journal

Day 40

Foolish Trader Journal, Day 40.

Foolish Trader

17 Mar 2025 • 3 min read

Market Recap

The market inched forward today.

SPY gained ~0.42%.
QQQ gained ~0.21%.

Trading Update

Last week, I said:

Next week, I need to monitor if the rally continues—I may need to close my MSFT PMCC and adjust my AAPL protective put.

So, I did that.

I closed the MSFT 3/21 $400 Call by buying it back and sold the open 5/16 $200 AAPL Protective Put.

Portfolio Status

My portfolio moved down by 1.22%. I was up until the final 10 minutes when MSFT went down, taking my account down with it since the MSFT LEAP is a major portion of my account right now.

📉 Year to Date: -2.12%
📉 All Time: -17.57%

YTD comparison: SPY is down -4.13%, while my portfolio is down -2.12%. Relatively, I am still ahead.

Here is the portfolio status.

Trade History

Here are my last 20 trades:

Plan for Tomorrow

I think I have waited enough for the LEAPS to go in the money. I want to wait more but LEAPS have taken away a significant chunk of my buying power and I feel twitchy not being able to execute new trades frequently enough for want of capital. So, starting tomorrow and by the end of this week, I will look for ways to reduce the loss on my LEAPS and get out of them.

One idea that crossed my mind was to create a credit spreads ladder on one or more instruments. So I went to my trusted advisors Claude and then to ChatGPT, asking both of them the same following question.

I need outline of an options trading strategy. Here are some constraints.

Sell a 45 DTE Put Credit Spread
Choose a $5 wide spread (so a $500 capital requirement)
Close at 21 DTE
Execute only one trade a day
I will open a trade between 15-20 ∆, which typically has probability of profit of 80%.
When I close a trade, I will open a new trade with the released capital/buying power that will be 45 DTE.

Will you be able to find some ways in which I can build a sustainable strategy with above constraints?

They both indicated I would end up with a 50.4% annual return. What a coincidence!

Here are their responses.

Claude

Summary

Full Conversation Transcript

https://claude.ai/share/150cb79e-081f-4120-9e8a-0dd80d9a12c2

ChatGPT