Quite the rally

Interesting to hold both a Jan’24 270 call and a Jan’23 350 covered call. Hoping for a price increase
in the long one and a price drop in the short one. Whatever happens, you’ll be happy in one and sad
in the other. My brain feels like it’s getting pulled apart.

It is a bit odd to be both long and short at the same time.

The ideal situation would be that the $350 one is shorter term.
The stock price gradually gets up to a penny less than $350 the day of expiry, so you keep the whole premium.
Meanwhile, you’ve been making money (and continue to make money) on your longer dated lower strike long dated calls.

It’s a combo of “long term sure thing” and “shorter term probably not going to get past this”.

As for whether writing a high strike long makes sense when valuations get above usual—
There’s more profit to be made simply selling the stock and buying it back later during a big price dip.
But only if the stock price DOES drop a lot, and you can figure out when during that process to buy back–both uncertain propositions.
Adding the call to your position gets rid of that problem: no price dip needed as a flat spot works fine, and no need to decide when to get back in.
The maximum extra profit is capped, but it’s known in advance so you can decide at planning time whether it’s worth it.

Jim

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The ideal situation would be that the $350 one is shorter term.
The stock price gradually gets up to a penny less than $350 the day of expiry, so you keep the whole premium.

Too late. BRK is already $358, that call is no longer OTM.

The difficulty I am having is that the DITM call I opened in November is showing 81% gain, which is 2.9X of BRK’s gain. {Oh, wow, I just looked at my notes on the purchase and see my estimated leverage on this position was 2.9X. }

So problem is, if I closed it the gain would be taxed at short-term rate. And I don’t really want to book that profit in 2022. BRK.B ran up from 280 to 358 in just 4 months, and it feels like it will pull back. That’s about 2 years gain in just 4 1/2 months.

Don’t want to outsmart myself, so the best thing is to probably take the standard advice and do nothing.

The difficulty I am having is that the DITM call I opened in November is showing 81% gain, which is 2.9X of BRK’s gain.

A terrible difficulty you have.

Jim

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