The Purpose of My Stock and Options Trading Diary

The Purpose of My Stock and Options Trading Diary as I have reiterated in the past is not for you to take this as advise. You can make your own decisions and get professional opinions for yourself, but for me, I do my own research, and I try to be forward thinking and I try to make my trades always profitable. I know that they won't always be, but I have found in the past that when I write a diary of my trades and look back at my diary, I can learn from my mistakes and also it helps me to think more clearly.

In other-words, if I put on an uncovered options trade and 30 days later, it expires or I get put the underlying stock, I want to know why I put that trade on in the first place. So, I can go back in my diary and look at what I was thinking at the time when I pulled the trigger and bought or sold the equity option.

Since market opinion and sentiment as well as volatility often change and with so many talking heads on television, a person can forget why they put made the trade in the first place. I know I will forget without my financial diary. Thus this helps bring me back in time and jogs my memory to the day I made the trade. I have found that I personally trade better this way and I would suggest that you keep a diary of your trades too - why you took the position that you did as I believe it cannot hurt and may help you.

For me in the current environment, you'll find that I'm either a buy of stocks or closed end funds and am a seller of uncovered puts because I believe that stocks are cheap, but we are in a bear market, leaving me in a position to say to myself, yes stocks are cheap, but the may get cheaper, thus by selling the uncovered put, I either buy the stock cheaper by being assigned, or I keep the premium that I sold the put for.

This should work good for me and the way that I think, but as we finally hit a bottom and volatility drops, I am going to have to use other strategies that I have in my bag of tricks, but for now my feeling is that we're in a bear market that may take a while to get out from and in this time, we will see big swings in the market, but when we finally bottom for good and turn into a bull market, I will have gotten put on enough stocks at a better value than if I had pulled the trigger the same day and flat out bough the stock as opposed to selling the uncovered put that I will end up (IMHO) with a great longer term portfolio of stocks that I could not have bought any cheaper.

Just my thoughts on an up day in a bear market... you won't see me making many a trade on these days as some people like to use them to sell into the bear rally. IMHO I believe that if a person has the time and knows what they are doing that they may be able to short into a bear rally, but I don't have the time and I can't predict when the market bottom is going to take place, thus I don't trade on these day, I just watch the value of my portfolio go up, because my uncovered puts become increasingly more profitable to me and watch the stocks that I'm long go up in price. even if they will come back down if this isn't the bottom, I feel god watching them go up.

I bought 500 shares of Symbol "ZF" a few days ago at 2.70 figuring since it's a closed end fund that it was just trading to far below NAV and its gone up approx 9% since, If you were to annualize that, it would be approximately an incredible 1350% annualized return.

So, it's fun to watch.

Thx,

The Options Trader...