After spending a few months experimenting with different stock and option strategies, I’ve decided to start keeping a weekly log of my activity. This will force me to document the moves that I’ve made the past week and provide a rational for why I made each move. My hope is that this will force me to really evaluate what I’m doing and help me to develop a winning strategy. And if I find that I’m consistently losing, well, our readers will have detailed notes on what not to do!

So without further ado, let’s take a look as this past week’s activity.

9/28:

Buy: MKC Oct 16 2020 $180 Put @ $1.92
Buy: MKC Oct 16 2020 $210 Call @ $1.54

So this wasn’t a true straddle, as the strike prices aren’t the same, but it was the same idea. I knew this was not going to be a good trade, which is why used different strike prices to keep the cost down. Earnings were scheduled to be released the next day and I was hoping for movement in either direction. It did not, at least not enough to matter.

9/30:

Sell: BA Nov 20 2020 $160 Call @ $21.50
Sell: PRPL Oct 16 2020 $25 Call @ $1.50

Both of these moves were to lock in profits on trades I had made before starting this log. I sold half my positions of BA and 60% of PRPL. One of the costly mistakes I made when starting out is not selling positions when they were up big. By selling half, I made it impossible (or at least much harder) to lose money.

Sell: U @ $87.12

I knew I should have waited before buying into this stock for a better price, but it kept going up… At least it was until I bought in. My stop loss saved me from further losses.

Buy: PLTR @ $10.77
Sell: PLTR @ $9.76

I got swept up into the IPO hype on this one… My stop loss saved the day again.

Buy: BBBY Dec 18 2020 $15 Call @ $2.52

I made this trade in the closing seconds of the day after seeing that some deep pocketed options trader had just made a large bet on this company. They were scheduled to release earnings the next day, so maybe someone knew something. Following these trades has given me the best results, so i bought in as well.

10/1:

Sell: BBBY Dec 18 2020 $15 Call @ $5.10

I sold half my position after seeing a huge spike in the morning on BBBY. the rest of my position is now house money, so I’m going to let it ride out the next month or so.

10/2:

Buy: SPY Oct 09 2020 $335 Call @ $4.00

This is the day the Trump covid-19 diagnosis came out. The market took a dive to open, but it looked like it was fighting to go higher. I bought these hoping for a big Monday jump. I picked the 9th for expiration in case I had to unload them as they should still retain some extrinsic value if I was wrong.

Active Positions:

I’m including positions I had purchased prior to starting this log to account for the money I’ve set aside for this experiment. I also may have wanted to see some good moves on this chart after the steep learning curve when I started…

TickerBuy PriceCurrent Price
AMD$75.20$86.15
AMD Oct 16 $85 Call$4.36$3.73
BA Nov 20 160 Call$13.20$21.18
CLX Jan 15 200 Put$7.70$9.15
BBBY Dec 18 15 Call$2.52$6.28
SPY Oct 9 335 Call$4.00$5.95
SAP Oct 16 160 Call$2.00$1.80
PRPL Oct 16 25 Call$0.75$1.38
MKC Oct 16 180 Put$1.92$0.325
MKC Oct 16 210 Call$1.54$0.175
SPY$341.38$339.76
SPY was added for benchmarking my performance

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