Zooming along now!

In the last $110,152 Portfolio Update, from July 14th, we went pretty bullish and it really paid off with $4,573 in unrealized gains (not included in above total) as wemade a very well-timed bottom call the week beforeand ran with it. We have since doubled up on C and added TASR but there hasn’t been too much that looked “cheap” since the 15th so we’re pretty much standing pat with $57,666 invested. Since we’ve added $12,007 to our cash pile though, it means there’s still $54,341 in cash to play with. Hopefully we geta nice pullback to bargain hunt with – perhaps it’s time for a China play as we’re certainly well-protected with our new FXP puts.

The first two weeks after you sell options are usually the worst and the rising VIX had boosted the premiums of the puts and calls we sold but none of that matters because we played a little more aggressive to the upside and, despite losing $2,015 on our covers, we are still way ahead of goal over the past two weeks. As usual, we are able to demonstrate the joy of doingvery little! It’s important to get used to theebb and flowof the premiumsover time and not worry about well-hedged positions. We only addtheprofits as weclose positions from our April 10th start withour virtual$100,000. We arenot including profits in the headerfromthe positions still working because:IT ISN’T REALLY A PROFIT UNTIL YOU CASH IT OUT…

The primary goal of this portfolio is to be conservatively hedged. The secondary goal of this portfolio is not to mess around with it. These are meant to be nice safe(ish) positions that do not require you to sit glued to a monitor all day. If you are new to this section, please read the May 25th update as there was much wisdom in there. We have a few minor adjustments to make this week(see red comments) but there were none last week so not too fussy with this lot. Keep in mind this is a virtual portfolio and doesn’t have to be followed exactly. The main idea is to teach proper hedging techniques and demonstrate that you can make a nice return without putting yourself at constant, daily risk. It should be noted that our new moves (in red) can be treated as new entries by someone starting from scratch and, as always, feel free to check with me in chat if you are…
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