April 2013 Results

Fellow Traders,

You’ll recall earlier this year I started a new series of posts summarizing my monthly trading results.   Today being the last trading day of the month let’s take a look and see how I did.

Number of Closed Positions: 4

Profit on Closed Trades: $447.50

Total Capital Used on Closed Trades: $46,600.00

Average Number of Days Trades Were Open: 27

Return on Invested Capital: 0.96%

OK, before I move on to the stats for my open trades, let me tell you a little more about these closed trades.  All 4 closed trades were naked puts.   Half expired OTM and half I bought back before expiration at a profit.  I had CSCO puts at the $20 strike and POT puts at the $37 strike expire OTM.  ITW and KSS I bought back early, both for $0.05.

Now let’s look at my open trades.

Number of Open Positions: 6

Net Cash Flow in April from Open Positions: $355.05

Total Capital Used on Open Trades: $71,050

Net Cash Flow on Invested Capital: 0.50%

The return on invested capital for my open positions is much lower than normal because I did a poor job of managing them.  I waited too long to roll out my GDX position.  This resulted in having 300 shares put to me at $40.  Because of this I was not able to generate any cash flow by rolling out my NPs.  Neither was I reasonably able to sell covered calls on my new long position unless I wanted to sell them far, far out in time or way ITM.  I also did a poor job of rolling out my open positions in CAT and NUE.  While I was able to roll-out for net credits in both cases, they were small net credits.   My other open positions are as follows:  CSCO MAY $19, TEVA MAY $37.50, and CCJ MAY $19.

I am cautiously optimistic heading into May.  Best of luck to all my readers!

Regards,

Troy