Zac's Journal

[zacj346]

Maybe I'll get the boot since I'm a Yankee, didn't see any rules against it. I also didn't look, to be honest. This is a cross post, I'm trying to expand my trade journal syndication empire, I cut out some irrelevant things but not all. Some of my trading is done in Schwab, some in Robinhood. I talk about 2 positions today and reference 2 others, I have 9 altogether.

Since about February I've consolidated into one style of trading. Lets call it a Simple Options Income Strategy. After picking a stock I want to use I have a target of 20% or 1 year. At that point I just reevaluate whether I want to continue trading or find another. I go off of premium, I don't mess with the Greeks even though I admit I should. I start with weekly options and target 0.5% minimum. When I get forced into rolling situations I just roll out until the next step is at a profit. I try to keep my options under 3 months, but that's just a guideline. I'll fill in the rest of the backstory later, I'm doing this kind of last minute today, and if I get the boot why put all the effort in.

I accidentally used Hazelnut creamer in my coffee this morning. Its not enough to throw out the whole cup but it is enough to have a disappointing aftertaste of hazelnut. I just wanted to share some of my personal struggles with you guys as I feel like we have grown closer over these past 30 days.

Anyway…the color formally known as purple is adjusted cost, white is strike prices. I also highlighted 2 moments of negative equity. The word equity was just not coming to mind when I did that so I called it drawdown. I think you can just look at it and figure out what I'm trying to convey.

Most Underwater Trade: I did sell an option at $63 when my cost basis was $64.90. I did it a few times but that was the biggest difference. All percentages are based on the measuring tool and rounded, but its close enough.

The jump at the end is today's trade. I said I bought time with another trade, I can’t remember which one, but I’ve been mulling over the idea of buying the time back. SQ was stuck out in January and at $70. I also had $2600 in premium collected since buying in, which is why my cost basis was all the way down to $54.50. So I rolled SQ to 11/15 $89 and paid $1863.

I still have $803.11 in premium and with that an $89 strike would be around 20% return.

I did something similar with HIMS:

What’s different is I’m actually -$377.25 in premium but the $29 strike will give me around a 23% return with the negative premium.

Altogether on paper I paid out $3026.39, but really that was just possible profit tied up in those longer strike dates.

 

[zacj346]

Swing and a miss this week. I was hoping to get out of some positions but it didn’t happen. I also traded off my phone today so I didn’t have any cost basis numbers in front of me. But I didn’t just wing it, that's for amateurs. I relied on the philosophy of the great Robert Boucher Jr. who once said; “ ..I like school. And I like football. And I’m going to keep doing them both because they make me feel good.”

Okay, that might be a line from The Waterboy, but I still think it's a valid argument. Sure, I may have undercut HIMS and its strike is a few hundred dollars underwater. But I’ll sort that out later. $448.24 in Premium today. SQ currently ITM $1242.56 (15.01%) return locked in, probably can get that up to 20% if the price holds out. DG and BP are slightly positive around 0.5%, HIMS -$418.03 (-19%) strike is -$226.51 (-9.5%). I could try to adjust it Monday, but I’m just going to see what happens. Receipts are below. These four day work weeks are rough, so this is all I got for ya.

 

[zacj346]

Okay, I made up another chart for you guys. Let's look at my HIMS position and how it's shaking out. Purple is Cost Basis, White is Strike Price, Green is Total Cost. Cost basis was determined by going week to week and getting P/L on Fridays and not after each option roll to make it easy for me. The trade is in a Schwab account so it's simple to pull information this way.

There is a lot going on in this trade so I’ll break down what's going on. I started this trade on 6/24 with 2 Put Options. On 7/19 I let one Option get assigned at $21.50 and rolled the other and had an option on both sides. I’m not going to do this in the future, it just made things more complicated on the spreadsheet side. After I was partly assigned I had a chunk of Equity built up for my cost basis. You can see I was also buying shares when it was low, and if you think that doesn’t make any sense, or “Losers average losers” flashes in your mind, then I feel you. It doesn’t add anything to the HIMS trade but it is a strategy I’ll employ on my dividend positions. I just didn’t have any dividend position to play with in August. The only change I will make is waiting for a turn around and placing a buy order just below my cost basis. As it sits the average of the 14 extra shares was $16.20 and I don’t think it would have been that much of a difference to put buy orders under my cost basis. So that's a good thing out of this trade.

