My Financial Independence Journey » Investment portfolio » Recent Transactions – Lots of Stuff
Recent Transactions – Lots of Stuff
As part of my commitment to keep my readers up to date on my portfolio, I write up short posts describing my transactions. My portfolio is undergoing a bit of a makeover at present, and I think it’s best to walk everyone through the changes from start to finish.
Previously, I was only allowed to trade with options level 1. Every time I sold cash secured puts I had to actually hold the cash in my account to cover the put. So I had about $8,000 sitting around in case either of my puts were exercised. That is all in the past.
I now have options level 2 and a margin account. Now that I have access to margin, I no longer need to have cash sitting around in my account just in case a put is exercised. I’ll write more about margin and puts in a future post. For now, it is sufficient to say that $8,000 just got freed up.
Between the freed up money and my regular investments, I went on a little bit of a shopping spree. Unfortunately, the market is still in overvalued land, which really put a damper on my designs. But I am undaunted. So below are my stock and options transactions.
Stocks
25 shares of Aflac (AFL)
- Cost basis: $1,259.99 or $50.39 per share
- Yield: 2.78% – a little bit lower yield than I would like for a starting yield. But I think AFL has room for dividend growth and may be undervalued at the moment. Next week, you’ll be treated to a dividend stock analysis of AFL.
- Dividends: $1.40 per share
- This will increase my yearly dividend stream by $35.
60 shares of Microsoft (MSFT)
- Cost basis: $1,689.99 or $28.16 per share
- Yield: 3.26%
- Overall, there are probably better investments than MSFT, but almost all of them are overvalued at the moment. So I grabbed 60 shares of MSFT giving me 100 shares total. Now that I have a full lot (100 shares), I’ll probably stop investing in MSFT for a while. Feel free to check out my analysis of MSFT.
- Dividends: $0.92 per share
- This will increase my yearly dividend stream by $55.2.
100 shares of Wells Fargo (WFC)
- Cost basis: $3,709.99 or $37.09 per share
- Yield: 2.69% – Like AFL, this is a lower starting yield than I would prefer. But I feel that WFC is in a good position to put the spurs to it’s dividends this year or next.
- Dividends: $1.00 per share
- This will increase my yearly dividend stream by $100.
In case anyone is wondering, I am also trying to buy LO and KMI, but the stocks haven’t yet dropped low enough for my limit orders to kick in. If I do manage to initiate positions in either of those stocks, I’ll be sure to report it here.
Options
No, I’m not done yet. It’s been a busy week at my brokerage account
Puts Sold
LO Jan 18 2014 40.0 Put – This brought in $394.23.
WFC Jan 18 2014 37.0 Put – This brought in $304.23.
Assuming that these puts don’t get assigned, I’ll wind up either keeping all the money or buying the puts back before expiration for less than I sold them for (pocketing the difference). If the puts do result in assignment, then I’ll have grabbed two good dividend stocks at reasonable prices.
Puts Bought
INTC Jan 18 2014 20.0 Put – I bought this put in order to close out the INTC put that I sold back in December. It’s been about 3 months and Intel’s stock price didn’t really move much past the strike price. Since I don’t particularly want to be assigned more INTC, I decided to buy the put back. I paid $156 when I bought the put back. That makes my net gain $63.47, which is an annualized gain of 14.54%.
Disclosure: I am long or short all stocks listed above as indicated.
Readers: What do you think of these purchases?
Written by MFIJ
Filed under: Investment portfolio · Tags: afl, buy, INTC, lo, msft, WFC
12 Responses to "Recent Transactions – Lots of Stuff"
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Those are some great purchases and options trades! I am personally fond of all those companies, and hold a couple myself! I think WFC has a lot of upside potential, and has shown themselves to really be a class above the rest when looking at the big banks.
Thanks! I think that this is a great time to start getting back into the big banks and WFC is first on my list. Hopefully I’m right in my guess that it’s dividend should be on a serious upswing over the next few years.
Glad to see you got the margin account up. After I went through my primer on margin I felt a whole lot more comfortable with it and added it to my account as well. It’s important to keep a healthy cushion between your margin requirements and potential margin outlays and your cash whether it’s in the account or at least accessible. It’s pretty easy to get carried away and get yourself over-leveraged.
Your primer was really helpful to me. Then I read a bit more online and finally called my broker and said “Hey, this is what I want to do….Am I understanding this correctly.” They said yes, and now I’ve got a margin account.
I’m still working out some guidelines for keeping my leverage under control and making sure that I’m not taking on too much risk. Expect to see some posts along those lines in the next few weeks.
wow, you have been very busy! I will be looking into selling a WFC put if I can free up some buying power. I’ve about maxed out my leverage in my options account right now. I’m happy to see more of the DGI community is taking advantage of selling puts on margin. In a rising market like we’ve had you can make a lot of extra income.
A lot of people are scared by options. At first, I thought that they were some kind of spooky financial product that only crazy speculators used. I’m not really sure how I first stumbled onto the idea of selling puts. But I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. Then I realized that they could be pretty easily combined with value investing. Now my investing is evolving to make use of a margin account to enhance my put selling.
I think that as more DGI investors write about puts and margin, the idea will become less mysterious and more easily accessible to those investors who want to take on a bit of extra risk.
I like that you’re only selling puts on stocks that you wouldn’t mind acquiring at those prices. I think that’s a great approach and it seems win-win.
There’s so many more things to consider than just would you like to own the stock at a given price. I’m currently in the process of creating some guidelines for selling puts on margin. Look for a post about that in the upcoming weeks.
Nice purchases! I wish I had of picked up the banks when they were trading below book value. Nice put option for Jan 2014 with INTC.
Excellent post, it’s nice to see someone blogging about investing using options and margin to give a different perspective. Do you track your performance each year?
Andrew,
Thanks for stopping by. I’m tracking everything. You can see my portfolio, dividends and current options holdings by checking out any of the tabs above. I also have one article where I compared my stocks to the S&P500.
[...] made numerous transactions this month since I was able to add margin to my account, thus freeing up $8,000 in cash that was being used to [...]