There were a couple of member questions that came in today and both I thought would be good to address:
1020 asked: “What’s the best way to get started using your site?” That one is easy to answer and hard to do. We have a “New Member’s Guide” which pretty much lays things out with these standard assignments:
- If you are new to options, read Sage’s Book
- Read 1 full month of my posts and all comments, you will get a good feel for the site, the kind of trades we do and also get to know a bit about the people in chat. Knowing people’s various expertises and understanding their market philosophy and position makes the next live comment they make much more informative…
- Read Option Sage’s articles under his tab, many were co-authored byme that highlight various option stratgies with real-world examples.
- Watch The Man Who Planted Trees, a short video about investing that characterizesa solid investing philosophy.
AFTER you do those things, then we are ready to talk about setting up a portfolio, which brings us to Pstas’s question of what would be a good model portfolio for $100,000.
In this traing environment I would first and foremost concentrate on theBuy List (under our Portfolio Tab) and trades like the DNDN (which is riskier) and ZION (which I hope is not risky) that I highlighted just yesterday. Typically, you can categorize the buy/write plays as fairly low risk. The idea is we’re buying stocks at discounts to the current trading price and scaling into the positions over time.
Setting realistic expectations is key too, the biggest mistake you can make with $100,000 is to jump right in and spend it. I’m going to put down a minimum for each play and an allocation
So let’s look at a quick set of trades we can set up:
UYG is my first choice. Why? Because it’s not as volatile as XLF, which just jumped out of our $5-$7.50 range and we don’t feel confident enough to chase it at the moment. UYG is a crap investment by itself but, for the same reason, is great to sell calls and puts against.
500 UYG at $3.48, selling5 May $3 calls for .72 and5 May $3 puts for .28, net $2.48/2.74
This play puts you in for $1,240 and you make $260 if called away (20%). If UYG is assigned to you, you will have 1,000 shares for $2,740. With any trade, you…
