Hi,

We only added options to this service in late February, so all the trades initiated since then are still open.

Ari

Hi Walter,

I consolidated your posts into one comment.

1) The verbiage you’re referring to is for those who prefer to make broker-assisted trades over the phone. If you’re simply entering the parameters of the trade yourself, then you don’t need to worry about inputting that statement. Instead, there should be various fields, checkboxes or circles, and dropdown menus that will allow you to enter all the specifics yourself.

For instance, in the brokerage platform that I use, here are all the steps:

First, I select “trade options” under the “Buy and Sell” dropdown menu.

Once I’m on the order page, I click a circle to select the “option type” as “put.”

Then, there’s a “transaction type” dropdown menu, where I select “Sell to open.”

After that, I enter the ticker for the “underlying security” (i.e., the underlying stock) into a search field to to get a quote.

Then, there are two more dropdown menus for “Expiration” and “Strike.” For the Cisco trade, I would select the 07/20/2018 expiration and the $40.00 strike price.

Next, I enter the quantity of contracts. Each contract represents the potential obligation to buy 100 shares of the underlying stock if the put expires in the money (i.e., below the $40.00 strike price). So we recommend those who are new to this start out by selling just 1 contract.

My “order type” defaults to “limit.”

Before entering the limit, I would check to see if the midpoint of the bid/ask spread for the option is higher than the minimum limit price specified in the instructions for this trade. The order page should auto-populate those prices.

For instance, if the midpoint were $0.42, which is a bit higher than the minimum limit specified, I would go ahead and enter $0.42 into the “limit” field to see if my order gets filled at that price. Since each contract represents 100 shares of the underlying stock, the total credit you would receive is $42 per contract sold (i.e., 100 x $0.42).

Lastly, for “duration,” I have a choice of “Day” or “good ’til canceled, which is often abbreviated as “GTC.”

I realize that these steps will vary slightly from brokerage platform to brokerage platform, but hopefully this has clarified the process for entering a trade.

2) The put we sold on CUBE expired on Friday for maximum profit, so no further steps are necessary.

3) For the CC trade, the strike price was $45, and the limit was $0.70. However, the option price quickly changed shortly after I published the alert on 5/11, and the underlying stock subsequently climbed about 3.1% this week. So it looks like this trade got away from us–the prices that I based the initial limit on are no longer available–the midpoint of the bid/ask spread is now just $0.40.

Ari