Wiki Selling TSLA Options - Be the House

[ReddyLeaf]

My own experience - I sold a $600 strike Sep '21 put at the end of August; shares were something like $497 (I track this stuff), so $100 ITM. My thinking then was that $600+/share by Sep '21 would be easy mode. Or at least close enough that a buy to close would be profitable. Option premium was $225 for that 1 year option position. Worst case, I accept assignment and buy shares with a cost basis of $375, which I find highly acceptable. The downside in this position is that I have $60k/contract sequestered for a year, so that cash flow hit might be an issue. I did get $22,500 / contract to ease those concerns though

And a big enough spike, despite the time remaining, might drive the value of that put low enough for a really early close. Something I believed would be impossible before say 3 months to go. EDIT to add: As a point of interest, those puts are trading at $145 right now. That's not enough of a gain for me, to consider an early close right now.

Interesting. I’ll think about that some more. Selling ITM puts was definitely not on my radar. I’ve always thought to minimize the risk of being exercised, say <0.25 delta for selling puts or <0.10 delta for selling calls. With TSLA expected to grow 50% yoy, one could definitely get better premiums ITM, with minimal risk of exercise. Still owning more shares is something that I’m planning. Unfortunately, no more cash available for me to sell puts. I’m all in on shares and calls. Must wait for that dreamy $1000+ SP.

 

[durkie]

NO. Like, the hardest of NO's, and you should both seriously consider modifying your posts so as to not spread misinformation. That's not a personal attack (options are quite nuanced) but rather a plea to not feed newer traders with bad logic. And sorry about the disagrees--I don't like to disagree a post that otherwise comes from an honest place, but they are so wrong that I felt I had to flag them for others.

Selling an OTM CC is 100% a bullish play. In most cases the anchor leg are the shares, not the call, because the delta of 100 shares is going to outweigh the -∆ of the call. You absolutely want the underlying price to go UP with an OTM CC, as that is how you maximize profit. The farther OTM the call, the more bullish you are. What you want is to capitalize on a) the positive ∆ of the position, 2) [hopefully] the high volatility of the contract, and 3) the theta burn on the contract. The ideal outcome is underlying closing on expiration day just below the strike price if you wanted to keep the shares, or just above the strike price if you wanted to unload the shares. Either way, you are absolutely profiting on stock price going up. I can't stress this enough, the best time to sell an OTM CC is when you think underlying is going to GO UP. That is bullish.

Selling an ATM CC is primarily a neutral play, or slightly bullish if you want to unload the shares. All of the profit comes from the -C. The ideal outcome is that the price goes nowhere; the best time to sell is when you think the price is going to be stable. This is primarily a volatility play which of course is at odds with stability, but regardless...that's what it is. The position has downside protection at the expense of reduced profit, so usually strike gets tweaked +/- NTM to find a break even at an underlying price with some technical relevance, but big picture downside protection != bearish entry logic.

Selling an ITM CC is a neutral to bearish play, and is best entered when you know you want to unload the shares AND are worried that underlying might go down, but you still want to capitalize on time value and, ostensibly, high volatility. Again, all of the profit comes from the -C, the difference between current price and strike price is just your downside protection.

Your explanation about OTM CCs still doesn't make sense to me. Once the transaction has taken place (ie, I've sold the call), why would I want the stock price to go up? I don't understand how I can capitalize on positive delta/theta burn/high volatility at that point.

It seems like I would be indifferent to the stock price so long as it's below my strike price.

 

[adiggs]

Interesting. I’ll think about that some more. Selling ITM puts was definitely not on my radar. I’ve always thought to minimize the risk of being exercised, say <0.25 delta for selling puts or <0.10 delta for selling calls. With TSLA expected to grow 50% yoy, one could definitely get better premiums ITM, with minimal risk of exercise. Still owning more shares is something that I’m planning. Unfortunately, no more cash available for me to sell puts. I’m all in on shares and calls. Must wait for that dreamy $1000+ SP.

I'm the same - out of the put selling business while that cash is tied up in purchased calls.

The ITM put isn't something I expect to do often (maybe ever again). But I do like the overall dynamics of this particular position. I'll mostly go back to current and next month put selling once this inclusion event is over. I'm rather looking forward to that.

 

[wnorris]

I am seeing a VERY common trading plan related to the selling of OTM covered calls with the intent to capitalize on a price spike/volatility. Folks are all waiting to see what the price does next week and target a similar price range for these calls. This is something that personally I have been planning for a while as well and seems like a high probability plan to capture some premium in the event a spike does come to fruition.