The Call position actually was set for January in Sept. the Put position was set for January in Oct. so it was locked up and I just sat on it for a few weeks until I closed out of the Put side. Instead of trying to square the circle on my spreadsheet I decided to focus on Calls more. The math is better, I don’t have to worry about putting money on the trade as prices rise. I just like it better when my position size isn’t variable.

So that brings everything up to date, I rolled back the call side to try and get an exit on the jump last week but it fizzled and now it's underwater. So that brings up the question of whether it was a good idea to give back all my premium plus another $300 something to try and catch the spike in price. I’m going to say yes, the math work. I would have exited with over 20% profit, which is my target for a year from a position I’ve had for 5 months. I don't have a reason not to try and do that. I’m going to label this one Good Trade, Bad Result.

It is the most interesting trade I got right now, so at least it gives me something to talk about. Below is everything else going on. Schwab doesn't give me a nice weekly graph so I pulled from my performance page.

And as a special bonus for you guys at Trade2Win I am adding my Schwab Performance YTD and total performance just to add some street cred, as the kids say.

 

[zacj346]

This is what I was looking like premarket, about $65 down from the last time I posted it. $11,496 (16.62%). The numbers from the Robinhood IRA are included, just not pictured. That account doesn’t have a position right now, I’m doing something different with it that I’ll talk about in a bit.

I don’t have much going on today. I rolled SQ to the 12/27 $84 for $137.94. At $84 my profit is $1483.53 (17.92%) not bad, but I won’t be getting to 20% by the end of the year. I also rolled out HOOD to 1/17 $29 for $33.65. At $29 I’m sitting on $305.01 (12.70%). Only being 5 or 6 weeks into this HOOD trade it’s looking good, I’ll work on getting the chart drawn up when I have time.

Good news though, I started day trading. I heard it's all the rage, all the kids are talking about it. I went with a simple MACD strategy. I’m going long on crosses below the zero line. Super simple, I can trade it off my phone if I wanted to, which was something I wanted to be able to do. It works well enough to do what I want to do, and Tradingview has a nice little MACD strategy that will mark the crosses on the chart. It's all crosses, and I have no idea how to adjust it, but it saves me from having to watch the MACD lines when I know my setup is coming up; sometimes those numbers are hard to read.

Anyway, I took a trade right at the market open on CLSK. I bought 10 shares at $14.83. This didn’t follow the MACD strategy at all, it was already above the zero line, but I thought it might run. It didn’t so I set a Limit Sell for $15 and moved on. I went through and made my trades on SQ and HOOD and completely missed the middle trade. Bought 10 more shares at $13.90 and sold them at $14.25. I set that based on a trend line guesstimate that it wasn’t going to get much higher than $14.30 and I'm not even sure it made it back that far before it pulled back again. In and out in a few minutes and I made $3.54 (2.54%). The pullbacks below the zero line were getting smaller so I stopped for the day. Below are the Receipts .

So what’s going on? I am legitimately working on my day trading; got to fit in around here. But I still think it's gambling so I plan on rescuing the account with my option strategy should day trading not work out. So I’m not going to run a stop loss and I picked CLSK just because it was priced low enough that I could do this in the small Robinhood IRA, which is about $1900. I thought 10 shares was a good balance of trying to day trade and not being too far away from being able to rescue it. 10 bad trades and its options time. I have to work around PDT rules, but that’s just going to keep me from over trading. I do have a Take Profit in at $15 which would be 1% on that bad trade just in case it rises before I come back to trade again.

 

[zacj346]

Someone in the other forum was bothered by my comment that day trading was gambling. He also said I wasn't risking anything (because of my small trade size) and that I needed to develop an edge. We went back and forth about the gambling part but I needled him with starting my post with this today. I left it in cause I really don't have much to talk about today, but I do want to expand on this idea if I have time this weekend.

Well…at least I have that going for me. I thought I was just getting by with charm and good looks, but turns out there’s an edge in there somewhere. I really dodged a bullet there; I don’t have time to develop one to be honest.

I rolled HIMS for $50.64 and at a $22 strike I’m still down $66.84 (2.81%) but that’s better than -9.5% it was sitting at so I’ll keep bumping it in that direction.

I also rolled DG for $59.94. I kept at $77 instead of being more aggressive because earnings are in 2 weeks and I’d like to not have an option on in case it jumps. The $77 strike would give me a profit of $217.17 (2.69%)

My open trade in CLSK from Wednesday hit its target on Thursday morning. That was $0.17 a share 1.1% Adding that to Wednesday’s total would be $5.24. In my mind I wanted a $4 a day strategy and it worked out.

