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How to Fine-Tune Market Risk With Weekly Options:
“Bernie Madoff attracted hundreds of millions of dollars by promising investors 12% a year (consistently, year after year). Most of our portfolios achieve triple that number and hardly anyone knows about us. Even more significant, our returns are actual – Madoff never delivered gains of any sort. There seems to be something wrong here.
Our Capstone Cascade portfolio is designed to spin off (in cash) 36% a year, and it has done so for 10 consecutive months and is looking more and more likely that we will be able to do that for the long run (as long as we care to carry it out). Actually, at today’s buy-in value (about $8300), the $3600 we withdraw each year works out to be 43%. Theta in this portfolio has consistently added up to double what we need to make the monthly withdrawal, and we gain even more from delta when SVXY moves higher.
Other portfolios are doing even better. Rising Tide has gained 140% in just over two years while the underlying Costco has moved up 23.8% (about what Madoff promised). Black Gold appears to be doing even better than that (having gained an average of 3% a week since it was started).
A key part of our current strategy, and a big change from how we operated in the past, is having short options in each of several weekly series, with some rolling over (usually about a month out) each week. This enables us to tweak the risk profile every Friday without making big adjustments that involve selling some of the long positions. If the stock falls during a week, we will find ourselves with previously-sold short options that are at higher strikes than the stock price, and we will collect the maximum time premium in a month-out series by selling an at-the-money (usually call) option.
If the stock rises during the week, we may find that we have more in-the-money calls than we would normally carry, so we will sell new month-out calls which are out of the money. Usually, we can buy back in-the-money calls and replace them with out-of-the-money calls and do it at a credit, again avoiding adjustment trades which might cause losses when the underlying displays whip-saw price action.
For the past several weeks, we have not suffered through a huge drop in our underlyings, but earlier this year, we incurred one in SVXY. We now have a way of contending with that kind of price action when it comes along. If a big drop occurs, we can buy a vertical call spread in our long calls and sell a one-month-out at-the-money call for enough cash to cover the cost of rolling the long side down to a lower strike. As long as we don’t have to come up with extra cash to make the adjustment, we can keep the same number of long calls in place and continue to sell at-the-money calls each week when we replace expiring short call positions. This tactic avoids the inevitable losses involved in closing out an out-of-the-money call calendar spread and replacing it with an at-the-money calendar spread which always costs more than the spread we sold.
Another change we have added is to make some long-term credit put spreads as a small part of an overall 10K Strategy portfolio, betting that the underlying will at least be flat in a year or so from when we placed the spread. These bets can return exceptional returns while in many respects being less risky than our basic calendar and diagonal spread strategies. The longer time period allows for a big drop in stock price to take place as long as it is offset by a price gain in another part of the long-term time frame. Our Better Odds Than Vegas II portfolio trades these types of spreads exclusively, and is on target to gain 91% this year, while the Retirement Trip Fund II portfolio is on target to gain 52% this year (and the stock can fall a full 50% and that gain will still come about).
The trick to having portfolios with these kinds of extraordinary gains is to select underlying stocks or ETPs which you feel strongly will move higher. We have managed to do this with our selections of COST, NKE, SVXY, SBUX, and more recently, FB, while we have failed to do it (and faced huge losses) in our single failing portfolio, BABA Black Sheep where Alibaba has plummeted to an all-time low since we started the portfolio when it was near its all-time high. Our one Asian diversification effort has served to remind us that it is far more important to find an underlying that you can count on moving higher, or at least staying flat (when we usually do even better than when it moves higher).
Bottom line, I think we are on to something big in the way we are managing our investments these days. Once you have discovered something that is working, it is important to stick with it rather than trying to improve your strategy even more. Of course, if the market lets us know that the strategy is no longer working, changes would be in order. So far, that has not been the case. The recent past has included a great many weeks when we enjoyed 10 of our 11 portfolios gaining in value, while only BABA lost money as the stock continued to tumble. We will soon find another underlying to replace BABA (or conduct a different strategy in that single losing portfolio).”
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Any questions? I would love to hear from you by email (terry@terrystips.com), or if you would like to talk to our guy Seth, give him a jingle at 800-803-4595 and either ask him your question(s) or give him your thoughts. seth@terrystips.com
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I look forward to having you on board, and to prospering with you.
Terry
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