Project Elijah: MTB

One of my heroes is Elijah Talley. He’s my Lance Armstrong of the kid universe, so much in fact that I replace my LiveSTRONG bracelet with a Pray for Elijah bracelet. Although I have never met him, I am very good friends with Susan from Olive Branch who is Elijah’s biggest fan. I would not doubt for a moment that if Susan from Olive Branch were to have kids, if the boy had “Elijah” in the name or the feminine version in the girls’ name. If Elijah was ever missing, she would be suspect #1.

Oh, did I mention that this dude has beaten cancer twice… and he’s 7?

So when life throws him some lemons, Elijah makes lemonade. Not just any lemonade, but high profile Lemonade.

Here’s a link to Susan from Olive Branch’s site about Elijah’s Lemonade Stand

If you couldn’t partake of Elijah’s Frosty Beverage yourself, you could contribute to a virtual lemonade stand. Well, when I was writing a comment to Susan’s post, I had a great idea! I’ll Trade for Lemonade. Sure! I donated $477 to Knoxville’s Breakthrough Corporation on World Autism Day on a trade that I made on that day. Well, I am going to do the same… and you can follow from home. In fact, maybe this will encourage you to donate to Elijah’s cause. And I love games/contests so this is going to make the trade fun and it’s for a good cause!

So here are the rules:

Elijah’s Trade:
MTB AUG 08 $65 PUT
The company is M&T Bank Corporation

This is PUT option which means we want the stock price to go DOWN.

Stock Price at Market Close on 07/14/2008 is $58.85
I bought this option for $380. Currently it’s worth $945 as of close of business on July 14th.

I will continue to hold this option until one of these scenarios happen:
1)The Stock Price shows no more weakness and looks as if it will start to increase

2)It decreases in value to $760, which I will close the trade out for 100% profit of my purchase price… $380 to Elijah, $380 back to me

3)This Option will expire on August 21st. I will close it on Aug 1st to preserve any time value left in the option and what ever profit will be sent over

And yes, there is a selfish reason for me to do this… I want to help Elijah’s cause and get the tax write-off (win-win). So, I am going to try to set up something in my Sidebar so that you can track from home

June Performance

Another month has ended and I had a pretty good month. I have not quite got all my capital back, but I made some decent headway. So let’s see what I did:

June was a purely Options month. I bought NO stocks and I sold 2 of my remaining positions. 1 profitable, 1 not and over all it was a push with -$4

Options wise, I bought 34 positions and sold 35, with 22 of them being profitable and 13 not. I finished at +$1787 for the month. Not my best overall month for options, but pretty damn close. Had I not had a few postions that go away from me and I should have been in spreads at the time, I would have fared much better.

Spreads, funny that I went to an advanced options workshop and yet, didn’t do any spreads. however, I studied my entries as spread trades, but there was a while when I didn’t have enough capital to make extra trades. So, no spreads for June

Portfolio:

Month: had my best Total month so far with $1783 with that being +13% from the amount that of my own money that I put into the account. Now, I am still -36% cumulative, but the Market is slipping into a bear market and now, instead of being being Techincal (bear flags, etc), it’s falling consistently, so the first couple days in July have been awesome.

It’s been a while, but I am kicking

I went to Atlanta in the middle of June with Michael from Chattanooga to the Investools Advanced Options Workshop. Although I haven’t technically done any of the advanced options, I have been much better in my trading. I think because the condition in the trades that I in don’t need the safety of spreads. Also, I don’t have the capital to get into the straddles and strangles that are presenting themselves. Now, THAT is something that I would do.

I am going to get in a spread trade in one of the indexes, but I am not exactly sure which one.

I got stopped out of a LVS put by my own mistake and I didn’t have enough capital to get back in… ugh!

(I just realized that this never posted, this was written on 06/27 and I am going to post it now)