Today I’ve been watching but mostly sitting on my hands. The signal line was above 0 except for the first signal which was from yesterday and I didn’t want to jump in like Wednesday. It would’ve worked out., and the subsequent trades also would have gotten $0.20. If that keeps happening I’ll adjust my strategy to take those. I took the 3rd signal of the day (4th on chart) since the signal line did drop below the 0 line and set Sell Limit for $0.20. I don’t have high hopes for that one, but I can work on other aspects of the strategy if I get another signal. So I’ll watch it for a bit, but I want to do other stuff today too so that might be all for me today.

 

[zacj346]

And I am out.

$2.10 (1.5%) I’m done for today. I’m not waiting around for the signal line to drop below 0 and I’m not going to adjust my strategy to take trades above the zero line yet.

Day Trading Week 1: 3 trades, $7.34 profit.

Average: $2.44/trade

Target: 4 trades, $8 profit

Target Avg. $2/trade

 

[zacj346]

Okay, I’m really done this time. I lost my pencil in the garage and came in to grab one off my desk. It posted a signal a few minutes before that but the price hadn’t moved. I didn’t think it was a strong signal, but the other trade was worse so I didn’t have a good reason not to take it. That gave me my 4 trades, $9.34 in profit, and an average of $2.33/trade

 

[zacj346]

As of Friday I have a profit of $12,133.32 (17.90%).


I’ve been working on that MACD strategy, trying to figure out how to edit it in TradingView. I got it to where it only trades Long below the zero line. (I can’t short shares) and has a take profit of $0.20 for CLSK. In the strategy tester it does still close positions for a loss, and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t look like it is adding the trades together and trying to get a profit for the whole position based on the trading time stamps. So I am not sure what's going on and I don’t know how to program, but it's good enough. I’m getting the signals I want now, the Take profit was just a bonus so I could see the strategy as a whole in the tester.

Blue Line is the Buy and Hold performance for those of you not using tradingview. And you can see that at least on the minute chart it underperforms. That changes as soon as you go to the 5min chart or higher. Below is the 5min.

Since the 1min chart only tests from Oct 14th to present I’m going to assume that based on higher time frame performance (5min, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week) that over a longer time the 1min will also outperform the stock. Until we have more data we can’t say that it wouldn’t match the other time frames.


The most interesting thing I found was using account equity to determine position size actually did better. I don’t understand it either, all other things being equal you would think it would take the same amount of trades and just be better marginally along with the increased number of shares.

Trading 10% equity is something I didn’t consider, but I do like it. It doesn’t change the strategy as a whole but it adds scale into it. It does make it harder to set a target amount but that was somewhat arbitrary. I picked a $4 target because if I can make $4 a day then there is no reason I can’t make $400 a day. I also thought I was going to be limited by PDT rules but that’s not true either. I knew Robinhood let you turn that off and on by switching from a margin account to a cash account. I thought that was all your accounts but it turns out you can switch each account independently. I can switch back and forth within certain rules so I can work my strategy as intended. So $4 a day is still a minimum I’d like to hit, but I wouldn’t consider that a target. Its still a worthy goal. The only difference between $4 and $400 is scale. If you can’t make $4 consistently you're not going to make $400.


$400 a day puts you right around $100K if you trade everyday, that’s a full time job. Really $58 a day is the Federal Minimum Wage in the U.S. ($7.25 x 8) so anything over $15K meets the minimum wage requirement for a full time job and now that I googled that I will never let you guys forget it and will from now on be expressing my YTD profit in hourly wage (40 hours x 47 weeks) which is currently $6.45/hr. I don’t think I’m really putting 40 hours a week into this, even 20 seems like a stretch. But part time (20hrs a week) I’m making $12.90/hr. That’s a solid part time job. I unloaded trucks at Fedex and that was 4 to 5 hours a night at $14. I don’t know what they make now that was at least 10 years ago, maybe 20.

Anyway, I'm not going to be off on Wednesday this week, my schedule is different because of Thanksgiving. I also don't know if the markets are closed, I know they are open Friday. I'll be back then to at least update my option trades. Not sure about day trading this week, my only day would be Friday so I might just take this week off.

