MY STORY
Moving into Options
COVID-19 PANDEMIC
I had began buying options in December, and by March 19th, right after the Covid-19 Pandemic had began ravaging the stock market, my account sat at $3842.17
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The pandemic wiped out the unrealized gains, and this is when I chose to not sell anything. I was holding calls that were a few months out, and I felt that recovery would come sooner than expected.
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By April 16th, I had regained my unrealized losses and began my climb upwards out of the pandemic, sitting at $6,050.13.
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Warren Buffett said, "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful," I chose to scrape as much money together as I could (including a $1,000 loan from my brother, thanks man), and put it all into the wrecked market.
GROWTH AND STRATEGY
As I began to better understand what Calls meant, I added as much cash as I could muster, and I reinvested my early call flips into a new company, JD.com, which has been my largest winner by far. The combination of added capital and gains left me with a total of $11,736.82 on May 6th, 2020.
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At this point, over the course of the last 20, I had invested around $10,000 in slow increments. I mainly added when I found a position I really liked, then added the amount to buy just that Call. This is also when I shifted 90%+ of my account into calls, and tried out using margin. Margin is borrowed funds from your broker, I use Robinhood, and the interest is 2.5% annually on what you are borrowing. If you have Robinhood Gold, you can use $1,000 of margin without paying interest for $5 a month. Don't use margin unless you understand what you are doing, don't get yourself into trouble.
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After moving the majority of my money into calls during March, the returns out of the pandemic were crazy, I did not add much cash during the next phase (A couple hundred if I could squeeze out a few more calls), it was more of a "sit and wait to see what happens with this COVID-19 thing," period, and on June 8th, 2020, I was trading $63,811.68.
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This was when the market volatility started to hit my account, and the unrealized gains and losses were enough to make anyone feel like they were on a roller coaster.
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