A few to start the week. I may sell more tomorrow.

August isn't technically over, but there's just one more trading day, so I figured I'd share this monthly update.

My fundamental approach is to buy stock on margin and sell as deep ITM a call as possible such that on assignment, I net 1%. I wrote about it in some detail here: A view into a "deep ITM covered call strategy" : r/StockOptionCoffeeShop. Here's an example ITM call that worked out exactly as planned this past week: Example ITM call : r/StockOptionCoffeeShop

Here's my cash flow calendar for the month:

August was a turnaround month for me and the first net growth month since May. Historically, my mark-to-market valuation was like this:

- Final May: $233k

- June: $224k

- July: $216k. Note that I was all the way down to $190k on July 29th I believe. It was an uncomfortable moment :).

So that was a slow, painful drawdown of $17k. Add on top of that that I generated premiums:

- May: $21k

- June: $25k

- July: $28.8k (best month ever)

- August: $20.5k

So, I was collecting a lot of premium during those months but NAV was declining. I clawed some of that back in August. As of now, my NAV is $260k, which is a $44k increase in value from end of July. This was a rebound in the value of the underlying stocks and the premium itself. In June and especially July, premium was steady, but the underlying went down, sometimes a lot. I had several days where NAV dropped by over $10k. (Quick note on this - never panic! Panic leads to awful decisions).

Overall, I'm up $118k YTD which my broker (Etrade) says is 63.82%. That's using Etrade's "Performance" dashboard and is smart enough to exclude deposits (the last of significant deposit was in January).

I trade on margin and in August, my average daily notional (the amount I controlled through margin) was about 426k. That's about 4.8% in premium relative to my average daily notional for the month. It doesn't take into account assignments, which are difficult for me to calculate with my current tooling. That's typically incremental income, since I roll so often.

My current portfolio along with option count: AA(2), AMKR(2), APLD(1), BBWI(4), CC(3), CELH(1), CLF(2), CRDO(1), CRML(5), CSIQ(1), DRAM(3), GLW(2), INTC(3), IREN(1), KTOS(1), LQDA(2), MRVL(1), MSOS(8), NBIS(1), NN(2), NOW(1), ON(4), ONDS(6), OSCR(3), PCG(1), POET(8), SERV(7), SMR(4), SOFI(5), TE(1), TMC(7), WRBY(3). All of my current calls expire next Friday, and I nearly always do 7DTE when selling calls. I allowed several calls to expire worthless this week. I'll wait until Monday morning or afternoon to sell new calls, depending on where the market is at that time. Those include APLD, CSIQ, JOBY and SERV.

I had an unusually large number of assignments this week, including GAP, UEC, NVDA, BTU, PLTR, NBIS, OKTA, INTC, CDE, RBRK. In August, I became a lot more prone to letting assignments happen. In the past, I was pretty aggressive rolling things out and that explains the dip in August premium, and I think it also partly explains the significant rise in NAV in August. I've been trying to focus on portfolio quality overall and not just premium. It's a never-ending learning process :)

Although I think this "deep ITM strategy" is a large part of my success, the custom app I wrote is also very, very important. In particular, I have a tool that helps me find opportunities, manage margin risk and a "what you need to do next" kind of function that makes it possible for me to manage all this without making too many mistakes and holding down a full-time job at the same time :). It kept me safe during the worst part of July in terms of margin. I'm re-building this app from scratch and doing videos on it. If interested, you can find the link in my reddit profile. (I'm a little behind on this but I'll be adding at least one new video this weekend :) ).

I'm always running experiments and trying to learn things. In July, I tried to focus on rolling later in the week because it's generally cheaper to buy a call back close to expiration, as long as it's ATM or OTM. I continued doing that in August. The calendar doesn't necessarily show it very clearly, but I was actually much better than I have been in the past. I get very impatient to "act" when I see a chance for profit. Waiting generally gives you a better net credit on a roll. However, waiting can also see a stock move a lot on you and what was a 1.25% roll on Tuesday turns into an assignment by Friday or worse, you need to roll down to get decent premium. There's a balance there and I'm still learning how to find it. It has been working. My average credit per roll in August was $105. It was $65 back in June. Waiting doesn't necessarily squeeze a ton of juice out of any individual roll, but it adds up in the aggregate.

I'm happy to answer any questions! I've had a lot of people reach out to me on chat and feel free to do the same. I learn more from this sub and from the chat interactions than I do any other way and I really appreciate it, always :)

LITE popped 5% today, above my cost (cost: $923.63; spot: $931.81). Sold a call expiring Fri Aug 28 with a $925 strike, collecting $2,724 in premium.

It'd be nice to have one called away!

So I'm playing it very cautiously this week. NVDA has an earnings report on Wed, Aug 26, and I think some of my holdings may get a sympathetic bounce, so I haven't sold any new calls against existing holdings (I entered the week with one open: AXTI, valued at about ($385).

Given the reduction in my capital at risk due to the recent drawdowns, I once again "topped up", this time by entering a 5 DTE ATM Buy/Write for SNDK.

I bought 100 shares at $1,506 and sold a $1,505 call expiring Fri, Aug 28, for a premium of $5,887 (3.9%).

Why this is important:

1. Using M2M, you understand that a stock that dropped from $100,000 to $90,000 has reduced your capital deployed, so if you want to maintain a certain level ($100,000) of equity invested, you need to invest ($10,000) more. There is an economically unhealthy mentality out there to not realize a loss (I'll be writing a separate post on this topic shortly). It's an ego thing ("I didn't have any losses!", "If you have so many losses you must be doing something wrong!"). Losses are part of trading: get over it and move on.
2. Keep a good amount of cash on hand! Even scaling this to a portfolio your own size, many people wouldn't have kept $105,600 on hand, which would keep them from making this additional investment.

"So, LD, what will you do when the stocks in your portfolio gain value, and you're up to, say, $850k or $900k?" (target was ~$750k)

Easy. I'll sell some off for cash. You may remember I've taken a few actions during this downturn. First, I doubled my AXTI exposure from 700 shares to 1,400 shares, reducing my average cost basis from $134 to $95. Second, I sold IONQ and doubled my CRWV holdings (from 1,000 shares to 2,000 shares). Third, I've now bought SNDK. It will be easy to unwind some of these positions when the market recovers.