All that said, what I cannot determine is what is the impact if everyone has a similar plan and there is a drastic increase in these similar short term calls? Basically, too many people thinking and doing the exact same thing.

Does it:
1) increase the likelihood of a Friday blow-off top scenario in an attempt to capture shares from tightly clustered calls (short price spike)
2) provide increased liquidity visible to MMs allowing for a more orderly distribution of shares to funds needing to acquire (muted price movement, no spike)
3) do nothing as what I am seeing is only smaller retail whose impact is not to scale to create any significant impact (no price impact)
4) ?

If there was only a small group targeting this plan I would not worry about this, but everyone on this board and Twitter has the same plan. I am curious if anyone on the thread has had this thought or if I am overthinking retail impact on price dynamics.

 

[wnorris]

Selling an OTM CC is 100% a bullish play. In most cases the anchor leg are the shares, not the call, because the delta of 100 shares is going to outweigh the -∆ of the call. You absolutely want the underlying price to go UP with an OTM CC, as that is how you maximize profit. The farther OTM the call, the more bullish you are. What you want is to capitalize on a) the positive ∆ of the position, 2) [hopefully] the high volatility of the contract, and 3) the theta burn on the contract. The ideal outcome is underlying closing on expiration day just below the strike price if you wanted to keep the shares, or just above the strike price if you wanted to unload the shares. Either way, you are absolutely profiting on stock price going up. I can't stress this enough, the best time to sell an OTM CC is when you think underlying is going to GO UP. That is bullish.

@bxr140 Thank you for the explanation and your contribution to the thread. After I read your first comment stating selling of OTM CCs was bullish I could not for the life of me understand how that was possible, but the above explanation makes if very clear and simple. I had not considered the impact of the underlying shares in relation to the sold call.

 

[ReddyLeaf]

I am seeing a VERY common trading plan related to the selling of OTM covered calls with the intent to capitalize on a price spike/volatility. Folks are all waiting to see what the price does next week and target a similar price range for these calls. This is something that personally I have been planning for a while as well and seems like a high probability plan to capture some premium in the event a spike does come to fruition.

All that said, what I cannot determine is what is the impact if everyone has a similar plan and there is a drastic increase in these similar short term calls? Basically, too many people thinking and doing the exact same thing.

Does it:
1) increase the likelihood of a Friday blow-off top scenario in an attempt to capture shares from tightly clustered calls (short price spike)
2) provide increased liquidity visible to MMs allowing for a more orderly distribution of shares to funds needing to acquire (muted price movement, no spike)
3) do nothing as what I am seeing is only smaller retail whose impact is not to scale to create any significant impact (no price impact)
4) ?

If there was only a small group targeting this plan I would not worry about this, but everyone on this board and Twitter has the same plan. I am curious if anyone on the thread has had this thought or if I am overthinking retail impact on price dynamics.

Simplistically, I think that the first thing it does is decrease call prices and increase put prices (supply & demand economics). Yes, MMs see all this action in real-time and have smart bots to take advantage. Right now, it appears to me that more calls have been bought than puts, and there is asymmetric pricing. I expect it to switch back after the 24th. A real gambler might sell calls and puts now (Monday), anticipating this potential pricing anomaly. The problem with this strategy, of course, is knowing exactly when and how high/low/not the SP swing will be. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I’m out of cash and cannot sell puts. I’m still not ready to sell calls because of the potential for a massive SP rise (say 50-100%) that I could me missing the strike by a large margin.

 

[gabeincal]

Selling a covered call is always a bearish play, whether ITM, ATM or OTM. I’m not sure what you are trying to say - maybe you thought I said I was buying the call?

I remember on Feb 4 when the SP tanked, the IV also simultaneously spiked and I was still able to sell all my short-term calls I had bought during the run-up for very hefty profits. I also ended up selling some way OTM (50-80% higher than the SP) covered calls that day and the next couple days expiring 2-6 weeks out, and made a killing on those too since the IV was so high and I rightly guessed the squeeze was over.

So, essentially, no harm in waiting for an actual drop in SP for selling your long calls and also selling CCs against your shares?

 

[pz1975]

So, essentially, no harm in waiting for an actual drop in SP for selling your long calls and also selling CCs against your shares?

It's always better to sell them at the top of course, but good luck with that! I have just noticed that a significant, fast SP drop seems to keep the value of the call options that you may sell to close or sell to open higher than they normally would be with such a drop due to IV spiking at the same time.