 

[zacj346]

Quick Update: DG went ITM but I was able to roll it to the 12/6 $87 (from 11/29 $77) and still get $66.94 for my trouble. Earning are on 12/5 so if it jumps above $87 on good earnings I'll have $1284.11 (15.90%) I think I'll let it go if that happens. That's 16% in 45 days, if all else holds up it'll push me up to around 19.5% for the year. Close enough right?

I also had a few hours to kill at a backhaul (I'm a truck driver, don't know if I said that) so I tried trading some CLSK. I kind of winged it with a trade. Robinhood mobile only goes down to 5min, I don't know how accurate it MACD is, and I never played with the strategy on a 5min chart to set a Take Profit. I picked $0.35 cause I was trading 12 shares and that gets me $4. Took one trade at the end of the day even though CLSK was in a downtrend and its still open, entered at $14.82 Sell Limit in at $15.17.

 

[da-net]

Hi Zac, I'm a yank too, and also trade @ Schwab. I trade level one only, this keeps me in check. It's good that you have a positive return, especially since most options traders lose money. I have traded most of the USA available markets and found that consistency was elusive unless I was willing to stay glued to the screens all day, which I'm not. Like most I looked for the "magic bullet" but it doesn't exist. About 2 months ago I decided to a different style trading but KISS, and I wanted to start the account very small and hopefully grow it. Of course I make my mistakes, like not taking the profit when it's offered, looking for more. However the small account is currently down about 4 percent. If you don't mind, I would like to occasionally post a trade in your thread after I'm in since I bid for the option between bid and ask. I won't post charts, only the trades. Others reading the thread can look at their own charts and decide for themselves.

 

[zacj346]

You can post here if you want. I'm not totally following what you mean when you say you bid for the option between bid and ask, but I'd be interested in seeing some of your trades to see what you mean.

Fair Warning: If you post here, you're inviting feedback from me. I'm not going to be mean to you, but I will critique your strategy if I think it's bad.

Best thing I can say is roll the dice and post something and let's see how it goes.

 

[zacj346]

I did make take another MACD trade, I'm stuck at a backhual, and I'm not sure I'll make it home tonight before I have to leave again so I don't have all the numbers but I did catch the morning sign on the 5min chart of CLSK. 13 shares, .35 Take Profit. So I got something around $4.50. Mondays trade is still floating out there though.

And I know I've been posting way to much about this and it's a small return. But it's a $2000 account, $7.69 a week is all you need to have a 20% return. I'm excited about a 20% return. Why can't you just be happy for me and my trash money.

 

[da-net]

Zac, Thanks for allowing me to post within your journal. I have no problem with criticism, in fact I encourage others to critique me as well. My goal is to simply test this out live and be held accountable for accuracy. I am testing this account with only a $1k, so I won't lose a lot if I fail.

Here are my very loose parameters as I don't want to over think it:
Option price max up to $1 + or -, expiration 2 to 3 months.
chart setup at yahoo finance; daily bars, 20 / 50 / 200 sma, CCI (simply because I have more screen time on this), candle patterns

I confirm everything at Schwab, before I place an order. Again, Thanks for allowing me to post.

 

[zacj346]

I assume since you are setting an option price you are buying. So why are you buying and why are you looking at 2-3 months? Also, how often are you trading?

 

[da-net]

As I stated this is a level 1 account, so only buying calls or puts is allowed. I simply look at what I expect to happen in price and how much time was required for previous moves, if it's too long I pass, but 2 to 3 months gives enough time for it to work or exit before total loss with some time value remaining. Depending on the option cost this amount allows between 10 and 15 open positions max. On yahoo finance with my chart setup, it's possible to have15 tickers at one time, but more than that creates a problem. I'm currently in a few trades, and watching 3 others. One i'm watching a Jan near the money call premarket was around 90 cents.. i think the stock will drop a little more and the option might go to 60 / 70 cents. If it does and candle confirms, I'll buy in and post the ticker, option strike & cost, along with bid / ask of the option at time of order placement.

 

[da-net]

APA $20 put Jan 17, 2025 $0.39 x $0.40 bought in at $0.39

 

[zacj346]

I was going to break out my soapbox but I'm too tired tonight. I'll have to do it later. I'll be back at least Friday to work on my options trades. No trades from me today, was unloading or driving when I had signals.

