Investing General Discussion

Assuming I make no trades today, this is how I made out for the year on closed positions. Overall a +12.45%. Eating PYPL was ugly and it alone dropped my profit from 20% to 12%. It was my one major mistake for the year. With the market ugliness I didnt get greedy and took profits when I saw them. I did my best to cut losers short if I felt the trade was bad.

I ended up with a small net loss for the year in options (due entirely to MTTR puts in the spring). Excluding MTTR my options plays were in the green for 2022. My early put plays were rocky as the extent of the market downturn was unknown, and after I adjusted to a strategy for a strict bear market (further out of the money and lower premiums) I was green on almost all the rest of my puts.

Over the last few months I have been adding on lows and trimmed my cash position down to 8%

I stopped looking at my portfolio two months ago. Just waiting for my divorce to finalize so I can dump my SEP and whatevers left over money into the QQQ.

ShakyJake said:

Well, I'm just thankful I didn't completely blow my account up. Right now, it seems like trying to trade options is nigh impossible in this environment. Or my strategy sucks balls.

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This market is good for options. You just need to devise a strat to operate in the market that is being given to us. Its functioning within a lane and that can be used to your advantage with options.

All that being said, don't be afraid to bail out of an option trade early and either cut a loss short or take a small profit if things go sideways.

ShakyJake said:

I like trading the daily chart and my strategy has been this: I wait for a breakout candle after a period of consolidation. I'll then buy a CALL or PUT option depending on the anticipated direction of the move. The problem I'm having is that we're constantly gapping up or down every day at open. Which is just murdering me. I've come to the conclusion that I simply cannot hang onto an option for more than a day without massive risk. Prior to 2022 the market was fairly smooth but now we're constantly slamming up and down.

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You run a totally different strategy than I do. I trade the monthly expiry and only write puts on stocks I'm willing to own. I go way out of the money and use a two year backtest on the strikes (when available). I don't trade anything greater than 20% chance of assignment. I watch them and if we get a day or two of green I look to buy-to-close once I hit 50% profit or greater.

I'm also selling covered calls on low beta value stocks (INTC and T). Same strat but not so far out of the money since I don't care if I lose them. I am also conscious of the approaching date of their earnings release.

Ps.. I'm not making high premium, but it's risk vs reward and I'm running low risk.

My PLTR puts closed out at the bell. I had originally sold them at .20 and then doubled down and wrote more at .40 when the stock price dipped under $6 so my cost basis was .30. Bought to close at .20 for a 50% gain. I had 3 different orders to buy more of the actual stock this week but none of them filled.

TSLA gonna be interesting to watch tomorrow. They blew out last year's deliveries and production (30%+ increase yoy from last year) but missed analysts delivery estimate by about 20k cars.

Futures open mildly green.

Jysin said:

Tesla’s own goal was 50% yoy increase, so missed that by a wide margin as well as missing analyst estimates.

Coin flip my opinion on how the stock may react to that tomorrow. I think the last leg down day Tesla had was when they announced price cuts for those taking delivery by year end. Most read into that as them missing their estimates and the stock sold off on that already. So, this may be baked in already.
Who knows??

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I watch their US inventory pretty regularly on the aggregator sites and they are looking good with the M3 and MY. They have shit loads of inventory building of MS and MX and that is the real concern for me. 6% interest rates on a $135k car is pricing out the plebes.

I expect them to do well on the MY/M3 inventory now that the $7500 tax credit is back on the table and the gubmint pushed out the built in the USA requirements until March.