Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Option Expiration Update

I've been out of town working again and haven't been making any published trades. But option expiration is coming up, so there is one trade I need to update.
The September LZ puts I sold as a merger arbitrage trade a little while ago is coming up on expiration and since the merger hasn't been completed yet and the stock is trading below the strike price. The puts for future months are exremely illiquid at the moment, so I may not be able to roll them out. If that happens, I can either buy back the puts or take the stock. Unfortunately, with the high bid/ask spreads, there's a good chance I wouldn't be able to buy them back for a reasonable price. Here is what I am going to do: I will put in a good-till-canceled order to roll them out for a small credit, most likely to the January or March expiration for $0.05 or $0.10 credit. All I really want to do with the credit is cover my commissions for the trade, anything above that is a bonus. If that trade doesn't get executed, I won't worry about it and will take the stock and wait for the merger to be completed to get the $135/share in cash. I'm not sure when I'll be able to post again as I'll be down here in Texas working until right before I leave for vacation in Germany(Oktoberfest baby!!). When I get a chance, I will post an update with how the trade played out.

Friday, September 2, 2011

More MSFT Calls

I've been waiting for MSFT to rise enough to be able to sell weekly calls against it at $27 or $28, but it's just not happening. Instead I'm going to take advantage of the higher volatility in the market to get a higher price on some further out calls.
  • Sell to Open: 1 MSFT Nov 19 2011 28.0 Call @ $0.47
This will give me an immediate 1.8% return in cash. Given the market weakness and Microsoft's price action the last year or so, I don't expect the stock to get called away from me by November, but if it does, I'll close out the trade with over 10% capital gain(plus the 2+% I got in covered call premium) in just 6 months.

The Numbers
  • Cash: +$47
  • Short Option: -$48