boilermaker75

Wrote WFC 47.5-strike Nov 15 expiration puts for $0.50 per share.

Keith Moon & John Bonham are most definitely very, very skilled drummers, but my vote has got to be for Neil Peart. As for investing, what percentage of the general population was selling stocks at or near the lows of 2008/2009? I had several associates who would tell me that they were down 40%, and now was the time to be getting out! They were going to take their lumps and get out.... What really has me spooked is that some of these same people are now looking to get back in the market. Speaking of great drummers, we just lost one, Ginger Baker. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/06/765781758/ginger-baker-cream-drummer-and-force-of-nature-dies-at-80 Dude was a human metronome & absolutely nuts. RIP Sunday night I am going to see The Who, well half The Who, at the Hollywood Bowl. Zak Starkey, Ringo's son, will be playing the part of Keith Moon. That is if Roger Daltry's voice recovers. He had to quit midway through their show in Houston on Sept 25 and then canceled a couple of shows. Their next scheduled shows are Oct 11 & 13 at the Hollywood Bowl. Nice! It was awesome! Zak Starkey is a great drummer. Zak was a protege of Keith Moon.

Yes, strongly agree about wabuffo.

Another great contributor, who I really appreciate, is globalfinancialpartners, gfp. I always look forward to reading his posts. Plus he's a Saints fan!

I am a LTBH investor. I am not writing puts on my whole portfolio. Today it is mainly on the cash portion, which is small because I am almost fully invested. Here are more details of what I do. First, I use writing puts to enter positions. All my current positions were entered that way. It gives me the discipline to wait for my price. I don’t have that patience with just limit orders. Besides I get paid while waiting to be exercised, probably why I am more patient, and it lowers my basis by the put premium. A criticism would be not acquiring a position because you don’t get put to. This has only happened to me once. I wanted to acquire some MCD at $50 and was never put to. So, I missed out on a four-bagger so far. Secondly, I use puts to do some trading. Usually stocks I already own and at prices I would not mind if I were put to. Most of my positions are written when the expiration is a few days to about a month out. For the rest the expiration is 1-2 months out when I write the put. I am selling insurance and collecting very nice premiums, but unlike insurance, if I have to pay a claim I end up with a stock I don’t mind owning at the price I am put to. Third, it is also a way to be margined in the sense if I would be exercised on all my outstanding puts I would be on margin. From 2008-2016, if I were put to on all my outstanding puts, I would have been around 25% on margin. I only ended up slightly on margin a couple times and by writing covered calls (equivalent to writing a put) I was quickly off of margin. Recently, I have been writing puts where I would be just slightly on margin if put to on everything. Currently I am short puts on BRKB, WFC, and BAC. Fourth, I also like to write puts to play risk arbitrage. For instance, when BRK was acquiring BNI I was writing at-the-money puts on BNI. If I outright bought BNI, I would have to wait till the acquisition closed to know my return. By writing puts I was setting the date when my play would be completed and what my return would be. I then followed an expiration with writing more puts. I did this till BRK closed on BNI.

Boilermaker - just curious if you can share your strategy around picking the strike price vs. premium collected (which in my calculations consists of things such as time value, volatility, etc.) vs. probability of assignment (here I have my betas, deltas, vegas). Nothing scientific. 90% of my writes have an expiration from a couple of days to a couple of weeks and I look for a premium of at least 1%.

I couldn't help myself, I just wrote some BAC 27.5-stirke, October 11 expiration puts for $0.30 per share. I did it in my IRA so they are cash-secured.

Yes I should have mentioned something about position sizing and what I do. Back when the banks were trading for single digits I was writing naked puts where if put to on everything I would have been heavily margined. I did occasionally get on some margin, but I turned around and wrote covered calls and was never on margin long. The put premiums were also much larger back then. I would not do that in today's market. Must of the puts I write are cash-secured, or I might get slightly on margin, 1-2%, if put to on everything. But my puts are spread out in time. The WFC puts I wrote yesterday would put me on margin but I have 46.5-strike WFC puts expiring Friday that would put all my put positions back at being cash secured if they expire. And I will probably buy those Friday positions back rather than try to squeeze another dollar or two out.