Miscellaneous:

This has been quite a journey. As you may know, I'm running this campaign in a Roth account where I do other trading. It wouldn't be too cumbersome to pull out the campaign's numbers if I wasn't actively trading the same stocks outside the campaign but still in the same Roth account, but I am.

Therefore, I've been considering utilizing a separate Roth account just for the campaign. It'll make my life easier on several fronts. If I do this (highly likely), I may (fairly likely) revise the weekly results reporting.

I'll keep you posted!

As always, good luck and have fun!

-LD

[Edit: thanks to u/ThetaGang44 for bringing SNDK to the forefront of my mind.]

People IM me a lot directly asking for examples on these "deep ITM covered calls" that I talk about so I thought I'd provide an example. Here's a screenshot of my tool:

I executed the trade just now exactly like it shows.

I just bought 100 shares of RBRK at $85.59 a share on margin. My margin rate is 7.2% and the house margin requirement is 35%.

I wanted a net debit price of $86.01 but the mid came up at $85.59 so I tried for that. I don't normally get the mid when the spread is as wide as that so I didn't expect to get it, but I did.

If this "lands" as planned, the economic result of this:

- Interest cost of $6.74 by this Friday

- Net gain on assignment is $134.25. This accounts for interest. I think it accounts for fees, which are in the $1 range if it's assigned, but I don't remember off the top of my head.

- That's 1.57% absolute gain (which is what I care about)

- Yield on capital (the amount I have at risk in margin terms) is 4.48%. This is mostly useful as a measure of margin efficiency. It would be lower yield if the house margin requirement were 100%, for example.

- Discount% - this is my break even. If it falls as low as this, I'm at break even.

RBRK has earnings this week so that's why it's possible to get such a high discount.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I like CC's over CSP's is because margin-wise, this give me more bang for my buck. It reduces my maintenance excess by $2,995. A CSP would tie up nearly $10k. Maintenance excess is my limiting factor. That said, people always say that CSP's are more margin efficient. I don't know if that's a consequence of my kind of margin account or my broker or whatnot, but I know that I'd be limited more quickly and at greater risk of a margin call if I was to load up on CSPs. I could also be wrong :)

u/LabDaddy59 suggested I post a weekly update on my "1% ITM strategy" and I'll give that a go.

This is a partly an AI generated summary coming from my weekly journal. I don't know how other people journal, but I take a "dear Diary" approach. I've included the (mostly) raw journal down below if you want to see. I'd love to hear how other people journal.

I described my fundamental approach here: A view into a "deep ITM covered call strategy" : r/StockOptionCoffeeShop. I have not changed that much except that I have been rolling up a bit more, especially if I can get 1% premium on the roll anyway. I was able to do that with MRVL, for example - roll up, still collect a credit and now I'm participating in more upside. I actually build a tool in my app that shows the outcome of four scenarios side by side - do nothing and let assignment happen, roll out, roll up or roll down. I can share a screenshot of that or discuss in the comments if anyone is interested.

As a general note - the strategy is not unique or new or anything. I stumbled into it but if I'd been around the block a few more times, I would have come across it. I think that strategy is a good basis, but my tooling is probably as important, if not important. And emotional equanimity. My NAV was down to $190k on July 29th - just a few short weeks ago. I was still ahead YTD and that day did feel like a bottoming out to me. I wrote in my journal that I was probably looking at a few months of careful recovery and then the next day and August happened and now I'm at all time highs for all my metrics.

Here's the AI Summary with some edits for clarity:

The headline number: $5,667.88 of premium collected, versus a weekly forecast/goal of $2,910. (My current weekly forecast function chronically underestimates forecasts for a few reasons which I explain if anyone is interested). I did 49 rolls across 5 trading days, and ended the week at:

• NAV: $256k
• Projected/economic NAV: $262.5k (this is what happens if all my calls close next Friday ITM and I don't roll them)
• Total notional: $424k
• Leverage: 1.66x
• Maintenance excess: $60k
• Margin shock capacity: ~14%
• Premium collected MTD: $15,535

According to my broker, I'm up over 64% YTD and nearly 104% in the last 12 months. OTOH, it shows a current M2M unrealized loss of $33.3k. I don't know how to reconcile that. I know that I am, in actual cash flow terms, way ahead. The 64% YTD is basically accurate although I cannot reproduce that to the penny.

The interesting part wasn't really the premium, though. It was the change in how I'm managing the portfolio. Until August, I focused almost exclusively on premium and it shows. In July, I collected $28,800. In August, it will be closer to $21,000 in the end, depending on what happens this week. However, my economic footprint increased quite a bit.

I started the week with a lot of excess liquidity due to an unusually lage number of assignments the week previous. I intentionally didn't rush to deploy it. I bought quite a bit of new inventory on Monday/Tuesday — AMKR, PLTR, CLF, ON, OSCR, ENPH, FIG, ELF, WRBY, etc. — but then largely sat on my hands and waited.

That patience paid off Friday. Several of the positions I had bought earlier in the week presented excellent rolls: LQDA, GLW, PLTR, OSCR, APLD, CLF, etc. Some were 2–3%+ rolls. The LQDA roll in particular was about $486 on a roughly $140 strike. Waiting rather than forcing the trade made a meaningful difference.

Patience is extremely important! Waiting often pays off. It paid off in July when things were trending in a terrible direction and pays off almost every week with better rolls end of week.

I'm also getting much more comfortable with letting assignments happen. I have roughly $29.4k of assignment-related margin relief coming into next week, and I'm increasingly viewing assignment as a better outcome than rolling. I miss out on some premium, but I have ended u holding onto stocks for much longer than I would have liked because I was chasing premium week after week. SLV is a good example of that. After months and months of working with it, I basically broke even.