 

[bxr140]

What I was saying is that compared to not selling the covered call (just holding the shares), selling an OTM covered call is relatively more bearish than not selling it.

It may seem like semantics, but bearish/bullish is not relative to other positions, it refers to underlying movement. More importantly there's a spectrum of bullish and bearish (as opposed to binary or step functioned categorization) that is useful to apply, and its good to understand the more binary tendencies at the edges of the spectrum. For instance, while a $1000 covered call for next Friday is technically less bullish than a $1200 call for next Friday, they are for all intents and purposes, equally VERY bullish positions, since the odds of price getting close to $1000 (let alone above) by next Friday is all but zero.

I like to think of selling the CC as selecting a bullish pre-sale price, but hoping the SP won’t quite get there, thereby keeping the premiums.

Exactly. If you Biff a future a price/time point on the chart, that's where you'd sell a call. In fact, that's the proper way to actually identify a covered call's strike and expiration. Use whatever tools you prefer to identify some significant future price/time point and then tune that point +/- on the X (time) and Y (price) axes based on any supporting data/logic you have (whether you want to keep the shares or not, whether there are events coming up like earnings, etc.).

Easier said than done of course and certainly there's no one right way to do it, other than having some defensible logic behind the method, but its imperative for sustaining profit when selling contracts. Selling contracts with a fixed strategy (like some ∆, probability OTM, % of underlying, etc.) is very much casino odds--you will lose, and its very easy for one loss to wipe out months or more of profits. Selling contracts with a layered and dynamic strategy is analogous to counting cards at the blackjack table and adjusting your bet accordingly.

Selling ITM puts was definitely not on my radar.

And it shouldn't be. Selling ITM puts is a high risk to reward position and a pretty terrible use of capital. There's a time and a place for all manner of positions in all manner of accounts; its hard to imagine any time and a place where an ITM put is the best play.

Your explanation about OTM CCs still doesn't make sense to me. Once the transaction has taken place (ie, I've sold the call), why would I want the stock price to go up?

A bit flippant of me, but: Because you want to maximize profit.

So its really important to understand how the individual legs of a position affect the total performance of the position, because the total position performance is the thing that's moving the needle on your account balance. To wit, [in many cases] it doesn't make sense to earn $1k selling a contract if it was covered by 100 shares that just lost $5k in value.

An OTM CC gives the underlying shares room to run up before you "lose them"; you absolutely want to capitalize on that potential growth. Once you hit the strike price your at-expiration profit potential plateaus, because any gains in the underlying shares are offset by losses on the -C leg.

P/L is much more complicated pre-expiration, but its important to study pre-expiration complications/possibilities because that can also inform your [evolving] exit strategy on the position.

I don't understand how I can capitalize on positive delta/theta burn/high volatility at that point.

So in general: If you want your position to capitalize on underlying movement, you want the position to have a big ∆. If you want your position to capitalize on theta burn, you want a high theta. If you want your position to capitalize on high volatility, you want to maximize IV and Vega. Note that the vice versa is true for all of those as well--if for instance you DON'T want your position's value to move much with underlying (for instance if you were only targeting time decay or volatility), you build a position that has a near-zero ∆ and you keep modifying that position to maintain a near-zero ∆.

Turning any of the knobs on those greek optimizations kind of impacts everything, so its not like you can build a perfect position that does it all, so its important to know what you're actually building and how it is going to perform. Its even more important to know what position to build and when.

Anyway, for an OTM CC:

∆ is pretty high, explicitly over .5. That's because the ∆ of the shares, which is 1, is offset by the much smaller ∆ of the call, and because the -C itself is a short position we actually represent the ∆ of the -C as a negative number. Let's call it -.3. So the total ∆ of this position, (right now) would be .7. That's a pretty healthy ∆ and, whether one intends for it to be so or not, that ∆ wants the price to go up; that's what I mean by "capitalizing on ∆". The nuance with the CC is that as underlying goes up so does the magnitude of the -C's ∆, so the overall position ∆ is constantly decreasing. That's not ideal if you're super bullish, but it is not necessarily a bad thing even if you are bullish (Which you are if you're entering an OTM CC) and may be a complete not issue.

