Trading going well, summer project determined
Other than 2 finals I have this coming week, school is now out for the summer. That means I can concentrate on trading, investing, and speculating. May options expired on Friday and I took full advantage of it. I sold covered options on Wednesday and Thursday and managed to make over 11% return on my entire account after broker fees by the close of the markets on Friday! I can still count the number of trades I’ve done on one hand so overall I’ve been doing very well. I’ve only had one small losing transaction. Overall my account is up 16.25% after fees. Did I mention I’ve only been trading for 1 month? I still have one more open position. Assuming the market doesn’t go up more than ~7% in the next month (very unlikely) my total gains will be almost 19%.
One thing I haven’t been doing well enough is watching risk. In the future I have to watch my exposure much more carefully. I’m in the process of evaluating my overall risk and repositioning to protect myself from fraud. Some of the investment pools I’m in are extremely risky and are not transparent. I am slowly moving my money out of these funds and placing them into managed and autotraded accounts. I just signed up with an options autotrading service I’ve been watching for quite some time now. They’ve been operating for about a year and a half and have had no losing trades. Their overall return is in excess of 100%. I’m going to use this service to increase my knowledge of options trading and hopefully continue with their winning streak. I’m also planning on opening a second brokerage account with TradeStation so that I will finally get some good stock market charting software. Also, between the two brokerages I will be able to open more trades without having the $25,000 minimum to qualify as a daytrader. I wouldn’t be surprised if I get a warning from optionsXpress due to how many trades I’ve done this week 
Eventually I’ll have the daytrading minimum but until then I’ll have to deal with 3 trades a week per account.
I’ve been trying to find a PHP/mySQL project to do to keep my skill level up. As they say, use it or lose it. I’ve decided that I’m going to develop an investment tracking script. It will track my investments as if I were running a pool (mutual or hedge fund) with outstanding shares. I will update the database daily with my positions and it will automatically track the value and change over time. Of course, the fund will be totally ficticious but it will be a good learning experience. Who knows, maybe I can develop it to the point where I can sell it. Features will include charting, statistics, share owner tracking, individual account tracking for different brokerages and investments, and more.
