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Strategies & Market Trends : How To Write Covered Calls - An Ongoing Real Case Study! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Wright who wrote (10380)	4/14/1999 11:03:00 PM
From: Dan Duchardt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14162

I appreciate you viewpoint David. After taking the time to reflect on what I had actually done in the "heat of battle" so to speak, I'm inclined to agree with you that my secondary buy and sell may have sacrificed too much upside potential for a relatively small reduction in the NUT. Only time will tell. It was an unnecessary complication in my original post, but the reason for me splitting the calls between May and June was that the program only allows me to trade 5% of open interest. I could not sell 10 May20s (OI = 106), or I would have. As for loving the stock, I have no such feelings for any stock, but I own a few that I intend to start writing calls against. I do bring a lot of daytrader's mentality with me, and not loving a stock is one of the attributes. I actually have a Datek account that I stopped using long before they got the streamer in action because of the poor reliability/availability and zero customer service. I agree that the streamer is a good tool, but very late in coming, and for being able to link to real time charts with indicators (MACD, BB, RSI, etc), options data, news, Level II if you want it, etc., myTrack is an order of magnitude superior to Datek as a data/information service. I can't comment on their executions; I have not actually traded with them. The contest executions tend to be slow, so it lends a bit of the real world frustration of not being able to get filled. I give wholehearted support to your comment about not trading on the fly without lots of trades under your belt. In fact I daytraded live for several months last year and have a pretty good feel for numbers like 17/32. By no means would I consider today's activity as "normal". I certainly was not expecting the DOW to give back 120 points (and CYCH to blow 2 bucks below the apparent support at 19) in 1/2 hour this afternoon shortly after I opened my original position. So yes, my secondary move was a reaction to events, and of highly questionable value. I'm not proposing it as a model of how to do it right, but it's what I did for better or worse. But as of right now I'm sitting over $2K in the money, compared to being down $1K if I had just bought and held the stock. Of course with options where I am RIGHT NOW is not the whole story. I can't walk in to the market tomorrow and unwind my position to realize a $2K profit. In fact I would have to pay an average of 3 1/4 to buy back the calls I sold, so in a sense I am still in the hole. But come the third Saturday in May, and again in June, even if I now do nothing and the stock goes nowhere I will make money by selling the stock or additional calls.