Options trade Sold to Open - Puts

Sold to open 3 puts, CB Nov 22nd 40 strike at .70 bringing in to my account $210 ( gross before commissions). I've been watching the entire insurance sector waiting to see which stock seems to have weakness and CB has been acting like a rock, so either they have their losses or bad balance sheet assets highly hidden in which case, this trade will lose money if they show up too soon, or they really are in good shape, in which cases I'll probably keep the premium. This trade is not for the faint of heart. There are insurance companies with toxic assets on their books and I'm just betting that CB isn't on of them. Even if CB does have something bad on their books, I hope that they would conceal it until after Nov 22nd.


Sold to open 6 puts, JNJ Nov 22nd 50 strike at .25 bringing in to my account $150 ( gross before commissions). My thoughts are that JNJ is a great blue chip company to own and if there is a sell of after election day, I may end up getting put this stock although It is currently trading at approx $62. So it would need a 18% or so sell of to put me and at that price, $50, I'd like to own this stock. Blue chip, pays a dividend, and I can bring in premium while I wait for it to go on sale. Find me something better than that and I'll take it.

Many of you have probably noticed that I do not take big positions on any individual stocks and my reason for that is I know I will lose on some. I have found that by making little bets across the board on the stocks that I like, my overall reward is greater because those trades that I lose on do not eat up all the profit on the winners, IMO, unless there is the major sell off where everything goes down, but we seem to have had that already and it hurt, so I don't want to get caught in the next one- if there is one ( a big sell off) with big positions in any given equity or it's derivative. Therefore, it's smaller diversified trading for the near future. I cannot let greed overcome good judgement and good judgement is to be very careful in these tumultuous times.

Sold to open 3 puts, ISRG Nov 22nd 120 strike at .60 bringing in to my account $180 ( gross before commissions). How low is low? That's the $180 question for this stock. Sticking with my philosophy to remain diversified and go with leaders in each field, no-one IMO sells a better surgical robot for minimally invasive surgery than ISRG. Earnings are already out and their stock has come down in price from a 52 week high of approx $350 to the last sale today of 183.79. Granted they have a high PE, but their growth is still impressive and how cheap is too cheap. IMHO $120 is too cheap for this dynamically innovative company. Therefore I sold the 120 puts - I really don't know what can go wrong that will knock this stock back down that low, but they seem to have a technical support at $127-$130-ish per share. So, even if they just kept dropping, I have a felling that support would kick in pre 120. I'm just hoping that I haven't missed something during my research. Time will tell. I normally don't trade on technicals and this is not a technical trade, but I do look at them as anyone who trades should use all the tools at their disposal, as it would be irresponsible to do otherwise. But you can do with your money what you want, I like to do my research before pulling the trigger.