We are over our $50,000 mark and right on schedule at the halfway mark! Not bad considering we began with our aggressive $10,000 virtual portfolio last year, which we ran up to $36,630 – put that $11,630 back in the virtual bank and began this year in February with a $25,000 Portfolio.
The last major update to our virtual portfolio was back on May 21st. We do send out Alert updates on a regular basis and discuss the trade ideas daily in Member Chat. Now we can start July off with a clean $50,000 Portfolio with the same goal – to double up in 6 months but sticking to the same small allocation hit and run trade ideas that we used (mostly) in the first half. I urge you to read the original post and the update if you haven’t already to get an idea of what we are trying to learn by following this "hyper-aggressive" portfolio model.
Getting that close to goal with a week to go put us in shut-down mode and we didn’t do too much trading last week but we did close the following transactions, which amounted to mainly closing out all of our losing trades for the year, charging them off against our $95,072 worth of winners that we already cashed out. Our goal was to get those losses under $45,000, so that we’d be left with $50,000 cash:
- 40 FAS July 1st $23 calls sold for .95, out at .70 – up $1,000
- 20 FAS June 24th $25 calls sold for .27, expired worthless – up $540
- 20 FAS June 24th $24 calls sold for .70, expired worthless – up $1,400
- 100 QQQ June 24th $55 calls at .04 – expired worthless – down $400
- 10 QLD July $77/81 bull call spread at $2.40, out at $3.85 – up $1,450
- 20 USO July 1st $38 puts at .75, sold for .90 – up $300
- 10 COF July $52.50 calls at .95, out at $1.05 – up $100
- 20 FAS July 1st $27 puts at .60, out at .50 – down $200
- 20 EGLE Sept $3 calls at net .65, out at .10 – down $1,100
- 20 EGLE June $2.50 calls sold for .30, expired worthless – up $600
- 40 HOV Aug $2.50 calls at net .80, out at .25 – down $2,200
- 20 C July $46 calls at .66, out at .14, down $1,040
- 20 GMCR July $70 puts at net $3.50, no point cashing out – down $7,000
- 4 CCL July $42 calls at $2.15, no point cashing out – down $860
- 4 AMZN July $215 calls at $5.25, out at $1.75 – down $1,400
- 80 FAS Aug $23 calls at net $7.24, out at $3.20 – down $32,320
In our last portfolio update, I had said about the FAS trade: "At the moment we are naked (not much to lose at this point) and one day, maybe, we will get a win when FAS pops and we are uncovered." Well, FINALLY, this was that day!
Had FAS not popped, we would not have hit goal and we would not have cashed out and we would have continued to work our losers by selling more calls and generating an income, using the cash to roll to better positions until the market turned back up because – THAT’S THE WHOLE STRATEGY. The real trick is, WHEN the market finally turns up, you have to learn to take it off the table.
Speaking of Conservative – I’ll do an update of the Income Portfolio this weekend as well as we shut down our short puts there as well. Boy will I be embarrassed if we don’t get a pullback!
They say "better safe than sorry" but being sorry really sucks!
Have a great holiday,
- Phil
Tags: AMZN, C, CCL, COF, EGLE, FAS, GMCR, HOV, Option Trading Strategies, Portfolio Management, QLD, QQQ, USO
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2011 at 6:39 am and is filed under Immediately available to public. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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