Paper trading portfolio update

I’ve been busy working on a side project: www.deepinthe.money (its a cool new tool I developed to help back test multi leg option strategies.. and its in alpha), so I haven’t been trading this portfolio much since my last update, but I did make one adjustment in the height of Trump craziness which I didn’t log on the blog, so I figured now that the market has calmed down for the time being lets check in and do an update.

First things first - I updated the excel with the portfolio performance compared to nasdaq, s&p:

Portfolio performance YTD vs nasdaq, s&p

So all are red, but my portfolio only slightly at -0.9% vs the s&p -2.6% and nasdaq -4.4%. But lets look at the actual portfolio and see where we are:

Portfolio holdings

So portfolio currently worth $99,580 from its original $100k, with the holdings currently worth -$3k and a margin requirement of $74k, so we’re 25% invested. Our “best case” is the short puts expire worthless, plus the BCS expires worth $8k, meaning we stand to gain $11k from where we are currently. And, in fact, each of our positions is “on track” to make its full profit, so just over 10% of the portfolio.

The adjustment I did at the height of tariff craziness was to double down on most of the short put positions, so AAPL, AMZN, PYPL are 2-4 contracts now instead of the original 1-2 contracts, where GOOG and NVDA I didn’t need to touch. I also doubled down on the previous META BCS, rolling down to 2 contracts of 490-530 BCS. Here are the orders which filled on Apr 7th and 21st:

Position adjustments

So even if the market doesn’t go up any more from where it is today, we stand to make ~10%, and as the quarter progresses I will look to add some more positions on some other companies to boost our potential gains even further.

And thats the beauty of using options to invest vs buying the underlying stock - its so much easier and more efficient to adjust positions to make money in varying market. Whereas when holding stocks the only thing to do is dollar cost average down on pullbacks, in order to make money you still need the stock to go back up. When you sell puts, you just need the stock to stop going down at some point, and from then on your positions can expire worthless. In other words, you just need to let time go by to make money, and time going by is one of the only givens we have in this life.

If you missed, you can check how this portfolio got to where we are today here and here, and also feel free to subscribe below to get these updates and other trade ideas delivered directly to your inbox in real time - I promise not to spam.