Monthly Archives: January 2018

Why LEAPS?

After more than a decade of getting a serious level of excitement by simply making a trade, even if the net profit per share was a penny or two, I always knew that someday I wouldn’t be able to sustain the kind of maintenance that it took to keep on an eye on a portfolio.

Even worse, I knew that someday I wouldn’t have the kind of time and attention that it took to keep an eye on multiple portfolios, especially when those portfolios may have had different goals and tolerances for risk.

Like most people, I always looked at investing and investment philosophy as being on a continuum.

The difference is that while most conventional wisdom believed that the continuum started with mutual funds or their modern-day equivalent, the ETF, and then ended with the safety of fixed income instruments, I never wanted any part of mutual funds, nor bonds.

For older people, like me, bonds were obligatory, but I never could figure them out. I just didn’t understand them and got a headache even thinking about the inverse world that bond traders inhabited.

While it’s not entirely lost upon me that call sellers and put sellers may live in an inverse universe, as well, those seem much easier to understand and negotiate.

Anyway, my children are at the early stage of this continuum. They can take lots of risk.

One of those kids has a portfolio that aggressively uses covered options, just as I had done for a long time and he is doing very, very well.

The other is riding the market’s wave and is doing very, very well, too.

Both are involved with individual stocks and have by-passed Index Funds and ETFs, altogether. read more