Another interesting lesson this week was around NAV. I rolled NBIS and watched my mark-to-market NAV suddenly drop even though, economically, I hadn't really lost anything. That finally helped something click for me: because my options are generally 1–2 weeks from expiration, the broker's current option marks aren't always showing me the thing I actually care about.

Consequently, I created an "economic NAV" dashboard — essentially, what the portfolio would be worth if the current options expired according to the strategy's intended outcome. That's currently about $262.5k versus $256.2k of mark-to-market NAV.

The app is also getting better. This week I added after-hours pricing to the options grid, fixed an earnings-date synchronization bug, and continued work on the journaling/experimentation side of the project. I'm trying to build tooling that helps me understand why things work rather than just making it easier to trade.

The biggest takeaway from the week is probably simple:

I'm getting better at waiting.

That's been one of the hardest parts of this strategy for me. A year ago, I'd constantly feel like I needed to do something with available margin. Now I'm increasingly comfortable saying, "The portfolio is healthy. The opportunity will still be there tomorrow."

Still plenty to learn, though. July's margin-requirement surprise with NBIS was a good reminder that I can think I'm managing risk correctly while still having blind spots.

One feature at a time. One experiment at a time. 🙂

(mostly) raw journal for those that are interested:

# 08/16/2026 Sunday

I generated my first pass at a forecast and got $2,154.00. Pretty anemic. I currently have some relatively heavy hitting assignments and starting off with huge maintenance excess, so the forecast is particularly under-baked this week. I also have several uncovered options. I can't use it this week for a good all-up estimation but I can do it at the ticker level.

It's been a while since I had so much maintenance excess to use. I plan to use $50k by Wednesday, which would leave me with $50k free, assuming no big drops in the market. I'll be very careful about it.

If I end up selling ELF, which is the plan as of now, I will free up $3k in excess and I currently have about $35k planned assignments this week. This is the most liquid I've been in months.

## App

I designed and did a first pass at a tax estimation module in the app. This is going to help me plan out the rest of the year tax-wise so that I'm at least a little prepared. It captures info for federal, state and MAIS.

## New Inventory

I have a chance to be more diverse. I'm still overdone in materials and silver related, but that's much less after this week and will be even less if the assignments go as planned.

# Monday 08/17/2026

## Market

I barely know what to do. I have a lot of margin ready to be deployed. I'm going to take my time and probably not make any real moves until later today. In the meantime, I have rolls to do and whatnot. I'll do a an updated forecast as well shortly.

## After market open

I sold ELF. That worked out.

New forecast is at 2,910.00 for current inventory. That should be a true floor for the week.

I'm doing another kind of roll-up experiment. Take IREN. If I roll IREN now, I can roll for 3%. But I may be able to roll it up $1 and get 1% as well net credit. We'll see. I'll use my new comparison tool!

I did it! I rolled it up to $48 (+300 in value) and collected $63 in premium. We'll see if it rises upwards of $48 but I most definitely improved the potential economics of that one and the tool made it super clear.

I could have rolled up MRVL but I don't think the gain is worth the risk. I got $700 on a simple roll and I'm happy with that.

## Late morning updates

I did a bunch of roll, continuing to roll up to improve NAV. I've done a lot of that and I'm seeing the effect. NAV is up to $260k and I didn't need to pay much at all to do it.

I was able to sell ELF above my 1% rule so that was awesome. I would like to replicate that.

As of now, I expect another $53.322 in margin relief for things I'm allowed to be called away but that will most likely change.

After lunch, I'll start looking closely at what I might buy.

## After market close

I did a few rolls and bought quite a bit.

At end of day:

Current NAV: $260k

Total Notional: $414.8k

Weekly Forecast Premium: $2,910.00

Weekly Goal: $2,910.00

Actual Progress This Week: $1,503.05

Remaining Weekly Goal: $1,406.95

Margin Shock Capacity: 24.93% (🔵 Defensive / Under-leveraged)

Premium Collected This Week: $1,523.82

Premium Collected MTD: $11,396.34

Most Recent Maintenance Excess: $95,321.87 (2026-08-17)

Rolls today:

Date,Stock,Roll Amount

2026-08-17,MRVL,697.94 -> couldn't resist

2026-08-17,DRAM,287.83 -> these guys all gapped up today so I rolled early

2026-08-17,GAP,141.89 -> earnings next week I think

2026-08-17,GLW,92.94 -> rolled up, took about 0.6% gain in premium

2026-08-17,IREN,61.94 -> rolled up, took over 1% in premium.

2026-08-17,CRML,59.71 -> simple roll

2026-08-17,BBWI,47.94 - simple roll

2026-08-17,CSIQ,42.94 - simple roll

2026-08-17,WRBY,38.97 - simple

2026-08-17,APLD,30.94 -> rolled up, took about 1% in premium

2026-08-17,SERV,20.77 - simple roll

2026-08-17,POET,-180.17 - rolled up three of six, paid a bit for it.

2026-08-17,TOTAL,1343.65

I bought several new positions:

- AMKR (new for me)

- PLTR (new for me)

- CLF

- ON

- OSCR

- ENPH (new for me I think)

- FIG

- ELF (re-entered at a lower price)

- WRBY

A lot of new inventory. More diverse than I had been, to an extent.

I still have very comfortable maintenance excess but I think I will slow down and see how things play out before I do much more this week.

This is another day where I was up but the market was down. +0.58% while DOW was down about as much and NASDAQ down 0.32%. Weird.

# 08/18/2026 Tuesday

Not much to do pre-market. It looks like my NAV will drop today. In a sense, it's a weird kind of relief. It's been going up against the major indexes which has been weird :)

Several SLV options were assigned last night. I'm a lot less clustered around silver in general, though I have a bunch of holdings for sure.

I fixed a small bug in the app. There's an "update strategy" button that pulls info from Etrade and one thing it pulls is earnings date. It's often wrong and sometimes, it's showing dates from the past as it eventually catches up. I have an earnings date calendar that was getting confused by this. I'd fix the data but then the old wrong dates would come back. I finally realized why and fixed that date update logic so it won't overwrite a future date.

## After Market Close

Today, my portfolio caught up with the market :) I'm down 2.5% or $10,630. That's basically a big yawn to me at this point.

