Pretty standard week. Haven't been too active.
Positions pretty much set for the rest of the year.

One week left in the year. Seems like sentiment is still mostly positive going into next year.

Noticed NET dropped some. Might pick some up.

Picked up some Monster shares. I drank it a few times. Was good.

Saw Jocko Wilink came out with a drink. I'll try it out next.

Nice little boost on Apple car news. Will be interesting to see how the next 3 years pans out.
Hopefully they include the wheels when they put the car up for sale and you're able to charge it other places besides Cupertino.

If it goes well, I'll be taking my retirement on schedule and moving to Dallas. Hope the home prices don't go up too much by then.

I'm thinking about starting a youtube channel when things get back to more normalish conditions. I think it will be food/restaurant reviews. And maybe things like blind taste tests of different things like alcohol.

But definitely something food related.

Anyways been a pretty good year stocks wise as a monkey blindly clicking buttons could've at least made 35%. I'm sure it will continue at this pace for another 20yrs at least uninhibited.

With all the future bitcoin gazillionaires there's going to be in a couple years where else will the money go? Stocks! To the moon!

Watching the falling knife that is BABA is quite the watch.

I know a couple people where it was the majority of their portfolio. Ouch.

ouch. takes me back to the days when I would buy bongs off alibaba in bulk for ~$20 each and resell them for ~$100 on craigslist. probably still really easy money in stuff like that for people who want to grind it out. selling glassware to stoners is also a great business for repeat customers

Hi Spuy! Nice year for you this year congrats. I just made my first ever options trade and wanted to just ask you your opinion on something if that's ok?

Bought a call option on PLTR for January 8th expiry. Strike 29 bucks. Ask 0.87. So my breakeven price is 29.87? And for every .50 cents stock goes above 29.87, would be extra 50 dollars profit? I believe there is also time premium which I may be missing in calculating my breakeven price.

I usually learn by doing so just threw 87 bucks at it and figure it out from there. My EV on this can't be too horrible so not such an expensive mistake if there is one.

Going to make some small trades and figure it out then go deeper into the well when i'm more confident

Anyways best of luck for 2021.

Hi Plop,

For me I very rarely buy options as it's the best way to lose a lot of money quickly. I only bought 4 options this entire year and closed all of them for a profit. The key if you choose to do so is to have a strong thesis and give yourself ample time for it to play out. If you're buying far OTM short term options kind of like what you did here your chance of success will be pretty slim.

But to answer your question, no it's not as straight forward in determining what your break even point is. The reason being is that the value of your option is going to decrease as time passes. And the price movement will have to make up for this just to stay afloat. The other thing is IV. If IV drops that can screw you as well and you'd need a big price movement in your direction to make up for that as well.

I just looked up your option right now and it's already fell by $10. Really the only way to make money is to have a strong price movement in the direction you guessed in a short time frame.

One other tip is that if you ever do get lucky enough where the price does move in your favor, close it out early while you are ahead. The other reason why options buyers perform so dismally is that even when they do get lucky enough that all the planets align in their favor, they make the mistake of holding on too long and the price plummets back down due to theta and IV crush.

If you do want to buy options, buy close to the money or even slightly ITM and give yourself at least a couple of months on it. Your chance of success will be a lot higher.

Hope this helps, good luck!

Oh wow thank you for such a detailed response. Out my depth level is: 2 million You are doing me a favor. Will stick to regular stocks and crypto then. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Might still do a udemy course on options just to get the hand of it anyways in case something really glaring pops up once a year. Thanks again man

Bought some CRSP and NET.

stubbled into this after you commented about baba in the stock trading thread. I learned so much reading this thread! Congrats on the very good year so far. You've been very helpful on explaining selling put options in order to get into the stock cheaper on stocks you like.

what you thinking about snowflake now that it came back down in price a bit? Or is still to high of a price to start writing selling puts on it.

I sold some puts on NET PLTR BABA

Hey glad it's been helpful for you.

Regarding SNOW, I like the company. Sales growth is awesome and I see a ton of potential here. It's definitely on my watchlist.

Personally I'm not doing anything until the rest of the lockup opens up in March and we have another quarter of earnings data.

Current price is still a bit high for me to want to get involved.

I do like the puts you've sold.

Market down today. Good year overall.
Never tried this, but saw it in a rap video and thought I'd give it a try to see if it's any good.

Will come back to write up some thoughts and goals for next year.

Wow what a year. I truly hope things turn around in 2021. But really who knows.

From an investing perspective this year has provided what is likely a once in a lifetime run up opportunity. I'm quite thankful for that. I work every day to mentally prepare myself for the next recession and do my best to protect against the inevitable blow that will come and not to squander what I've built this year.

