Quiet day

Today was a quiet day for trading for me. Having one account entirely committed is good and saves farting about with some of the complications involved in the discount brokerage positions...although I did take some small profits on a long position this afternoon.I decided t start closing out some of these on relative strength, the shorter expiry options anyway. I am disappointed in the overall performance of the option advisory service that I stuck with lately, the one I decided to drop.

I started looking at the older trades that these fellows setup to see if trading spreads would have been a better strategy to use. Being that I cannot sell options in the TFSA or RRSP account I was tied to covered calls only or long option positions... that ties my hands more than I realized while trying to use someone else's plan. When they were creating credit trades by buying long calls and selling naked puts for profit I could only buy the calls... without the credit of the puts I was hobbled off the bat and many trades are expiring or being closed with a 5 cent profit...with the naked put. That puts me in the red more often than not in those cases.

I am now investigating the possibility of having had placed spread trades on the same securities at the same times as their recommendations. Rather than getting fancy I will be using current option chains to see if there is enough yield now and extrapolate that into past performance. It is rough but as long as the stock price remained ahead of the strike for the duration of the trade to inside month expiry and I apply the $10 per day per $5000 (0.2% daily ROR) I can get a sense of the value of perhaps continuing the service going forward.

In cases where a solo naked put was recommended I might just place a bull put credit spread. Other times when the put was sold to cover the cost of the long call I might trade a bull put credit spread in a large enough ratio to pay for the long call up to a maximum risk level. The odd time a spread that I can trade comes up or an iron condor. I think I may find that 1/3 to 1/2 may have been workable as many do not have great chains with depth.

Looking at some of the trades that they took it looks like this may have been a promising venture... only I am starting late. I'll think on this over the weekend and see what I come up with.

I have an Optioneer trade expiring Friday, nice to see the spreads expiring, another on the 30th with them and two SPY spreads as well.

Jeff.