Trade

• No open positions in TLT at start of day
• Down to $87 now, didn't get in on ex dividend day but that's ok. Would have lost $100 with the share price going down from $88 (or higher). Dividend would had been $30 something. Very easy to lose that in price fluctuations.
• Sticking with my thesus of targetting premium that is multiples of what interest would be on cash. So if I write a CSP, that's $8,700 collateral which is a little less than $1/d in interest from RobinHood Gold's 4%. So if I exceed that by multiples, it's in theory worth it. Granted things can shift but that's what the wheel is for.
• Sold $87p for 7/9 for $0.43 credit. Set BTC limit at $0.02 so that's $40 for 6 days, much more than the $6 I would get on the cash alone.
• I like insurance so I bought $87p - 7/11 @ $0.01. This then reduces my collateral to $550. So I get to make nearly the same amount of interest over the long weekend on my cash. $41/$550 is a little over 7%, not bad for 6 days.
• I didn't want the $87 strike but premium on $86.5 was like half so I stuck with my main thesus of selecting the option with most extrinsic value. $87 took a little to get rid of last time but seems like TLT is on a bit of an uptrend so hopefully will be OK. If not, I'll just keep selling $87cc's farther out. As long as I beat interest, should be worth it. Even if I have to keep the shares for a while, I can keep getting dividend premiums which right now is slightly higher than the 4% on cash.
• Need to keep learning patience. Price was above $88 during ex dividend but that was towards the high-end of bands.

Rough EOM P/L

• Since a purely simple wheel strategy is shown to do worse than buy and hold, I wanted to know if I did better wheeling this month.
• Threw my RH report into ChatGPT which came back with a total TLT P/L of $264.57 which sounds believeable.
• Update: Actually I can just sum the totals across all transactions easily, P/L comes to $217.62 which of course is much worse.
• Price of TLT if bought on June 3rd -> $85.01. If sold today at close: $86.97. Buy and hold profit would had been $196. But I would have also received the dividend of $32.83 so total of $228.83.
• My cash interest in RH account dropped by $17.80, interest on $8,500 is normally about $27.95 so I retained about $10 interest with wheeling as I wasn't always long on shares. Actual P/L $274.57
• So total advantage over buy and hold for this past month is $45.74. So a little more than doubling interest on my cash.
• Out of curriosity, TLTW does a similar strategy but more passively. How did that do?
• June 3rd price of $22.32, closing today at $22.78. Would have been 380 shares for similar capital contribution. Dividend of $0.31368/share or $119.1984 total. So $174.80 in share appreciation + $119.20 dividends is $294. So I was beaten by about $20 had I just owned TLTW instead.

Learnings

• I meant to get the June dividend for TLT by buying on Jun 2nd which was the ex dividend date, however that purchase settled on Jun 3rd so I never received the dividend. Would have been $31.95 placing me at a theoretical $306.52 and beating TLTW by $12.
• I broke my strategy for retaining the dividend had I owned shares. Granted I would had been down on equity by more at this point though but idea is to just sell the CC's. Initial idea started with dividend capture, think I need to hold onto that.
• I had fun and wasn't stressed out so wasn't a lot of work but only made like $17 vs b/h.
• This will be boring eventually so I really need to improve my strategy in order for it to be worth it.
• Like what? Ideas...

Same but modified strategy

• If I'm going to get assigned on short put, on expiration day, open another spread. Less likely I'll get assigned there too but if I do I can cover it, lot of capital though.
• Considered just selling the shares immediately after assignment and buying deep ITM call instead in order to tie up less capital. Lot more complicated, have to make sure premium on call is limited, less than one CC premium. Bit more risk, if TLT goes down $2 then I'm out $200 unless I exercise or keep buying calls as they expire. Also can't get dividends without exercising. Ties up less capital though, but what is point of that if getting cash interest is already not that great? Only real benefit here is if I do a lot of these and I'd certainly have to ignore dividends at this point, then why even use TLT?

Different strategies

• Could just sell deeper ITM calls one month out past ex-dividend date and target a premium a tad higher than interest on the principal. Would protect against a significant downturn, could sell Aug 8 $84c for $3.40 right now which would be about $40 (interest on $8,700 for 36 days is $34.32). $84 would be decent protection. Of course there is a risk of early assignment due to dividend. So I'd break even roughly with just keeping cash but then I took on risk and got nothing for it. Also no upside potential over the month. Not enough market depth ITM either, best I could do for Aug 1 would be the $81c which would cost me $35 in premium($6.35). $87c for July 9th is $39 so that would cover it. Could sell $87.5c for Aug 1 instead, would be $69 profit ($104) which is like double interest on full notional principal. Effectively $69/$635 or a little over 10%, not bad for 1 month. Getting 7% on the put spread trade above for 6days though. Compounding here on shorter time windows can be powerful but underlying price swings will cut more. If short is OTM on Aug 1, exercise long call and recieve dividend. Could only do that on one or two contracts though. Otherwise have to sell and possibly re-buy if sold for loss. But in theory, $8700 in capital used here could render 8700/(635-104) = 16 spreads for theoretical premium profit of $1,100. Not bad for a month's work. In reality though I would probably do the weeklies not just because premium is higher on a per day basis but it would expose me to different cost basis which would help average out fluctuations. Also, because strike in my example is $0.50 above current share price, there's a potential additional $800 in upside here. Nearly $2,000 per month. Of course should try with fewer spreads first, can't get dollar signs in my eyes and make poor decisions.
• Wonder if just holding TLT or muni's in a SPAN margin account and then trading treasury futures would effectively be the same thing I'm doing here just possibly better capital usage.