I need to remind myself that I don't know sheit. Keep learning, keep growing. The second you believe that you're hot sheit and you've got everything figured out, life won't hesitate to pull you back to earth in a flash.

One of my objectives for the coming year is to be a more positive person. There's enough negativity in the world, why am I engaging with and contributing to it?

To start I think the low hanging fruit will simply be to not post as much. Looking back on the year I've definitely engaged trolls waaaaaay too much and have let their negativity influence me to the point that I've gone and spread that same negativity to others. That's one thing I'm quite embarrassed and apologetic about. I think it's really easy to get caught up in things and want to respond to everything. But in the end it really is stupid and a net negative for myself. Like what is the point with arguing w/ strangers on the internet? With that said the practical exercise will be to post less and don't post negative things. If I disagree with something so what, just let it be. It's a total waste of time and energy otherwise.

The second thing I'd like to get off the ground this next year is the Youtube channel I mentioned. I've been thinking about a small project/hobby I could work on and that seems like the most natural one as it combines 2 things I enjoy: Food and video creation/editing.

I guess lastly w/ regards to investing like I said in the beginning, just continue to learn as much as I can. Read as much material and gather various viewpoints as I can. Maintain disciplined decision making.

With that said thanks to all who have followed and had positive things to say.

Happy New Year!

Congrats on the year. BUT. Any regrets on missing out on the ebon rocket?

Sorry that was a joke about the ebon. I know you feel bad that things go carried about a bit in that thread, but really he needs to lose it all to learn a lesson here like all of us gamblers do. I do really appreciate you being one of the only ones humble enough to spend time giving advice to newbies, not having the elitist attitude many people here have towards ignorant new investors. If I didn’t read this thread, I would of never have known how successful you have been just based off your posts in BFI threads.

Haha yeah I know you were joking. But yeah, no one's going to hit every pitch. That's ok. Just make sure the ones you do hit count and have solid reasoning behind them. That's how you know what to do when the price drops on something. If you're confident in the business strategy and the fundamentals of the company, when the stock price drops and nothing else has materially changed then it's an easy spot to buy more at a discount.

But if the only reason you got into the stock was because you saw some rando post the ticker on the internet saying it's the next best thing, buy buy buy! then you're stuck w/ an impossible decision because you have no idea what you own. Which is what happens to most people.

Sometimes you hold on and you get lucky. Sometimes you sell at a loss wrongly. Sometimes you sell at a loss rightly. But it's all random. But even worse people don't realize this and based on the results of what happens they will log it in the back of their mind and it will often reinforce poor decisions going forward.

Your last comment cracked me up because it can easily be a dig at my poor posting quality lol. But I know that's not how you meant it.

Regarding BS, yeah I mean he's happy to gamble bigly. Is he making irresponsible decisions? Well in my view yes, but like I said no need to waste my energy in arguing with someone and just berating someone who never asked for help in the first place.

He may be lucky and never learn his lesson. Or sometime down the road he might. Who knows, but I'm not going to judge someone on what they want to do with their life. It's not like I'm his mom. I've made plenty of terrible decisions myself in the past so i shouldn't be one to judge too harshly. I certainly got plenty lucky to get where I'm at today.

Anyways like I said I'm going to really focus this year on positive things and ignore the distractions the best I can.

Hey man awesome to see you crush it so hard this year, and thanks for your advice, I feel a lot more confident in my portfolio because of it. Would absolutely tune into a YouTube channel as well.

Best of luck in 2021

It’s not low quality posting, just lack of bragging or posting definitive numbers. Like I can see oh I sold this Netflix put but I don’t remember always seeing results or total portfolio progress posts.

Thanks and the same to you!

Yeah that kind of stuff seems a little out of place there. But I never really saw myself as a regular poster there anyhow.

Congrats on the very good year. Seems like markets will continue on in 2021. Hard not too, with rates at 0%, stimulus, possibly even more stimulus and vaccines coming into play.

This post resonates spot on with me. If everyone could really remember those words they would save a lot of money. I also ran very hot in the markets this year and after being first being up close to 100% and feeling hot got into a situation I could have blown up almost half my account gambling in long dated deep out the money option plays when it was my first time doing options none the less. Humbled me very fast to take the loss the next day and get out only losing 10% my portfolio after being down close to 20% at some point. Came back strong after that up 60% after that beating grinding away.

I went from firing the whole account on one stock I loved but that was super well researched to trying protect what I made and diversify the account and put more effort into portfolio management and learning more about everything. Avoid doing any big gambles. I understand you didn't really do any of the mistakes I did but protecting what you made and constantly learning is very important. It's easy to try to get there fast but at way to high risk.