How confident are you APA is moving lower? How do you handle bad trades? I can't check on this cause only have the $20 and $22.50

 

[da-net]

First, Thank You for pointing out my typo error, which I edited to correct. Confidence? As I said I try to KISS and prefer not to show charts and ask others use their setups. However, this time I will attach a post trade annotated one along w/ Schwab's Ratings & reports Snippet. I don't consider news or world events or even ratings and reports into trading. Bad trades? I see this as very low risk trade ($1 per day) time value. As we all know large quick moves can and do happen, but I don't set any fixed parameters to exit a trade as i trade daily bars, not intraday unless I happen to check and a very obvious bar (pin bar in this case) has a high probability of forming, which did yesterday. Does this guarantee the direction, no, but we trade on probabilities, don't we?

Please "break out your soapbox" and let me have it!

 

[zacj346]

I had to sit aside the soapbox, it turned into a whole rabbit hole of issues and I'm still working through it. Down and dirty point to kind of keep the talk going and keep the ideas going; I think buying options is a dumb way to trade. Selling options makes more sense and is more fundamentally sound based on what I believe is the core principals of investing. I don't have an answer for a different way to trade with $1000 and I don't expect everyone to have the same core principals as I do. Going on about how I think your trading wrong and not giving an alternative is less than helpful. I'm still chewing over the problem, but with the holidays I'm a little short on time.

Today was mostly house cleaning. I had a bunch of small positions in Schwab, I think it made up about 8% of my total account so I went through and sold everything to free up capital and just simplify everything. I sold out of BP which freed up enough capital to also sell out of AFRM. BP ended up netting $37.81 (1.25%) I will be getting dividends for another $47.50 sometime in December so that’s roughly 2.8% for a month long trade. AFRM was sold at $69.03 giving me a profit of $923.98 (27.21%). That one was opened 5/10 so a little over 6 months. I did originally sell a 11/29 $68 call to get it assigned and then I realized that was dumb I bought it back and made a few bucks there too.


With those and all of the small positions out of the way I had 11K free on that side of Schwab. It wasn’t enough to close out TSLA ($13K for that), but I don’t really want to take on a new position right before the end of the year. I ended up doing a Buy/Write on PLTR, I bought in at $66.73 and sold the 12/6 $66 strike for $2.17. For everyone keeping score at home that will give me $142.51 (2.14%). I could have just sold a Put, I know that. I just don’t like doing the math on Puts. I don’t like how it boosts my percentages when I roll to a lower strike. I feel like I’m getting a false sense of how well I am doing if I just roll lower. It no longer reflects the true amount of money I have working in that position over time. That’s just me, and I’ll still use Puts to enter positions but I’m trying to stay out of positions until February and then reset everything at one time. At least that’s what I'm going to try to do.

MACD is still going strong. I really thought it might close the open position, I think it got within a cent or 2. I just let it ride. I took a trade this morning off the 1min chart. I watched the 5min as well but it was above the zero line most of the day. First trade was good, missed a second trade but it didn’t quite make it to its TP so I doubled up on a 3rd trade and it was good as well. I went back through and logged all my trades so far and I’ve made $21.05 (1.06%) in my first 2 weeks with 1 open position.

0.5% a week is 26% annually, and I know there was more on the table this week that I didn't take. I thought about doubling my position size to 20% of capital. That still gives me some chances at bat before getting tied up. I don't know yet. Robinhood still offers a 3% match to contributions to their IRAs so that makes it the most attractive place to put my money. And now that I'm past major purchases of materials to finish the garage I'll be putting a portion my paychecks in to my accounts. I'm also probably going to move money from the brokerage side and max out my IRA contribution (and I get 3%). All that would get me away from CLSK so I don't want more money tied up in it then I need to. Have to wait and see what DG does next week.

I'll look at that next week, as well as look at unwinding HOOD, HIMS, and IWM. I didn't get to those today. I've shifted my focus on really getting set up for next year. I think with all I learned this year I can do better.

 

[da-net]

Zac, you're right that a more conservative approach is selling options. Decades ago a study found that over 90% of all options expire worthless, don't know if that's still true. What that doesn't say is that some of those options may have made money and then expired worthless. As an options principal I saw many strategies tried and most failed, but several made money for a while when the person stuck to their strategy and made good choices on the underlying issue. ie: Currently, I see a good opportunity but the options are outside of my parameters in both time and price, so I'll leave it alone. It requires an OTM Mar call priced at $4.30 and might pull back just a bit before advancing to the $7 range.

If you're having second thoughts about my posting within your thread, just let me know and I'll stop.

btw.. Are you thinking there will be no Santa Claus Rally this year?