I wasn’t able to get around to this on Friday, but we closed out the week with another $340 in profit that day, making for a nice weekly total of $772. That’s nearly 5% of the total account value. With one day left in August, we’re about $200 short of a 20% portfolio gain for the month. That would be fun!
We started out the day by selling all the $IWM and $SPY stock I bought a couple days ago to raise cash. Then we sold and took a loss on our EBAY call. That stock just hasn’t traded well at all since we bought it on September 5, so we dumped it for a $92 loss. It’s important to learn from your mistakes, if mistakes were made. In this case, I bought too early on the highlighted day below where it failed to break above the downtrend line.
Now that is not a mistake for me. I have to make these buying decisions before I leave for work, so I often buy before I know for sure that it’s going to clear a spot. The mistake for me was that I didn’t sell it the next day when it went lower. I should’ve gotten out right there for a few bucks. This is the kind of sloppiness that can set in when almost everything else you’re doing is working, and it needs to be rooted out. Obviously, we still had a fine month despite it. But we’re not aiming for fine. We’re aiming for special. Mistakes like this hurt when the market gets tougher.
On to better news, we sold our DPZ options position for a very nice gain. On the same day that we bought EBAY, we bought the DPZ Sep $230 call and we sold the Aug $230 call for a net investment of $314. When the August call expired, we sold a Sep call against our long. Today we closed that position. In all we gained $301 on the call we bought, and profited $107 on the calls we sold. So that’s a $408 profit on $314, or 130% in 23 days.
Then we added a new position, buying shares of Slack Technologies (WORK) at $32.06. You can get it a little cheaper perhaps on the open tomorrow. This was bought in the exact same manner as the failed EBAY trade, but below you can see how much better it looks at the close of the day.
I love setups like this. The stock has risen above its 50-day sma (blue line) just as it gets a bullish confirmation on the MacD. Now it clears a downtrend line, too? Sweet. If this works, it might play with that downtrend line for a couple days, but ultimately it should stay above the rising 21-day ema (yellow line). If not, we’re out.
Lastly, we entered a position in Spirit Airlines (SAVE) using options. This is an ideal options use. Potential for a quick, large gain. But also the stock could potentially have a quick, large selloff if negative things occur. Options define your risk and maximize your reward. We bought the Oct $20 call for $199. The plan would be to watch that go higher and then sell the Oct $25 call against it at a higher price than they currently are selling for. The most likely result of a chart that looks like this is that it hits the purple line next.
I almost forgot about DraftKings (DKNG) My Favorite Stock that everyone likes to sell on things that are never going to happen or don’t have any impact on it. Friday was one of those days. The NFL is not going to cancel its season. Just, stop. I added an options position to my stock position, buying the Nov $50 call for $267. You can buy it cheaper tomorrow, as we lost a pretty large amount on DKNG Friday. But it barely registered in an otherwise great day.
UPDATED: I forgot to add that we adjusted our $AKAM position by selling the Sep $123 call for $95, against the Nov $120 call we bought last Friday. We are up $190 on the total position this week and the resulting P+L graph looks like this:
Current positions below:
Long: AAPL, ABT, ADBE, AKAM, AMD, ARNC, DKNG, FCX, HAL, LULU, LVS, MCD, MSFT, NET, PETS, PYPL, RDFN, SAVE, SPOT, TMHC, TTGT, WORK
Short: QQQ (as a hedge)
Have a great week and happy trading!
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