Volatility kind of is what it is (its really the thing that most drives options prices), and so the only real thing you want to do here is generally sell a contract when its volatility is high, with the logic being that over the course of holding that contract volatility will decrease. The 'capitalizing' here is that when you sell at high volatility you receive a higher premium that statistically will burn down over time. If you sell a contract at low volatility, especially one that's farther dated (like, ~months out, let alone years), you end up fighting the statistically rising volatility of the contract so you don't really end up with an unrealized revenue stream. What's most important to understand here is that it is both the Vega of the contract and the probability of IV movement that matters, NOT the contract's IV value, since the actual impact to contract value is [IV% change * Vega]. Usually farther expirations have MUCH slower movement in IV%, but MUCH larger Vega than closer expirations, so they are kind of opposing functions.

Theta is, if I'm honest, the killer with selling options. Its easy for newer traders to get sucked into the "free money" perception of theta and really focus on that. While theta is ultimately a revenue generating element of a position, it is typically FAR out shadowed by Volatility and ∆, so you really need to understand what you're getting into. Capitalizing on theta burn here is finding an expiration close enough to actually have a material daily payout, and far enough away to sustain that payout. Monthlies end up being a pretty good balance here; if you're selling 12-24 months out looking to capitalize on theta, you're Doing It Wrong.

...what I cannot determine is what is the impact if everyone has a similar plan and there is a drastic increase in these similar short term calls? Basically, too many people thinking and doing the exact same thing.

Does it:
1) increase the likelihood of a Friday blow-off top scenario in an attempt to capture shares from tightly clustered calls (short price spike)
2) provide increased liquidity visible to MMs allowing for a more orderly distribution of shares to funds needing to acquire (muted price movement, no spike)
3) do nothing as what I am seeing is only smaller retail whose impact is not to scale to create any significant impact (no price impact)
4) ?

FOMO is a strong force. What's important is that you build a proper position based on defensible logic. (And as noted elsewhere that doesn't preclude a YOLO position, it just means that position still needs to be contemplated and sized properly). The most difficult thing for us retail traders to predict in the market is events based action...put another way I don't think I'd believe anyone who gave you a confident answer to your question. Certainly TSLA has been dynamiting fish in a barrel for the better part of a year now so its made us all look good, but this time around if I were giving not-advice advice on the internet it would be to build a position that sacrifices upside potential for downside protection.

 

[jw934]

Your explanation about OTM CCs still doesn't make sense to me. Once the transaction has taken place (ie, I've sold the call), why would I want the stock price to go up? I don't understand how I can capitalize on positive delta/theta burn/high volatility at that point.

It seems like I would be indifferent to the stock price so long as it's below my strike price.

This has already been answered. I'll recap. If you want the call to be exercised, you want the SP to be just above the strike at expiry. If you don't want the call to be exercised, you want the SP to be just below the strike at expiry. Either way, you want the SP to be higher at expiry, after you have sold the call.

The only reason you would want the SP and the IV to go down is if instead of holding the short call position, you are trading options and looking to buy back the sold CC at a lower price before expiry, in which case the bearish outlook is more profitable by selling an ATM CC or ITM CC.

 

[EnzoXYZ]

Interesting. I’ll think about that some more. Selling ITM puts was definitely not on my radar. I’ve always thought to minimize the risk of being exercised, say <0.25 delta for selling puts or <0.10 delta for selling calls. With TSLA expected to grow 50% yoy, one could definitely get better premiums ITM, with minimal risk of exercise. Still owning more shares is something that I’m planning. Unfortunately, no more cash available for me to sell puts. I’m all in on shares and calls. Must wait for that dreamy $1000+ SP.

I'm the same - out of the put selling business while that cash is tied up in purchased calls.

The ITM put isn't something I expect to do often (maybe ever again). But I do like the overall dynamics of this particular position. I'll mostly go back to current and next month put selling once this inclusion event is over. I'm rather looking forward to that.

A year or two ago the dreamy price would have been pre split $1000. Here we are at $3000 looking for $5000.
TBH I’m dreaming of the $1000 per share price too but I’m afraid I’ll be in the $2000 dream shortly.

 

[durkie]

A bit flippant of me, but: Because you want to maximize profit.

So its really important to understand how the individual legs of a position affect the total performance of the position, because the total position performance is the thing that's moving the needle on your account balance. To wit, [in many cases] it doesn't make sense to earn $1k selling a contract if it was covered by 100 shares that just lost $5k in value.

An OTM CC gives the underlying shares room to run up before you "lose them"; you absolutely want to capitalize on that potential growth. Once you hit the strike price your at-expiration profit potential plateaus, because any gains in the underlying shares are offset by losses on the -C leg.

