I’ll keep this short because the portfolio is still really small, but a month has passed since we started. The portfolio and the market have both gone pretty much sideways so not much progress on either one, but lets add a couple more positions. You can check out the previous post where I opened the existing positions here.

NVDA, along with all the other chip stocks as well as the energy stocks took a huge dive following the DeepSeek scare:

It doesn’t look like that much but NVDA lost $600B in market cap, the single largest loss of market cap in history! So lets take advantage of the drop by opening a small position. And I actually made these trades on Feb 5th, so last week, and only now I had time to write about it, so I actually already have some small gains on the NVDA position. Either way, with NVDA trading at $120 (at the time) down from $150, selling a Jan 2026 $100 put for $10.05 will net us in a $90, if it ever went that low. And it seems like it has some support around $100, so should be a safe bet. And it only requires $2300 in margin, so its a 1000/2300 = 43% return on margin requirement in a year, so quite an efficient position. E*Trade gives the trade a 69% probability of any profit, so definitely being the house on this trade, not the gambler:

PYPL is another company which dropped a bit on earnings, so lets sell 2x Jan 2026 $70 puts for $5.1 each, dropping a total of $1020 cash into our account, and a margin requirement of $3262, so 31% return on margin in a year. E*Trade gives the trade a 72% probability of any profit, so again - being the house, not the gambler:

With those 2 trades we dropped ~$2k cash into our account, right now, against the promise to buy 100 shares of NVDA and 200 shares of PYPL, which if we need to purchase will cost for NVDA $10k and PYPL $14k, so $24k or a quarter of the porfolio value. But the margin requirement is only ~$5.5k, and I’ll make a separate post about margin, but its a double edged sword. It enables you to leverage your positions, but it also can be dangerous if the positions go against you and you don’t have enough cash on the side to cover them. But again, more on that in a separate post.

Overall we now have $4k of potential profits, the previous $2k will only expire in 2 years, and the $2k I just received will expire in 1 year. In March I will look to add another ~$2k of potential profits to the portfolio, and just for educational purposes we’ll go with a different strategy, so sign up below to be alerted when we make some more trades.

Theres still a lot to talk about, for example how to read the option graphs in the screenshots about, but getting all that content out will take time. If you have any specific questions you’d like me to post about I would be happy to hear in the comments.

And also in general: how do you feel about the stock picks? How do you feel about the strategy choices? Would you like to try or ask about any other strategies? Is something unclear?

2 New trades for portfolio

APP trade idea to take advantage of recent 40% drop

How to Be the House - not the Gambler