Someday Began Today

I’m a bit more rambling today than usual, but it was an unusual day after an eye opening weekend.

A few years ago, maybe about 5 years ago at this point, I wrote an article about a lower maintenance approach to hedging a portfolio.

It involved the use of a well diversified portfolio of about 10 names. They would, ideally, all be high and safe dividend paying companies.

The idea was to use LEAPS and try to stagger the expirations and then just sit back.

Sit back and collect dividends and add that income to the premiums from having sold the options.

For the LEAPS strategy I had also planned on using a strike price that would reflect a fair amount of capital; appreciation over the year or two. Say 7% a year? 10%? read more

Why Did You Do That?

 

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The June 2017 option cycle ends tomorrow and it was looking as if L Brands was going to get assigned.

At a time when I really do want to increase cash holdings, ordinarily, I would be pretty happy about seeing that position get closed.

After all, it had done pretty well.

In the event that it had been assigned tomorrow, the 3 month holding would have returned 11.7%.

That’s pretty good when you consider that for the comparable period the S&P 500 returned only 2.4% or, even you want to give benefit of the doubt and include dividends, maybe 2.8%.

But as I was looking at the coming month and wondering what exactly was I going to do with the money that I would have lying around, I looked at the risk – benefit proposition in front of me.

That risk – benefit proposition was this:

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Fox News Was Blasting Obama’s Mustard Use 8 Years Ago

Donald Trump isn’t the only president to have faced harsh criticisms just months into office. At this point in former President Barack Obama’s tenure as the leader of the free world, right-wing news outlets were condemning his use of Dijon mustard as a condiment. Yes, really. In news from eight years ago that appears to be…