P/L is much more complicated pre-expiration, but its important to study pre-expiration complications/possibilities because that can also inform your [evolving] exit strategy on the position.

Hmm, so are you considering "profit" as both realized and unrealized profit? I want the stock price to increase, but as a shareholder I want that whether I sell the call or not. The covered call as you mentioned adds a negative delta to my position, so that's the confusing part about selling OTM CCs as a "bullish" move.

 

[LN1_Casey]

Rolled my 580 18Dec put to a 600 24Dec put for a tasty $2k holiday self-gift if I don't close it out early, which I plan to do so; maybe for $10 if it drops to that point. I think this'll be my last one, and I'll deposit the amount due to my car sometime this week or next. Still no delivery date, but I'd rather be cautious.

 

[EnzoXYZ]

Rolled my 580 18Dec put to a 600 24Dec put for a tasty $2k holiday self-gift if I don't close it out early, which I plan to do so; maybe for $10 if it drops to that point. I think this'll be my last one, and I'll deposit the amount due to my car sometime this week or next. Still no delivery date, but I'd rather be cautious.

I see you are in Oahu. Wife and I been looking at possible “retirement” house in Hawaii now that Tesla exceeded our expectations. Any suggestions of nice areas?

This morning I did increase my put options by selling one more at $570. I also sold a CC at $700. Can’t wait for this Friday.

 

[bxr140]

Hmm, so are you considering "profit" as both realized and unrealized profit?

Yes. Whether its been taken or not (realized vs unrealized), profit is what's going on with your account balance. (Don't get me started on the fallacy of "paper loss" when it comes to selling options...)

The covered call as you mentioned adds a negative delta to my position, so that's the confusing part about selling OTM CCs as a "bullish" move.

It goes back to the performance of the position, not the ∆ of the contract. A DOTM covered call is going to have a position ∆ of .8 or .9 or whatever (compared to 1.0 if the position was just shares), and so you're still making 80-90% of the gains on the covered call that you would with just the shares, as underlying goes up. That's definitely something you want to leverage and so you definitely want underlying to go up, and you definitely want to enter the position ONLY if you think underlying is going to go up by a lot. (You'd build a different position if you only thought it was going to go up a little or whatever else). And, of course, that relatively large ∆ works against you as underlying goes down--the total dollar value of the position is going to tank with any significant movement--so you definitely don't want underlying to go down.

As a counterpoint, a DOTM covered call might have a position ∆ of maybe .1 or .2 (because the CC might have a ∆ of -.8 or -.9) so you're making pennies on the dollar as underlying moves up. That's a bad deal if you expect underlying to move up, but a good deal if you're not sure which direction underlying is going to move since you're only losing pennies on the dollar even with significant downward underlying movement.

 

[ammulder]

It goes back to the performance of the position, not the ∆ of the contract. A DOTM covered call is going to have a position ∆ of .8 or .9 or whatever (compared to 1.0 if the position was just shares), and so you're still making 80-90% of the gains on the covered call that you would with just the shares, as underlying goes up. That's definitely something you want to leverage and so you definitely want underlying to go up, and you definitely want to enter the position ONLY if you think underlying is going to go up by a lot.

I think there's some confusion here caused by current events.

I have shares which I don't want to sell for many years. However, let's say for the sake of argument, I would be happy to part with 100 shares at $1000 and use that $100K for a Model X or a home renovation or whatever. You might argue I should take a loan, I might argue that price is overvalued and I'd be dumb not to take advantage of it, whatever. We'll say I'm prepared to sell 100 for $1000.

So, I'd also be happy to walk off with a few $K without selling the shares. That would make a first deposit on my Model X or home renovation or whatever, and then I could take your advice and get a loan. If I think the IV around S&P inclusion is higher than it's likely to be for a while, and the stock price will also at least for a little while be higher than it's likely to be for a while, I might want to sell a covered call with a $1000 strike on those 100 shares. Either they're exercised and I get the sale I was OK with, or they're not and I keep the juicy premium from the high-stock-price/high-IV combo.

OK, now, if I want to take advantage of rapid time decay I think I'd want to sell a bunch of shorter-term covered calls, maybe Feb 2021 $1000. But that's only $1640 per contract, and I'm only willing to part with 100 shares at this price (=1 contract), so my profit on the covered call itself is capped there at $1640.

On the other hand, the $16,024 for a Jan 2023 $1000 covered call looks much more attractive, since I can get all that while only working with the 100 shares I'm willing to part with.

