file)
* If you don’t have a program to read or modify spreadsheets, you can download the OpenOffice Suite at no cost.