Reviewing the stock option spread trade issue

I mentioned being a little disappointed in one of the first stock option trades that I placed last week. While that is true I figured that I shouldn't discount the whole idea based on one potential loser. It may have been a fluke with the options expiration as I mentioned so I should maybe consider that entering such a trade immediately before options expiration might not be a great plan.

I did some checking on one other stock that has a deep option chain and is very liquid, AAPL. While I have not doen a sector study to determine if the sector is in the right point relative to other sectors I think that AAPL is one of the drivers of the tech sector.

The interesting thing about the AAPL options is that the price is at $195ish, all of the OTM calls are in $10 strike increments and the ITM puts are of the same denominations. A put credit spread has some money to play with while the call credit spread do not. Indicative of the volatility and higher potential for the stock to drop fast I suppose, which is why put spreads can be more lucrative and more risky.

Running a put spread at 170 strike with 165 as protection runs the best payback but the yield is lower than I would prefer, 4.6%. This would be where I would need to decide upon a cashflow and not be concerned with the yield so much.

Risk wise AAPL has not dropped $25 in 25 days if traded off the low side of the linear regressions or trend channels except in a few cases during the meltdown. Of course that doesn't mean that it won't do just that before Jan 15th this time.

The thing about cashflow and yield is that I would be better off taking my $5,000 and sending it to Strikepoint as I can see a 8-10% yield per trade if I cannot do at least as good as that. I think I will still go back to sector ETFs and see what I can stir up again. I have SPY and XLE on the go right now. I need to update my sector performance table now and see what I see.

I would like to be posting charts and studies now but there is not much of that with a premium selling strategy unless it is run with tight strikes that make more use of support, resistance and trends based on technical chart analysis.