January 2023 Options Trading Summary | $3607

Starting a new year of options

It has been a decent good start to the new year. I earned $3,607 in net premiums from trading options.

About half of this amount came from my 2 weekly trading challenges that I share on Twitter and YouTube.

For my Google options challenge, I’m trying to make a 50% annual return. So far it’s been 30 weeks and I am on track to completing this goal making about $200 per week.

A new challenge that I started in January is trying to beat the S&P 500 by trading S&P 500 options using the SPY etf.

It had a bumpy start and I was lagging behind the index for all of January. But now I have finally caught up.

The goal here isn’t to achieve a specific investment return, but to simply make more than investing in the index. We’ll have to see the final result by the end of the year. 🙂

New strategy I’m testing out

I have started to trade 0 days to expiring SPX options by selling a credit spread only a few minutes before markets close.

So for example, at 3:58 PM when the S&P 500 is at 4000 points, I will sell a 4005 call option and buy a 4010 call option.

Since the 4005 option is worth more than the 4010 option, I will earn a net credit.

SPX will only trade for another couple of minutes and will very likely close between 3995 and 4005.

Therefore, the call spread is likely to expire worthless and I get to keep the premium.

The final outcome is either I let both legs of the strategy expire out of the money, or I close my position before the market closes.

Whether I decide to sell a call spread or put spread is determined by price action and technical indicators like the 1 minute MACD direction. 🙂

So far this strategy has had good results but I want to test it out for a longer period of time and see if it can be improved.

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