Though, if TSLA can go up 7x or whatever in 2020, it can certainly do 1.6x in 2021-2022. I have zero confidence the stock price will stay under $1000 that long.

While the total value of my TSLA position including the covered call would be maximized if they stock went to $999 and stayed there for 2 years, the stress of watching the price and waiting for the call to expire under the circumstances of a close-to-but-under-strike price would kill me. Having the consolation of my overall position being up would NOT cancel that out.

What I'd really like is for the stock price and/or IV to tank shortly after S&P inclusion, so I can buy back this call under $10,000 for the contract (it appears it was that price in early December, though it's only been out a little while so there's not so much history). That would get me a $6K+ profit right there, potentially after a very short while if the stock price and IV do go down notably after inclusion. I don't have to wait for months or years of time value to expire, I only need "a dip" in price and/or IV.

So in that sense, I could be a long-term bull, but trying to profit off this S&P event might have me rooting for a short-term post-S&P price decline to flip a covered call quickly for a tidy profit while keeping all my shares in anticipation of a long-term rise. So selling the covered call itself feels bearish; I would want the price to plummet so I could buy back the call and then return to my normally scheduled bullishness.

Further, though I said I'd be willing to sell 100 for $1000, that's, like, today. If I had to sell 100 for $1000 in 2023, I could be quite unhappy about it. So if the price continued a more or less steady rise, and there was never a good time to buy the call back for a profit, that might make me increasingly wish for a lower price, which also sounds bearish. Again, your point stands that if that were to be the case then my total portfolio should be way up, but constantly agonizing over when to cut the bleeding on this "free money" covered call would not make me happy.

 

[bxr140]

I think there's some confusion here caused by current events.

Could be, maybe the editorial below didn't come through as apparent as I had wished.

To wit, [in many cases] it doesn't make sense to earn $1k selling a contract if it was covered by 100 shares that just lost $5k in value.

A situation where you have a long term shares that you don't care about their near term value fluctuations is actually what I was referring to.

In the end though, it all comes back to knowing why the position is being built and what the practical opportunities and risks are for that position vs one's price analysis.

For instance, the hypothetical jan23 $1000 -C might pay out $10k if closed in Feb with TSLA at $500...but it also starts costing money to close in feb with TSLA at/above ~$750 (those are hand-wavey best case guesstimates based on IV bottoming, so actual underlying values will likely be lower in both cases). Of course one can still hold the -C and hope for a reversal but its also very possible that price will stay and/or keep going from there, putting your jan 23 -C deeper and deeper into the hole, with few good options for getting out without a realized loss to your account balance.

While the hypothetical Feb 21 $1000 -C might only pay out $1.6k, it does so straight up to $1000. Definitely a different risk profile that someone keen on not losing money and definitely not losing their shares would probably want to consider.

Just as a random building off the above feb hypothetical, an interesting play might be to use that Feb 21 $1000 -C to fund, for instance, a put spread. That $1600 can buy a Feb 21 590/560 put spread (buy the 590, sell the 560) such that if TSLA is between 590 and 1000 in feb you break even, but if price is under 560 in feb you basically make ~$3200. Certainly some tweaking on both sides could further optimize return, but the point is that its all about shifting around risk and reward.

 

[LN1_Casey]

Rolled my 580 18Dec put to a 600 24Dec put for a tasty $2k holiday self-gift if I don't close it out early, which I plan to do so; maybe for $10 if it drops to that point. I think this'll be my last one, and I'll deposit the amount due to my car sometime this week or next. Still no delivery date, but I'd rather be cautious.

Welp, closed early... a little earlier than I intended, but supposedly my car may have arrived on Island and I need the cash ASAP. So I covered the put with a moderate $400 gain. Pretty good for a day.

Will probably be until next year to start selling calls again. Mostly because of taxes.

 

[juanmedina]

I can't believe that Dec 31 '20 $800 calls are at a premium of $18 ea. So tempted to sell CCs against all my shares... Any reason why not?
On 1k shares I got, that would net me $18k today and I would be more than happy to sell these shares for $800 on new year's (an appreciation of +30% plus my already purchased calls appreciation of probably +200% in the meantime). That would pop the champagne for sure. It really looks like the market is pricing in a larger rise than $800 this year?

did you end up making the trade? the calls are already down more than 50%.

 

[gabeincal]

did you end up making the trade? the calls are already down more than 50%.

No I did not. i waited.... Annoying, but learnt something new I suppose...