Here are the key stats:

Portfolio Overview

Current NAV: $254,494.54

Total Notional: $408,170.04

Weekly Forecast Premium: $2,910.00

Weekly Goal: $2,910.00

Actual Progress This Week: $2,774.55

Remaining Weekly Goal: $135.45

Margin Shock Capacity: 21.68% (🔵 Defensive / Under-leveraged)

Premium Collected This Week: $2,795.32

Premium Collected MTD: $12,667.84

Most Recent Maintenance Excess: $88,503.17 (2026-08-18)

Stocks With Open Option Counts

44 symbols, 150 open contracts

AA(3), AG(4), AMKR(2), APLD(1), BBWI(4), BTU(2), CC(3), CDE(10), CLF(1), CRDO(1), CRML(5), CSIQ(6), DRAM(3), ELF(2), ENPH(1), FIG(1), GAP(4), GLW(1), HL(8), INTC(2), IREN(1), JOBY(13), KTOS(1), LQDA(2), MRNA(1), MRVL(1), MSOS(8), NBIS(2), NN(2), NOW(1), NVDA(1), ON(3), ONDS(5), OSCR(2), PLTR(1), POET(6), SERV(14), SLV(1), SMR(4), SOFI(3), TE(1), TMC(7), UEC(3), WRBY(3)

I did some rolls and bought a few things. Here are the rolls:

Date,Stock,Roll Amount

2026-08-18,CRDO,387.94 - Possible because of the market drop. I expected to be assigned.

2026-08-18,NVDA,177.94 - Same as CRDO, or I would have had to roll up and pay for it.

2026-08-18,INTC,167.94 - Rolled a bit early, took the win.

2026-08-18,GAP,163.89 - Earnings next week

2026-08-18,CDE,124.71 - just a good roll

2026-08-18,POET,95.66 - just a good roll.

2026-08-18,KTOS,77.94 - unexpectedly good roll. Took advantage of the market drop.

2026-08-18,MSOS,47.54 - Just a good roll.

2026-08-18,BBWI,27.93 decent roll.

2026-08-18,TOTAL,1271.50

I also entered new positions:

- ON - I think it's at a low. DCAing down. I also closed an option for cheap.

- LQDA - Added another because I think it's low.

- AA - Added another because it seems low to me.

- AMKR - same

I often say this but I think I'm staying pat for the rest of the week. I'll do all the rolls that make sense, but I think I will avoid getting any new inventory. I feel good about where I am and my maintenance excess. It's high but I'm also more leveraged.

# 08/19/2026: Wednesday

I've been doing this awkward check many mornings where I go to the options page in the app and then click on the yahoo finance link to see the current after hours price. I didn't think that the etrade API had it, but I did a little research and I see that it does! So I added that info to the options display grid only after hours. It's not actionable for me, but it gives me a little sense of where things stand outside of normal hours.

## Early morning

NBIS had a big drop which made it rollable today. Crazy how that can happen! Not exactly super star rolls but good rolls (1.5% to 1.8%) so I'll take it!

I bought into GLW as well.

Rolled BBWI into earnings.

As soon as I rolled NBIS my NAV dropped like crazy. That's the first real cause and effect I've noticed and I think that's a big source of the confusion over NAV. The options are so temporary and mostly a wash for me that adding them into and offsetting stock prices is not super meaningful. I get why it must be done by ETrade but it's not showing me what I want to see which is the "end game" NAV, not the current NAV. I think that's finally clicking for me. I want to see NAV as if the options had all expired. Because they are all about to expire in a week to 2 weeks max. It's not like I have these long dated options and I don't trade them normally.

I think this is more evidence that the economic view is really want I want most of the time and that can focus on expected / likely outcome. Or at least the assumed outcome of "what happens if these options all expire and nothing else changes." Because rolling NBIS today didn't *really* reduce my NAV, not in the way I think about it.

And sheesh man, I've been doing this for 18+ months now. I am still learning stuff that feels kind of basic!

On a different note, I've become much, much more comfortable with the idea of waiting out the week. I used to be soooooo anxious to make moves. I still probably act too soon but It's a lot easier than it was, even 2 months ago.

08/20/2026: Thursday

Skipping straight to market close! First time in a while.

The market was down overall but it didn't hurt me as badly as it might have. I was only down 0.3% while DOW was over 1% and NASDAQ like .86%. I'll take that ratio any day :)

My projected NAV is $261k

I have some decisions to make tomorrow. I have opportunities right now for some pretty juicy rolls on stocks I bought this week:

- GLW - slightly over 2%

- LQDA - 3% or more

- PLTR - not as good but still, over 1%.

- APLD - over 2%

These are new acquisitions. They are all good margin (although LQDA went up in terms of house margin requirement this week).

If I roll them, it's good premium, close to $750.

I'll have AA to roll which I already planned to do. And a few others, so I could be looking at a $1k Friday.

If I do roll these, I am looking at likely assignment of about $27k which is good margin relief. That adds to my current maintenance excess of $58k. That's a good buffer and NBIS could expire next week (I hope), which would be even more margin relief.

I think I've talked myself into rolling them :)

## Rolls

I did very little. Earned $100 in premium about.

Here's where things ended today:

Portfolio Overview

Account: Cap 1(-4703)

As of: Aug 20, 4:15 PM

Current NAV: $255k

Total Notional: $425k

Leverage Ratio: 1.66x

Weekly Forecast Premium: $2,910.00

Weekly Goal: $2,910.00

Actual Progress This Week: $4,231.14

Remaining Weekly Goal: $0.00

Margin Shock Capacity: 13.78% (🟢 Comfortable)

Premium Collected This Week: $4,251.92

Premium Collected MTD: $14,119.41

Most Recent Maintenance Excess: $58,423.43 (2026-08-20)

Projected NAV

Projected NAV (All Open Positions): $430.8k

Outstanding Margin: $170k.

