THANK YOU

TheAcsMan now comes to its end.

In 13 months, there were nearly 68,000 views and almost 500,000 pages viewed, so “THANK YOU,” as a transition gets underway.

That transition takes me to LEAPtoProfit. For the next few months LEAPtoProfit will be updated without a paywall in place. After that, however, I have to pay the rent on this website, somehow.

Over the course of the next few months trades on the existing portfolio will continue to be updated in preparation for a longer time-frame trading portfolio that makes more use of covered LEAP options, as I move to a reduced trading platform.

If you understand Why LEAPS, I hope to see you on the other side.

LEAPS?

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

A Natural Corollary

A natural corollary to the concept of collecting crumbs, is what I used to call (and still do),  the “D’oh Trade.”

That article, in a highly edited version appeared in TheStreet.com, but the unedited version appeared in the old OTP website.

I thought that writing for TheStreet would be a great way to get followers, but I found that I preferred to write without an editor more than I wanted the followers.

But, here, it is  

Run-on sentences and all.

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2017 making those D’oh trades and those crumbs have really added up, although sometimes they do take a lot of maintenance, as well, as I look at the possibility of losing Petrobras this week at an $8.50 strike and possibly an early assignment of Abercrombie and Fitch as it goes ex-dividend, this week.

But if you own those shares and have been following those trades, stay tuned.

Welcome Back Old Friends

JImage result for welcome backust a couple of weeks ago, actually not even that long ago, I bid a farewell to an old friend, whose name I always had difficulty in spelling.

That was Weyerhaueser.

Today, along with LuLuLemon, I welcomed it back.

In my ideal world, at least when it comes to stocks, that is what I would be doing again and again.

A couple of years ago it was that way with Twitter. read more

Goodye, Undistinguished Friend

Sometimes, when you take a superficial look at things, you really don’t see the beauty.

I have to admit that while I’m not a real glossy person in life and while I’ve never been one to look for thrills or seek to stand out, I do like stocks that have character.

In a perverse way, I think that I may even like stocks that treat me poorly.

There is probably a name for that sort of thing and there is probably a diagnosis that goes along with the propensity to get some joy out of misfortune.

In case you don’t know the term, it is Schadenfreude.

This week, though, it was a different Germanic word that came to mind, as I marked the end of an almost 2 year association with the shares of Weyerhaeuser.

During that time, I never really even learned how to spell its name without having to look it up, even as “Schadenfreude” comes as second nature. read more