Keith Moon & John Bonham are most definitely very, very skilled drummers, but my vote has got to be for Neil Peart. As for investing, what percentage of the general population was selling stocks at or near the lows of 2008/2009? I had several associates who would tell me that they were down 40%, and now was the time to be getting out! They were going to take their lumps and get out.... What really has me spooked is that some of these same people are now looking to get back in the market. Speaking of great drummers, we just lost one, Ginger Baker. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/06/765781758/ginger-baker-cream-drummer-and-force-of-nature-dies-at-80 Dude was a human metronome & absolutely nuts. RIP Sunday night I am going to see The Who, well half The Who, at the Hollywood Bowl. Zak Starkey, Ringo's son, will be playing the part of Keith Moon. That is if Roger Daltry's voice recovers. He had to quit midway through their show in Houston on Sept 25 and then canceled a couple of shows. Their next scheduled shows are Oct 11 & 13 at the Hollywood Bowl.

Keith Moon & John Bonham are most definitely very, very skilled drummers, but my vote has got to be for Neil Peart. As for investing, what percentage of the general population was selling stocks at or near the lows of 2008/2009? I had several associates who would tell me that they were down 40%, and now was the time to be getting out! They were going to take their lumps and get out.... What really has me spooked is that some of these same people are now looking to get back in the market. Speaking of great drummers, we just lost one, Ginger Baker. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/06/765781758/ginger-baker-cream-drummer-and-force-of-nature-dies-at-80

Is it really picking up pennies when your making 30-40% ROC a year? And you are not going to get steamrolled if you are purchasing companies like BRKB, WFC, and BAC. There has never been a time where getting put to on BRKB was not a good thing. Hind sight bias. Seems like plenty of people would have been steamrolled doing this with WFC or BAC in 2007/2008. Plenty of people would have been steamrolled doing this with KHC/GE in 2018/2019. Every year, there is a "safe" and "solid" blue Chip that has dismal performance. Hindsight bias makes us feel comfortable taking risks with these names, but it can be a pretty bad deal if you're selling puts on margin on one of these when that occurs. If options were so easy to make money in, everyone would do it. The problem is that there are occasional blow-ups where the loss on the position wipes out multiple prior trades' gains. As you point out no more risky than owning the stock outright as far as getting steamrolled. Actually slightly less risky because of the put premium plus however much your wrote the put out-of-the money. The biggest drawback I see is missing out on the gain you get with the stock if it surges up. No it is not easy, but the same difficulty as LTBH. I have been writing puts for about 25 years. I have had some that have not worked and sold for a loss. But the same with LTBH, which I have been doing since the late sixties.

Is it really picking up pennies when your making 30-40% ROC a year? And you are not going to get steamrolled if you are purchasing companies like BRKB, WFC, and BAC. There has never been a time where getting put to on BRKB was not a good thing.

I don't track explicitly. My main use is as limit orders to enter positions at good prices. Every stock I own I entered this way and I am close to 100% invested. The only stock I didn't get doing this was MCD back when MCD was around $90. That is the downside, missing out because the stock moves up and I never get put too. Since I am typically 95-100% invested, if I get put to everything I would be on margin. So I am usually conservative writing out of the money puts so I am not looking to make 15-20% with this strategy. I'm happy with 8-10%, which is about my guess for my put writing return.

Wrote WFC 48.5, Oct 18 puts for $0.65 per share this morning. I've been doing this for more than 10 years with WFC, BAC, and BRKB. When I get put to I sometimes keep the shares, so a form of a limit order to accumulate stocks at better than current prices, or if I already have a full position I turn around and write covered calls, which is identical to writing CSPs. Edit: I also already have WFC 46.5-strike Oct 11, and 47.5-strike Oct 18 open positions.