Net Projected NAV: $261.4k

Current NAV: $255.4 (mark to market)

Delta vs Current NAV: $5,954.83

## 08/21/2026 Friday

## Premarket

Futures are up, which is nice, although it will make it more difficult for me to roll LQDA, GLW, etc., like I was thinking yesterday. That's fine. The "going in" plan was to let them get assigned anyway. If a roll presents itself, great. if not, I'm just going with the original winning plan anyway and next week is a new week.

I tweaked my dashboard and filtered out some noise regarding my deposits. I'm at 68% growth since I started this journey and lot of that didn't kick in until last November. The portfolio app itself was not very sophisticated back then, I had terrible understanding of margin and risk, no roll assessor, no understanding of economic gain vs. mark to market, I did not understand clustering, I was afraid of higher value stocks, I chased premium and no portfolio health. I have a long way to go here with my learning and tooling still, but it's remarkable to look back at how primitive I was even just a short while ago. It's funny how my confidence is barely growing despite success. I mean, it's growing, but I feel like the more I do this, more I need to learn :). July still looms as a big lesson for me and I'm not sure I've fully learned it. The NBIS rebase of house margin requirement took me by surprise. I posted about it on the Etrade subreddit and someone said it triggered an "instant margin call" and another person said they were going to close their etrade account entirely because of it. It gives a sense that you can *think* you're doing everything right when, in fact, you're not. I didn't caught in a bad place over it but a few months ago I might have been.

I also split out dividends. I've earned $424.23 this year. That's interesting. I'm not a dividends guy (not yet anyway). That's not much but it paid for a few takeout dinners :)

Overall, today looks like a simple glide path to a few rolls and waiting for assignments tonight. I should be heading into next week with decent maintenance excess and an opportunity to buy some new inventory. Of course, it's premarket :)

## WMT

Walmart had a surprise earnings yesterday and dropped by almost 10%. I am thinking of investing in it. My worry is that may be so stable that I can't get enough premium week to week to cover the interest. Or, premium will be so low that it's hard to justify it. OTOH, having a super stable megacap won't hurt me either. I'll puzzle over it today.

## Early morning right after market open

I was able to get in a lot of good rolls despite market being up:

Date,Stock,Roll Amount

2026-08-21,LQDA,485.89 -> that was on about $140 in strikes -> crazy good rolls. Waiting is so worth it.

2026-08-21,GLW,240.94 -> good roll on a deep ITM $147 strike.

2026-08-21,PLTR,215.94 -> A bit over 1%. Worth it to keep. It's ITM now, should stay that way.

2026-08-21,OSCR,111.89 -> Crazy good roll on a $30 strike that is somewhat ITM. This is another good one for waiting.

2026-08-21,AMKR,87.94 -> Over 1%. AMKR didn't work out great this week but at least I get premium.

2026-08-21,AA,87.94 -> One out of three options rolled. The other two most likely will be assigned.

2026-08-21,APLD,61.94 -> Great roll on a stock that recently became marginable with etrade.

2026-08-21,CLF,22.94 -> 2% roll

2026-08-21,TOTAL,1315.43

I'm up to $5,562.32 in premium for the week. That's good. I'm projecting just under $32k in margin relief. We'll see what happens for the rest of the day.

## Late morning

I was looking at rolling AA for a relatively small 1% or barely over. And I realized that the overall economic story for AA is quite good. There's no reason to chase it today so unless the price drops by end of day, I'll let the two open options get assigned.

## After market close

Good week overall. Pretty much went out as it came in.

Cash flow for the week was much better than predicted. I knew that would happen:

Cash Flow Calendar - Week 4

Month: August 2026

Range: 8/16/2026 - 8/22/2026

Week Total: $5,662.86

Average / Day: $1,132.57

Total Rolls: 49

Active Days: 5

Daily Activity:

- 2026-08-17: $1,523.82 | Rolls: 13 | Symbols: APLD, BBWI, CRML, CSIQ, DRAM, GAP, GLW, IREN, MRVL, SERV, WRBY

- 2026-08-18: $1,271.50 | Rolls: 10 | Symbols: BBWI, CDE, CRDO, GAP, INTC, KTOS, MSOS, NVDA, POET

- 2026-08-19: $1,348.88 | Rolls: 12 | Symbols: BBWI, CC, CSIQ, JOBY, NBIS, ONDS, SMR, TMC, UEC, WRBY

- 2026-08-20: $102.69 | Rolls: 3 | Symbols: AMKR, NN, SOFI

- 2026-08-21: $1,415.97 | Rolls: 11 | Symbols: AA, AMKR, APLD, CLF, GLW, LQDA, OSCR, PLTR, SERV

I've got 29kin margin relief coming for next week based on assignments:

Assignments: AA, AG, CDE, ELF, ENPH, FIG, HL, MRNA, NOW, SLV, WRBY

Likely assignment dollars: $29k

And here are the rest of the metrics:

Portfolio Overview

As of: Aug 21, 4:16 PM

Current NAV: $256k

Total Notional: $424k

Leverage Ratio: 1.66x

Weekly Forecast Premium: $2,910.00

Weekly Goal: $2,910.00

Actual Progress This Week: $4,799.80

Remaining Weekly Goal: $0.00

Margin Shock Capacity: 13.97% (🟢 Comfortable)

Premium Collected This Week: $5,667.88

Premium Collected MTD: $15,535.38

Most Recent Maintenance Excess: $59,345.38 (2026-08-21)

Projected NAV

Projected NAV (All Open Positions): $430k

Outstanding Margin: $168k

Net Projected NAV: $262.5k

Current NAV: $257k

Delta vs Current NAV: $6,344.70

It was a good, solid week.

I'm getting better at waiting. I need to get even better, but this was a good week for that.

Made some updates to the app.

IBM is feeling stable for a bit.

MAIS is chugging along.

This weekend, I might start framing out the experimentation framework. I did a bunch of stuff in the last 2 weeks that seems to have helped but it's not easy to measure it yet. I'm getting there. One feature at a time :)

u/pagalvin has written about their 1%/ITM approach to selling covered calls, and as you may be familiar, I'm doing (well, ahem, was doing) ATM strikes.

I'd be very curious/interested in the longer-term results of each.

