Zac's Journal

[zacj346]

Late start today, had to get some injections at the Dr this morning. First thing is another mistake on the MACD.

Highlighted are the three trades that closed recently and profit is way off. I was looking at other symbols and adjusting parameters on what I thought was the RKLB setup which is currently paused and I was doing it on the VFC setup that’s running. It happens, that’s just something I have to pay attention to.

Other than that, $35.23 from 4 trades on VFC this week, currently 1 open position on it from today.


TGT is still killing me, disappointing earnings from WMT dragged it down more. Looks like this is going to be a long term battle. I assume if it has similar earnings it will drop below its recent low around $121. Who knows, it might have so much negativity baked in that even mediocre earning will seem positive for it.

The one bright spot is LVS is moving up, I have about 4% positive equity. I rolled it out to a $45 strike and I’ll see where it is next week.

The CF trade from the scanner didn’t work out exactly. I rolled it down and it is at 1.5% return at its current strike. I did watch a few others that did work out better (wouldn’t need rolled) so I decided to give it another try and added a put on ELF. ELF isn’t on my watchlist but I adjusted the scan settings and it gave results closer to setups I’m looking for on my watchlist. As someone that hates having to pick starting positions it's just nice to hand that off to some other mechanism. I have 12 more days on the free trial so I just want to see what kind of track record I can get before deciding if I want to pay for it.

 

[zacj346]

Well, last week could have been better. Schwab dropped to -$2805.51 (-4.45%), Taxable is $1571.68 (11.13%), and MACD is $308.52 (5.42%). Negative equity is eating up premiums and then some.

TGT: -$1154.97 (-8.19%)
HOOD: -$1332.03 (-11.10%)
HUT: -$661.26 (-23.71%)
DKNG: -$323.63 (-6.47%)

HOOD and DKNG are still puts so I might be able to pull more money off the table. All in all its not bad. Options trading is -$1233.83 (-1.59%) adding MACD total performance is -$925.31 (-1.11%).

Looking over my positions I’m a little disappointed that I started straying from my original approach. TGT my strike is $141 but my breakeven is $135.82 so I should be at $136 or $137.
It wouldn’t change the TGT position being upside down, but my strategy is reducing cost basis to the point the position is profitable. I should be more aggressive on falling positions and working to capture profit on rising positions.

MACD didn’t close any more trades this week. It brought in $35.23 from 4 closed trades on VFC and $108.92 from last weeks call on RKLB. It currently has 3 open trades on VFC. The strategy on Tradingview has 4 open trades though…looks like it ran out of buying power so the trade failed. I manually entered a sell limit for one of the open trades, the other 2 are close enough that I’ll just let it run.

 

[zacj346]

Going to go after these 2 aggressively to get some red off the spreadsheet. TGT strike is slightly above break even of $132.82, HUT strike is in the red -$796.58 but i’m not worried about it.

Changed HOOD puts to the same date, thought I could leapfrog the options down, but It wasn’t looking good so I am going to stair step them.

Example of what I mean by stair step.

 

[zacj346]

Closed out CF. 2 weeks 1.06% profit. I probably could have kept this going and got more out of this trade. At least the chart looks decent. But I just wanted to take a win. Part of it was just wanting to cycle in more trades from Options Samurai to get the most out of my trial, but I really wanted a win to keep my morale up too. While my confidence in the process is still high, that doesn’t make seeing a lot of red suck less.

Rolled TGT to a more aggressive strike. Maintained LVS, ELF and TOST(below) positions. I could have left ELF alone and it might have expired worthless, but I got a decent premium to drop the strike down to $67. HUT has earnings Monday so I am letting the option expire and wait for earnings.

Added CAVA and TTD from the options scanner. CAVA looks more like a falling knife. I took it off of RSI not sure how that’s going to work out. TTD was also based on RSI but it also looks like a MACD cross is coming up and its at its 52 week low. Didn’t seem like that big of a risk.

TTD is at a 73% probability of expiring worthless and CAVA is at a 77%

Over in MACD I don’t think it completed a trade since last time. VFC is paused and I started selling options on it today. I also have a sell limit on it because it took an extra trade friday. I’m not quite sure what happen. I got an alert, but its not on the trade log for the strategy.

