You’ll probably find that over time in your options trading journey that the best tickers to use will change as time goes along. There have been stocks or ETF’s that I have used in the past that were optimal for selling puts on that have periods when they aren’t best to use. So it’s good to have a long list of tickers to choose from. I find that I come across new ones almost every week that I find are good to use.

For example, when the IPO for NMAX was first launched of course the implied volatility was very high as the share price was extremely volatile. So I took advantage of that for awhile. But I’m finding that now the implied volatility has fallen because the share price has somewhat stabilized from where it was. Because of this the options premiums aren’t as optimal as they were a few weeks ago.

It is important to understand why volatility may be higher than normal so you can understand and account for possibly higher risk. Things such as upcoming earnings announcements will cause the implied volatility to rise. This results in possibly higher volatility which can make the share price shoot up or down much more than normal on the earnings announcement date.

Week 12 Results

Here are the positions we started the week out with:

On Monday I could see that the share price of BULL was a little above my strike price so I decided to leave that one to see where it went during the week. The share price of SERV was still quite a bit below my $12 strike price, but I decided to wait and see if the share price would come up more during the week. I opened a new position by selling a put contract on OSCR with a strike price of $14.50 and an expiration of 7/25. For this trade I was able to collect a premium of $80.

When Tuesday came around I could see that the share price of SERV wasn’t really moving much. I could have waited until later in the week, but I decided to roll it out to an expiration of 8/8 and roll the strike price down to $11.50. I was able to collect a net credit of $20 for rolling the position.

When Friday came along the share price of BULL had actually risen a lot so I was able to let my BULL put expire. The share price of OSCR did drop some during the week so I anticipate that I may have to roll my OSCR put next week unless the price recovers. Here is the chart of all of my trades for the first 12 weeks of this journey:

Summary

For the week I was able to collect net premiums of $99.88 after fees. My target for week 12 is $75.58 which gets me a little more ahead of my target premiums up to this point. I’ve been able to collect a total of $957.68 in premiums for the first 12 weeks. My target for the total premiums for the first 12 weeks is $873.11. I’m currently using $3,650 of my account as collateral for my open put positions which is about 33.3% of the cash in my account.

Read: Growing $10,000 Using Options Trading – Week 1

Read: Growing $10,000 Using Options Trading – Week 11 Update