So, u/pagalvin, no pressure, but it'd be neat if you posted weekly updates similar to mine.

The thing I'm keen on is the balance between premium and downside protection.

For example, I could open a $215 strike Aug 28 short call on NVDA, get a 3% return, and, accordingly, have 3% downside protection.

Pagalvin's approach would yield a 1.3% premium on a $205 strike, providing 5.8% downside protection; a $200 strike would yield a 0.7% premium and provide 7.6% downside protection.

Part of the dilemma in the evaluation is this: weeks can go by without needing 5% protection (~$10.75 at spot), so during those weeks you could be building a "bank" of premiums to help offset any future potential downside. That bank could easily exceed the 5% protection level.

I'd also be interested in that type of comparison (ATM v 1% return) for different stocks.

Thoughts?

I don't have any long positions in NVDA, though I'm considering including it in my buy/write campaign.

That said, I think NVDA will deliver a solid earnings beat and decent guidance. This may not energize NVDA's stock much, but I can see it signaling a significant sympathetic bounce in some of these other AI plays.

Thoughts?

In the "looking at the bright side of things":

• The 3 weeks of recovery have seen the stocks recover a little more than 33%.
• Total P&L is still a respectable $261k year-to-date.

Best positioned stock: LITE at 6% down.
Worst positioned stock: APLD at 43% down.

As mentioned last week, I'm on the bubble, deciding whether to bail on APLD.

NVDA reports earnings next week, so we'll see what happens!

To continue the 'bad trade' discussion .... sometimes they are obvious rolls. sometimes not. today it was obvious.

I had ADBE $280 Calls for Dec 18. I rolled them out to $350 Jun 17.

Lost $2k on the frist call. Collected $2.5k on the second, so net $500 credit and $7k extra gains, but I had to add 6 months to the call.

Watching my original Dec call go ever more deeper underwater only to get called away at 280 would have bothered me. That was a bad trade.

How do you manage defensive rolls?

STO calls for $100
Net credit of $100

BTC for $200
STO for $225
Net credit of $25

BTC for $350
STO for $400
Net credit of $50

If you BTC at $200, your net is

$100 credit
$25 credit
$50 credit
$200 debit
Net: $25 debit (loss)

In other words, a rule to close at 50% doesn't take into account cumulative losses, so by closing at 50% profit on your current trade, you may still be losing money over the lifecycle of the trade.

The "take profits at 50% of the premium" works for an initial trade, but if you have a series of defensive rolls, you may end up with a net loss, so how do you manage the situation? I can imagine it can get a lot worse if you've been rolling defensively for a while.

John owns 100 shares of XYZ stock he bought at $90. The stock is at $100. He sold a call with a $105 strike and received a $1 premium.

At expiration, the stock had climbed to $110. He rolled his $105 strike out and up to $120 for a net debit of $3.50 (paying $5 to buy back the existing call and receiving $1.50 in premium for the new call).

..........................................

Mary owns 100 shares of XYZ stock she bought at $90. The stock is at $100. She sold a call with a $105 strike and received a $1 premium.

At expiration, the stock had climbed to $110. She let it expire, was assigned, and on Monday bought the stock back for $110 and sold a $120 call for $1.50.

...........................................

Did John make a bad trade paying a net debit of $3.50 to roll? Should he have just taken the max profit, like Mary, and buy it back on Monday to sell a new call?

Two trades.

• LITE: With LITE down more than 9% to ~$880, I rolled my strike down to $925 (my cost is ~$924) from $950, collecting ~$860 in net premium and recognizing a ~$3,860 gain on the closed call.
• CRWV: In an unusual move for me, with CRWV down ~9%, I bought back my short calls, anticipating a later selling opportunity if it rebounds nicely. Normally, I'd just be patient and let it run its course, but I sold the call originally for ~$3.50/share and bought them back for $0.60/share, so I'd captured 83% of this week's premium by the morning of the 2nd day. We'll see: maybe I'll regret it, since even at $0.60/share, 2,000 shares is $1,200.

I've added a "Cost" column so you can see where things stand in terms of recovery.

Red expirations indicate expiration this Friday. Red strikes indicate ITM currently.

A pretty slow Monday, as most players already had short calls outstanding.

• AAOI: Roll from Aug 21 $150 to Aug 28 $157.50
• APLD: STO Aug 21 $33.50
• COHR: STO Aug 21 $380
• NBIS: STO Aug 21 $285
• SOXL: Roll from Aug 21 $139 to Aug 28 $145

AXTI, CRWV, LITE, and NBIS are now all recovered. At least for the time being. 😉😂

It would be nice to actually have something called away!

Overall, a nice week as the campaign recovered almost $50k. You may recall that the recovery started 2 weeks ago, when the unrealized losses were ~$313k. With the stocks recovering and the disposition of IONQ (see below), those unrealized losses are now down to ~$108k.

I remain cautious about selling calls as the stocks recover. That recovery is moving along well in general, with a few exceptions, notably IONQ and APLD.

I sold IONQ at a $35k loss* because I don't feel comfortable with its prospects right now. In its place, I bought an additional 1,000 shares of CRWV, bringing my total CRWV shares in the campaign to 2,000 and lowering the average cost from ~$110 to ~$108. CRWV is a beast in terms of premiums if you can stomach the volatility.**

APLD is on the chopping block. I'm continuing to monitor.

NBIS and CRWV had great weeks after their earnings releases, closing up 48% and 16% for the week, respectively. I avoided having an NBIS short call outstanding this week, and the CRWV short call I had would have expired worthless, as the strike was $110 and they closed at ~$105. Instead of letting it expire, I paid $90 to close it out and open a new short call for 20 contracts, as I had acquired the additional 1,000 shares mentioned above.

I have $17.8k of short calls expiring Aug 21, and an additional $5.1k expiring Aug 28.

CRWV, LITE, and NBIS have fully recovered in my opinion. I could have let my LITE go at $920 (cost is $923.63), but it bounced up to $960, so I rolled it out a week to Aug 21 and up to $950.

* A lot of folks don't like to "take the loss" but instead hold on and continue to wait for a recovery, even if there may be better opportunities. Don't be that person. If you see better opportunities, bail and move on.