After digging into this and reading through what I could find, it seems like everytime I adjust the settings I would need to delete the alert and remake it for the changes to be reflected in the alerts as well. I’m not sure if that’s the issue, or I’m just not understanding it. But that would make sense as to why it kept issuing alerts. I adjusted the strategy to add 2 positions but the alerts were still off of adding 4 positions. That would be interesting if that is the case. Instead of having to load up custom strategies for each position I might be able to reconfigure the same one to set up alerts without affecting the other positions.

On the brightside, if I am holding 125 shares of VFC on March 10th I’ll get $11.25 in dividends.

I’ll be back sometime over the weekend to go over how I’m sitting after 2 months.

 

[zacj346]

Schwab ended the week and the month of Feb. at -$3143.78 (-4.99%), Taxable is at $1724.53 (12.21%), and MACD is at $112.47 (1.97%). Combined my performance so far is -$1306.78 (-1.57%).

Income - Options Premium
Equity - Current Price + Income + Dividends
Total $ - Profit at Current Strike
Sell - Current Strike

Add the Equity up and I’m -$2082.45 (-2.51%) in open positions. HOOD is the biggest drawdown with -$1637.73 followed by HUT and TGT. HUT is probably going to be the biggest headache to get out of. That could change, both HUT and TGT have earnings next week. HOOD and DKNG are both out at 3/21 strikes so I’ll keep an eye on them but I’m not planning on rolling them until the 3/14 and I’ll look at 4/6 strikes so I don’t have to trade over vacation.

TOST and LVS are doing well, LVS I will let go if it stays about its strike, and even if it falls a little below. It’s actually a little better than the screenshot with $228.07 (5.13%). The $200 was from me entering different values to compare strikes and I just didn’t reset it.

My free trial is ending with Options Samurai but I’m not ready to buy it just yet. I liked it, and I pulled 4 trades off of it; CF, ELF, TTD, and CAVA. CF did fine and it still looks like it's going to run up more. I’m going to wait until I exit the last 3 to see if I want to continue it. The screener cost $470ish a year, I don’t think it’s a bad price. And I really don’t enjoy building watchlists and looking for setups so its a net benefit if I can cycle through the trades with a decent profit in a reasonable amount of time. I would only need 6 CF style trades a year to breakeven (2 weeks, $83 profit). We’ll see. I’m going just try and get out of the remaining ones with a profit instead of trying to ride them for large profits.

MACD put in a solid month $506.96 in closed trades for February. I’ll have to pay the piper eventually, maybe in March. I thought about staying with options and recouping more, and I may do that. I’m not sure how I want to play it from here. It’s just something I have been thinking about. It really depends on what I ultimately want to do with the MACD strategy. Is its main function income generation? Is it position building? Or is it hands off trading? I’m still considering expanding it to all of Robinhood but I’d need my main account over $25,000 so it's still a little ways off.

 

[zacj346]

Still funny.

Anyway, I did a few minor things. Bought back a few options; TGT, VFC, and TOST yesterday. Today I sold a TOST Call at $37 that brought my adjusted price down to $36.79. I also sold a HUT $15.50 Call that brought my adjusted price down to $24.29 so just a tad underwater on that.

I have been thinking about HOOD. Its my worst position, but its also 2 positions so I feel like its going to be the most flexible to work with. I started thinking that maybe its better to be on the call side of underwater positions. The only way to get more premium on the put side is to go higher, but I would essentially just be increasing my indebtedness to the position. I also can’t do that forever, I would run out of capital. On the call side I can undercut my adjusted price by as much as I wanted. I run the risk of it being called away, and of the price jumping and overtaking my call. I still think its something to try. I’m going to split HOOD and have a call and a put and I think I’ll be able to work it down faster than stair-stepping. I’ll have to wait til Monday to get that up and running.

That’s all I got until Friday.

 

[zacj346]

Just started out rolling everything this morning. HOOD was assigned so I didn’t have to wait until Monday to start selling Calls and working the Put down. I usually just run down my list making trades and then go back and update my spreadsheet. While I was updating LVS I decided to switch gears and close it and double down on DKNG and work on clearing the board.