I've been religiously writing ATM cash covered puts on this all year collecting premiums. I got assigned shares a few times. I also hedged a few times buying puts that offset premiums a bit but also gave some additional protection to the downside. Been averaging about 2-3% a month on the capital. Not quite as good as your strategy but if you're not looking to hold shares I don't think it's a bad strategy. You do miss the div though. Curious how many others on here sell covered calls or cash covered puts? In this environment it seems quite easy to do confidently. I saw Boilermaker has been doing something similar in an IRA I believe. Although I haven't been doing it strictly on BAC. I do it all the time with BRKB, WFC, BAC, and AMGN when AMGN 170-puts have sufficient premium.

Thanks. Bought it. I did too, started reading it this morning. I have seen Max Tegmark on shows about cosmology, math, etc.

I haven't read it, but this book looks like it might be good on the subject of AI and is for sale today at AMZN https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B06WGNPM7V?_bbid=12998103&tag=ebookdealspagesite-20

Maybe. The joke is just as funny (as in, not really funny at all), albeit to the other large segment of the population, when the words "liberals" and "conservatives" are switched and Mr. Trudeau is replaced by Mr. Trump. There has to be a joke here somewhere about the liberal kittens having only their left eye open and the conservatives only their right, but I can't seem to make it work. It does seem to be one of those jokes that you can just plug in your own people or ideologies and it would be found to be funny by people who agree with you. I could see communists plugging in capitalists for liberal and communist for conservative and sharing it with their comrades. I could plug in "statist" for liberal and "anarchist" for conservative, share it on facebook and I'd get ton of likes from my anarchist friends. Reminds of of Michael Malice (author of "Dear Reader") who says that one thing he learning visiting North Korea is that you can take any ethnic joke and plug in "Japanese" as the target ethnicity and you will be the funniest guy in the country. They all hate the Japanese and they have never been exposed to ethnic jokes. "How do you sink the Japanese navy? Put it in the water." I have a friend in Canada who sends me jokes all the time. I know there are a lot of Canadians on here, why I posted it. I didn't mean to make a statement, more TIC. I am not a conservative or a liberal. As soon as you start labeling yourself that way self-regulation to prevent cognitive dissonance replaces thinking.

A pretty little girl named Suzy was standing on the sidewalk in front of her home. Next to her was a basket containing a number of tiny creatures; in her hand was a sign announcing FREE KITTENS. Suddenly a line of big black cars pulled up beside her. Out of the lead car stepped a tall, grinning man. "Hi there little girl, I'm Mr. Trudeau. What do you have in the basket?" he asked. "Kittens," little Suzy said. "How old are they?" asked Trudeau Suzy replied, "They're so young, their eyes aren't even open yet." "And what kind of kittens are they?" "Liberals," answered Suzy with a smile. Trudeau was delighted. As soon as he returned to his car, he called his PR chief and told him about the little girl and the kittens. Recognizing the perfect photo op, the two men agreed that Mr. Trudeau should return the next day; and in front of the assembled media, have the girl talk about her discerning kittens. So the next day, Suzy was again standing on the sidewalk with her basket of "FREE KITTENS," when another motorcade pulled up, this time followed by vans from CBC, CTV, and CNN. Cameras and audio equipment were quickly set up, then Trudeau got out of his limo and walked over to little Suzy. "Hello, again," he said, "I'd love it if you would tell all my friends out there what kind of kittens you're giving away." "Yes sir," Suzy said. "They're CONSERVATIVES." Taken by surprise, Mr. Trudeau stammered, "But... but.... yesterday, you told me they were LIBERALS." Little Suzy smiled and said, "I know. But today, they have their eyes opened."

Wrote BRKB 197.5-strike Aug 9 expiration puts Wrote BRKB 195-strike Aug 16 expiration puts.

Wrote BRKB 197.5-strike Aug 9 expiration puts

Wrote some BRKB 195-strike, Aug. 9 expiration puts.

I had put a small amount with Hussman, $10,000. I closed it early in 2010 because I was realizing he was a permabear and his fund wasn't going anywhere. I closed the account at $10,084!

Wrote AMGN 170-strike, Aug 2 expiration puts.