GauchoChris portfolio update 6/30/2020

Is there possibly a mistake in your calculations?

Saul,

There may be a mistake in my calculations. I am selling options in conjunction with buying shares in GOLD so I probably need to consider the added risk in the calculations. I also just started last week so I don’t think that I’ve given it enough time to see how well it will work. The following risks going off topic so we should probably stop this thread (and maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it in my update).

The assumptions behind the approach are the following:

  1. GOLD (a gold mining company) will track well the price of gold.

  2. Gold price is unlikely to crash (and maybe will do as well or better than the US Dollar).

  3. The weekly premium of selling at the money straddles on GOLD are around $1.30 on a share price of $26.50 so this is 4.9% of the value of the shares. Since this $1.30 premium is all time value that will decay in a week, it can be harvested. Then repeated each week. Since I am taking on risk by selling the put component of the straddle and since I do not sell options against my entire GOLD position, I think the weekly return will be less than 4.9% (maybe 1-2%).

Note: I have been using a similar approach with ZM and CRWD. The weekly premiums on CRWD have been around 6% per week lately and around 8-9% per week on ZM (they were as high as 15% per week when ZM was trading at around $150 in May!!).

For example, CRWD is currently trading at $102 per share. So 100 shares cost $102,000. You can currently receive the following premiums for selling 1 CRWD 10Jul $102 call and 1 CRWD 10Jul $102 put:

call: $3.70/sh x 100 shares = $3700
put: $3.80/sh x 100 shares = $3800

So $7500 / $102,000 = 7.35% but this is for a week and 2 days. Of course there are risks and this becomes a money losing trade if CRWD drops below $94.50 or rises above $109.50 on July 10th. But there are ways to compensate for this risk should the shares start to move a lot in one direction.

Again this is off-topic so please don’t reply.

Chris

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