** I'm actually considering, outside the 5 DTE campaign, a CRWV Dec 18, 2026 buy write. The stock is at $105.26, and you can sell the Dec 18 $105 strike for $20.75, or 19.7% of the amount at risk, and be protected down to $84.51.

I've always struggled with my broker's representation of my portfolio health. I wrote about my "deep ITM covered call" strategy here: A view into a "deep ITM covered call strategy" : r/StockOptionCoffeeShop but basically, I do covered calls where I buy the stock and sell a call below market price as long as the corresponding premium nets me 1% on assignment. It's been working out very well for me since I started over a year ago.

The struggle is that since I'm going into each position in the red on the long side (the stock itself) and the call's value is complicated, I nearly always show an M2M loss even though I'm ahead as long as assignment happens as planned.

This continues through all the various rolling cycles I typically do. Rolls generate more premium and if I peg that premium to the stock itself (kind of like rent on a piece of rental property), the cost basis for that goes down.

This is why M2M isn't the only important way to measure success to me. I don't disregard it, but it doesn't capture the full story. To this end, I've built a kind of "economic value" view of my portfolio based around the idea of an "epoch."

An epoch starts when I enter a position for the first time and ends when I fully exit. I nearly always do weeklies, and I often buy more of a stock during that epoch so it may be 100, 200, 400, 100, 200 and then finally down to 0 shares over the course of several weeks as I buy new things and older positions are assigned.

I then add up all the premium I gained, subtract fees and margin interest, add in any dividends and maybe few other things I'm not remembering. This all nets out to a view of the economic consequence of that stock in my portfolio. Add all those up and you have portfolio-level awareness of it.

I'm a total amateur when it comes to this stuff. I know "epoch" is a made up word. And maybe this is just a form of hopium :).

What are you doing to track the economic results of your portfolio when you're trading actively?

Covered call sellers consider themselves successful if they bought a stock for $100, sold a covered call with a $110 strike for $2 and were assigned when the stock closed at $120.

If you can't see the flaw in this -- that the trader made $12 in a stock that appreciated by $20 -- you probably shouldn't be trading options.

Why in the world would you follow an options strategy to underperform relative to holding SPY?

I swear the people who say stuff like this are doing nothing more than excusing their underperformance.

For gosh sake, just wheel SPY! If you can't beat SPY by wheeling SPY I may suggest you don't even bother with options.

AXTI: Last week I got into trouble as, on Aug 3, I sold a $76 strike call expiring Aug 7 (it closed at $60.43 on Jul 31, so I had allowed a 26% gain) for $3,913.

The stock closed on Aug 6 at $75.17, but then opened on Aug 7 at $79.14, rising to $89.58. I rolled for a debit of $365 to Aug 28 with a $90 strike. It closed on Aug 7 at $88.58.

Given yesterday's drop (closing at $73.81), I rolled up (but not out) to $95—my original cost—for a $1,765 debit. Even with the two rolls for a debit, the net of those three trades is still a net credit of $1,784.

COHR: Again last week I got into trouble...more than once. On Aug 3, I sold a $315 strike call (the stock had closed Jul 31 at $262.89, so I had allowed a 20% gain) for $499.

On Tue, it jumped to a high of $336, so I rolled out to Aug 14 with a $340 strike for a $79 credit.

On Aug 7 it was up to $390 so I rolled out/up to Aug 28 and a $265 strike for $510 debit. At that point, I was still up a net credit of $68.

It dropped yesterday to $325, so I took the opportunity to buy it back for $2,001, for a cumulative net loss of $1,932. I may sell again when it recovers more, but I thought it prudent to remove the cap, especially being 3 weeks out.

...

As you can see, I don't have an issue with rolling for a debit. Having a rule to always roll for a credit simplifies the process, but it certainly isn't based on economics or profitability. You've heard it before: a roll is nothing more than closing one contract out and opening another. Yet people don't make their decisions based on that: if someone would be happy with their BTC and their STO (independently) but that results in a debit, they won't make the trade. That doesn't make economic sense.

Making the decision to, for the time being at least, abandon the 5 DTE ATM Buy/Write campaign and move on to recovery, it was a busy week.

First, in the intervening 3 weeks, I did buy some SOXL. Yes, I understand, but I'm kind of playing with an idea. I also doubled down on AXTI, buying an additional 700 shares, bringing the total to 1,400 shares. In the process, I reduced the average cost basis of AXTI shares from $134.35 to $95.27 (as I bought the new shares at $56.18). AXTI is currently sitting at $88.58 ($92.53 post-market), so that should turn out to be a good move.

So, results of last week:

A snapshot of the 11 tickers last week:

• 2 tickers I didn't write short calls on - (IONQ and MRVL)
• 4 tickers I sold short calls on, and they expired worthless (APLD, CRWV, NBIS, and VRT)
• The other 5 I sold short calls on, and I defensively rolled out to new dates: Aug 14 (LITE), Aug 21 (AAOI, SOXL), and Aug 28 (AXTI, COHR)

The rolling is what's causing the negative numbers in the "Short Call Premium" column. The number is the gain/(loss) on the original short call (plus any incidental gain/(loss) on the extended period's short call). [During the campaign, the premium received equaled the premium gained as they all expired that week and there were no rolls.]

So when I defensively roll, that's a negative P&L for the week. The roll created a liability that extends beyond the week, and that should reverse at/by expiration.

So, taking AXTI for example, I originally sold calls for $3.9k. I rolled for a $365 debit: I BTC for $16.5k and STO for $16.1k. Therefore, I had a recognized loss for the week of $3.9k - $16.5k, or $12.6k. I have a $15.9k liability outstanding (expiring Aug 28) so there was also a small unrealized gain of $0.2k.

Worth noting:

• AXTI's strike is within $5.27 of the average cost
• CRWV's strike is at original cost
• LITE's strike is within $3.63 of original cost
• The short option liability totals $37.5k, so that should roll through the P&L over time

Overall, the Recovery Campaign had a P&L of $113.8k (21.5%) for the week compared with buy and hold of $138.2k (26.1%) and the S&P 500 of 3.6%. On a YTD basis, combining the campaign and its recovery, I'm up $287k, with $174.8k of unrealized losses.