The positive mindset idea is very important. I also try to be and occasionally find myself getting into it with someone for no reason. Best to just ignore the negativity and only be positive as a new year resolution I agree.

Good luck on the youtube channel. My friend has a travel/food channel and he's super passionate about it. I love youtube and spend most my TV time on that. If you do it on something your passionate about I'm sure it will eventually do very good.

I'm up early this morning looking into the weekly options for this week to wheel. Thinking facebook, google, apple, alibaba, cloudfare and PLTR. I want to do amazon but I'll wait a bit before getting into options that big. Maybe also salesforce or netflix. You typically set your positions the friday before a week starts or all depends on when stocks get to certain prices and what not?

One of my friends who crushes the markets told me to look into DM. That he really likes it at $17. I'll start to research that as well but seems like a good spac.

I agree w/ your general sentiment on the market for this year. Between the Covid rebound/vaccines, Janet, and low rates I think we'll continue to see stonks go up for awhile.

The top Puts I like for this week are MU, PLTR, NET, CRSP, ARKG.

Yeah I generally set them the week prior for the following week. So I generally stay within a 7-13day DTE range.

One thing I will say about SPACs is the obvious if you can get in close to $10 it's good and the further away you get from that the higher your risk. Knowing nothing about DM at $17, well you know your downside risk.

Also warrants are more risky because they have no price floor. But risk/reward go hand in hand, just know what you're getting into.

Also of note, once a SPAC deal is complete, there may be stipulations about the warrants so you'll want to know what those are so you don't unknowingly hold your warrants past an expiration date or something like that.

Historically SPACs have underperformed the market post merger. The reason I think is that often times the average company looking for a SPAC is one that has a questionable valuation and needs some guaranteed cash. But the amount of retail money floating around these days I think has caused a lot of the exuberance we've been seeing lately surrounding these.

QS is a company that I added to my watchlist recently. Just an interesting one to think about. They currently sit on about $1 billion in assets and have the next 4 to 5 yrs to prove out their use case. Being this early the field is wide open. It's a highly competitive sector right now and they have a bunch of things to solve even under the assumption that their tech will be viable for the commercial market. I haven't done any work yet, but I feel even with the current pull back $17 billion is still too risky. If I can get decent premium at a $30 strike at some point I'll probably sell a small position there.

I think the battery space is the biggest obstacle in the EV space and whoever does crack that nut is going to make trillions. QS intrigues me, and has for a while.

I guess recent test results have shown that they are only at 50% of a couple of their goal benchmarks. I don't know enough about battery tech to be able to tell how big of a problem this is or not.

The biggest risks I see outside of the tech not living up to expectations is that they are on a 5 yr timeline to execute. A lot can happen in that time including TSLA and Toyota just completely running away with the ball.

That said, being able to get a small position in the low 30s or better I think is a fair play that I'll go with if it becomes available. Otherwise I'm happy to pass it up and keep piling money into Cathie's lap.

Thanks for the tip! Those picks all have juicy premium indeed. MU wow was very nice collected 77% of the weeks premium holding it one night Was a interesting first day. Sold a lot of big put options in the morning yesterday and then the tech stocks all tanked within a hour with the georgia polls narrowing. Wish I waited one hour ha. Sold out today when everything reversed big time figure I wait out these georgia run off elections and start tmrw or the next day.

Agree about SPACs. Got to be very selective and do a lot of research. Lot of them pop lightly on hype. QS is interesting indeed, I'll keep it on the watchlist if it drops some more.

All the bread and butter plays today.

Jan 15 DTE

NFLX $490 strike
NVDA $500 strike

FB $257.50 strike. Haven't done this one hardly at all, but they got earnings coming up end of the month so will probably look to run it one more time next week.

QS shot back up to $71 lol. I'm assuming it's all the retailers seeing the price action go from $131 down to $50 and thinking, "What a great deal I need to get in ASAP! Literally can't go tits up!"

Very nice picks! I love FB btw out of the big tech names, highest growth out of the bunch, huge untapped potential with whatsapp and a huge platform for future roll outs. Though they are slow to roll out anything new.

Crazy day yesterday and huge reversal today. Made a lot of moves yesterday had two big winners in the morning selling FB 250P and GOOGL 1679P up 50% quick and swapped them for FB 257P and GOOGL 1695

CRSP 152P is pretty much a lock for next week but the spread kind of bad to close it. Also have MU 73.5P, NVDA 500P, NET 70P, PLTR 22P

My only pick thats doing bad from yesterday is BABA 220P. I don't mind getting assigned that one at all though. Was close to adding some more BABA 210P but it is already a pretty big position.

You sell any of the big winners from yesterday to swap them out for something else?

Not bad a week into the new year.

Some positions that are up some.