Happy Tax Day to all of you who have procrastinated. If you’re trading options like we are, you may want to consider having the government keep the refund as there’s no way to garnish our trades for taxes. Therefore we tend to owe money at the end of the year and forfeiting your return to pay towards that is one way to avoid that bill. Normally it wouldn’t matter, but if you owe too much my understanding is the IRS makes you file taxes quarterly. I’d personally like to avoid that. Now there are some great ways to make money trading options and shelter the proceeds from taxation, but that’s a whole other aspect of our trade strategy that I’m ultimately going to make a course on.
Had a long chat with Tim today about our new favorite topic–how there’s next to nothing worth trading. To put it in perspective on how bad it is, I had two orders out today: one for the $140 strike of JP Morgan Chase (JPM), and one on freaking Nio (NIO). I was only asking for $120 for the $140 strike of JPM but never got filled. Nio is one of my least favorite stocks in the world, but I shouldn’t gripe because the $28 strike paid $81.
I had read an article about how the last several months there has been consistent selling off leading to the day of monthly options expiration. That day is tomorrow and disappointingly I didn’t see any significant selling off. How long will the volatility gods make us wait?
Speaking of tomorrow being the expiration for the April monthly options, it will be an interesting day of note. It’s looking almost certain that 100 shares of our Budweiser (BUD) stock will get called away at the $65 strike (it’s trading over $67 all of a sudden).
More intriguing is how we have come down to the wire on Peleton (PTON). We are at the $118 strike and it’s currently around $119. If PTON stays north of $118 we’ll keep our premium and finally be free of this position. If it sinks below $118, but above $113.64, we’ll gladly take on the stock above our cost basis. If it looks like it will fall below $113.64, we’ll be rolling it again. With so little tradable tickers, at least we have something to look forward to.
Communitea Trade Update: Fisker is down in the ballpark of $13.50, which is only a buck above our strike price. Since it’s such a cheap ticker I may size up this position tomorrow, as the second contract would bring in something like $105 dollars, averaging my premium on this trade to $92.50 per contract and lowering my break-even point a tinge. Not exactly sure where FSR plans to find support, but we’ll be finding out.