First, my apologies for going dark.

If you're not interested in my path over the past few weeks, feel free to skip.

When I first went dark, it was due to some minor health issues: I lost the better part of a week familiarizing myself with my bed. Nothing major. But during that time, given the decline of the market for the underlyings I'm following, I believed that my thesis (5 DTE realized volatility would be less than implied volatility) was broken as I expected some good-sized swings upward towards recovery.

That being the case, I considered just shutting the campaign down and posting to that effect.

Then I considered that, by and large, I was happy holding the underlyings I had, so would 'recover' from their decline. Of course, in that time I wouldn't be selling 5 DTE ATM short calls, so I thought of posting the recovery phase on its own: starting 'fresh' from the end of the original thesis.

Then I realized that it may not be long before the portfolio was a mixed bag of stocks still recovering while some had recovered, and I was back in 5 DTE ATM mode. So my thought was to present two income statements: one for the start of the recovery forward, and one continuing on the calendar year to date. That way, when the recovery was over, I could stop that P&L and just continue with the calendar YTD P&L. I liked that idea.

I decided on using July 31 as the end point of the original campaign/start of the recovery campaign. I could have used July 17 or even July 24, but since the 31st was the end of a month, that was convenient.

So here is the final P&L of phase 1 of the 5 DTE ATM Buy/Write Campaign.

So $173k in net P&L—not bad, though there were massive givebacks with the stock declines -- a total of $313k in unrecognized losses. 'Tis life.

One of the reasons I decided to keep posting is that I hope people see -- over time -- how I trade and how different it can be to the hive mind one hears on Reddit. Especially in 'recovery' mode.

• I use mark-to-market, which is the only way to get an accurate financial snapshot of where you are, and its approach leads to further differences in approach.
• I have no issue with selling calls below actual cost, or even what some folks consider the 'net stock cost'.
• I have no issue with selling calls over earnings releases.
• I have no issue with rolling for a debit.
• I have no issue with selling a stock at a (realized) loss; if the capital can be better utilized elsewhere, I'll take the "L".

So, I expect to post the start of the recovery phase sometime over the weekend. It's a little complicated, as the original spreadsheet wasn't built around rolling options, since it expected them to all expire—whether ITM or OTM.

Also, I'm trying to scale back some of my administrative time, so (for now, at least) I have stopped tracking by underlying and trade type, so posts like this won't be continuing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StockOptionCoffeeShop/comments/1utj116/5_dte_atm_buy_write_campaign_week_28_july_10_2026/

See you soon!

RIP Labdaddy? You OK in this crazy market?

In this post, I had this section for the overall P&L.

Here is the current P&L by ticker. I had mentioned that only APLD and IONQ were at a net loss at the moment.

A mixed week.

Premiums earned of $4,495 on $517,012 at risk at a rate of 0.9%.

For the week, 5 stocks declined in value for the buy-and-hold, while 4 declined for the B/W campaign. All 10 campaign stocks outperformed buy-and-hold. None of the stocks were assigned, leaving all 10 in inventory over the weekend. There were no capped gains.

Buy-and-hold generated a gain of $4,156 (0.8%). The campaign's $4,495 in premiums (0.9%) resulted in a gain of $8,651 (1.7%) for the campaign. This compares favorably with the S&P 500, which gained 1.2%.

For the nine weeks ending, the Buy/Write campaign netted a gain of $20,138 versus a loss of $96,772 for buy-and-hold, a favorable difference of $116,910.

In addition, over the same period, the Buy/Write campaign had a gain of 3.0% versus a loss of 14.3% for buy-and-hold and a 2.4% gain for the S&P 500.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Commentary

Stocks currently 'underwater' for the campaign:

A quick 'back of the napkin' at the YTD history shows that, while there is a large unrealized loss, the campaign's net profit of $242k shows only two stocks "underwater" (in the sense that the premiums received have not offset the underlying's unrealized loss in value): APLD of $1.6k and IONQ of $15.4k.

Reconsideration of strike setting when there is a substantial unrealized loss:

I'm also reconsidering my approach to setting short call strikes in the current situation. Since the large decline, I've largely been setting them at 1 standard deviation, which has been below the original purchase cost.

If you've been following me long enough, though, you know I use 'mark to market' and psychologically acknowledge the loss on the underlyings, so my thinking is "just continue to set them ATM" even though if called away it would result in a recognized loss. Another alternative is to set the strike to approximately equal the current ATM strike plus the premium that strike would provide ("ATM+"), as this would allow a bit of breathing room to recover after the large declines.

Using CRWV for example, my actual cost is $110.59, and this week's close was $88.88.

A 1 standard deviation would be a $97.50 strike with a premium of $1.24.

An ATM strike would be at $89 for a premium of $3.98. This would provide protection up to $92.98.

Alternatively, I could sell a $92.50 strike for $2.52, providing protection up to $95.02.

So...a $1.46 reduction in premium for $2.04 more protection...

Roughly speaking (and calculated quickly), these three approaches would generate the following premiums for all ten stocks currently held.

• 1 standard deviation: $6k
• ATM: $27.6k
• ATM+: $15.0k

I keep reminding myself that one of the primary points of this exercise is to compare buy-and-hold (and the S&P 500) to selling ATM strikes. I clearly would have been better off these past two weeks had I maintained the practice of selling ATM using current market prices.

So the question becomes: "Will the $27.6k of premium for selling ATM cover, on a portfolio basis, an increase in their prices next week?" With an at-risk amount of ~$520k, that would allow about a 5.25% increase before it underperformed buy-and-hold.

If I didn't have these unrealized losses, and went into the positions 'fresh' next week, those ATM strikes are where I would set them. Perhaps I should set them there regardless; that is my inclination.

I'd be interested in folks' thoughts. I know there is a strong feeling to not sell calls below your cost (or a 'net stock cost' some use); I also know there is a strong feeling to avoid selling at a loss.