I made a decent profit of $183 (4.13%) from a 6 week trade. That leaves ELF as my only trade not in the red. CAVA and TTD don’t look bad, at least their strikes are in positive territory. I’m in a rush this morning so I’ll do a better review this weekend.

 

[RolloTape2025]

What are your reasons for trading long?

 

[zacj346]

I can't short on Schwab, and I'm not sure I can on Robinhood, I don't think I have tried.

 

[RolloTape2025]

That's a very funny comment. I can't beat that 🙂

 

[zacj346]

Schwab is down -$5718.48 (-9.06%), Robinhood Taxable is still holding on to $1433.33 (10.15%) and MACD has fallen to -$759.65 (-13.35%) Combined trading is -$5044.80 (-6.08%). HUT, TGT, and HOOD are my worst positions, while ELF is the only position currently in the green.

Lines in black are just individual strikes, I also added RKLB and VFC from MACD.

First thoughts are there is so much red on the board. I am doing way better in the Taxable, still up 10%; than everywhere else. So I was looking at my position in TOST and its not down nearly as bad as HOOD and DKNG even though their charts kind of all did the same thing through earnings and are down today about the same from their pre earnings close. So maybe the way I traded TOST through earnings wasn’t a bad strategy after all. I also have $12,000 (75%) of the capital in cash (earning 4% interest). Since I know I’ll earn something for my money in Robinhood I’m more likely to let it sit if I don’t have a trade.

CAVA, TTD, and ELF were all entered after the current selloff started, so I’m not sure I’d be in any better position if I had opened positions earlier. (albeit on different stocks). I’m still tracking CF and it sold off more after I exited but is only slightly down from where my breakeven would have been; my breakeven would have been lower if I was still in it though so it may have been positive.

Anyway, it’ll take a few weeks to see if I am actually able to work down my positions. It seems possible I just have to wait til the sell off stops and stocks settle before I can actually get ahead.

 

[zacj346]

Just rolled calls down to get some extra premium.

Mostly I’ve just been watching the market going down and trying to figure out a way I can get involved in a better way. I’m limited to going long and using covered options positions, the only time I can buy an option is to hedge with a put, but I have to own the stock to do that.

I wondered if I could use this hedge offensively. It seems counter-intuitive, but I think it could work. I bought a put on TOST and one on HOOD. HOOD is just a control, I just want a comparison.

With TOST now my premium is -$583.78 and it jumped my breakeven to $45.86. Its 27 weeks until 9/19, so if I average $22 in premium a week until then my premium would be slightly positive and I can sell TOST for $40. I won’t make any money on the trade, but I have a guaranteed out. It seems like this would work. If it recovers before then I plan on selling the put around 50%. I could be totally wrong on this, in which case I set myself back a few months. I looked around with Google and couldn’t find anyone trying something similar. It seems counter-intuitive, but the math works. And if the math works why can’t it work?

 

[zacj346]

HOOD, CAVA, DKNG, and TTD puts were all assigned. Cava was intriguing, I didn’t consider it that upside down. Last time I looked before it was assigned I was going to be able to roll it out and down. So does this mean people are cashing out and the market is going to turn? I don’t know… I just went down my list and rolled everything , I skipped ELF originally because its premium was higher than I wanted to pay and it was going to expire worthless. I came back later and closed it after the premium came down some.

$170.68 (2.66%) for 3 weeks; or (2.43%) if you count from the 1st strike price of $70. Now I have $10K in that account to rescue either DKNG or TGT. DKNG already has 2 positions, so I’m leaning towards TGT but Ii’m going to wait until after vacation to see what happens. I was very aggressive with TGT $105 strike, that could turn against me and need help. Guess I’ll just sit back and wait for something to break.

In the other Schwab account if the market is turning around CAVA and TTD seem poised for at least a bounce. I’ll hold them for a little while and see, I’ll just watch RSI and MACD to for exit signals. Positions from options Samurai are 2 wins and 2 open so I’ll probably go back to that when I want to open new positions.

I’ll be back this weekend to share where my accounts stand.