Day 15 - Ambitious Monkey

Today ends Week 3 of this experiment. Reminder - the content here is not financial advice but entertainment, see my introductory post here.

In that post, I had mentioned how if I was profitable on a few trades, it will be akin to a monkey hitting a dart right. Well, the monkey is now feeling ambitious.

Portfolio Status

My portfolio is up ~14% year-to-date and I have chronicled most of the journey on this site. I started documenting my trades since Jan 20, 2025, and I had a capital of $11.1k USD then (see Day 1 notes here). Here is where the portfolio stands today.

Trading Update

I noticed that my big wins were coming from LEAPs. So today I picked a couple of stocks from my screener that were near the 30 RSI value for the last 1 month Bollinger Band, MSFT and GOOGL, and opened a 70 ∆ LEAP for Jan 16, 2026 against both of them.

An RSI of 30 or below indicates a stock is likely oversold, which the market typically uses as a signal to buy into good stocks that have gotten cheaper. So my bet is that both MSFT and GOOGL present buying opportunities for those who want to own these stocks, and so that buying should naturally push the price of these equities back up. I did not check position size, but over half of my portfolio is now dependent on whether GOOGL and MSFT can rise to the challenge (in about 12 months timeframe).

My exit strategy would be similar to the last PLTR LEAP trade I made - look to Sell the Call back at 15-30% Profit in the next 3-4 months.

Week 3 Reflections

I had one big trade go well for me. And no trades actually went against me.

I think I am getting a hang of it but for all I know, this could be Dunning–Kruger effect.

Here are the last few trades I have made.

One cool trick I figured out today was that I can get Option price data in a cell in Numbers on Mac using a Formula. Numbers integrates with Yahoo Finance! to present stock information.

Here is how the formula to get Option Price looks:

=STOCK("MSFT260116C00385000", "Price")

The above formula will get the Price of the MSFT 2026, 01/16, Call Option for $385. If you plan to use this formula, know that the price is a little delayed.

The long text for the formula can also be looked up directly if you looked at an Option quote in Yahoo Finance!. For example, you can view the SPY Option chain by clicking on this site: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/options/, the Contract Name you see on the page is what is needed for the formula.

So why did I think about using the above formula? Because then my history view will not needlessly show the P/L in red when I open a LEAP since it is not truly of zero value when I buy a LEAP, it depreciates slowly (at first, and then quickly).