Update

Hello,

Even though I have not posted for awhile, I have continued to invest.  Here is what has happened.

In April I sold 7 Puts of CZZ at a $12.50 strike price.  These options were exercised, and I found myself owning 700 shares of CZZ.  The cost of the shares exceeded my funds, so I ended up having to buy some of them on margin.

Since that time I have been selling $12.50 calls using these shares.  This month I sold 7 calls, expiring in July (2 month contracts), and received $194.90. 

In addition to the money that I have been investing for this blog, I decided to sell some stock in another fund that I had been holding for a few years.  I took the money from this and sold a Put on the Inverse Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) Proshares Short Financials ticker: SEF, following advice from the Weiss Research Safe Money Report newsletter that I received from Mike Larson.  My intention with selling this Put was to purchase the stock at a lower price than what the market was currently going for, after the profits were figured in.  Here is what I did: sold to open 1 SEFMay11 $37 Put, for a profit of $245.03.  When the option was exercised, I ended up spending a total of $3,464.92 after subtracting the $245.03 from the $3,709.95 that I spent on purchasing the 100 shares.  The current price of the stock is $37.69.  The idea behind SEF is that its price goes up when the Dow Jones U.S. FinancialsSM Index goes down.  I expect the price will continue to go up as banks continue to have issues.  I have been contemplating selling calls against the stock that I own.  However, I am hesitant because I do not want to have to sell my shares if the call gets exercised.  I think this ETF has the potential to reach the highs that it saw in 2008 and 2009 around $124.66/share.

The last few months have been a little bit difficult for me to determine which direction the stock prices are going to move.   Stocks I have been watching, MCP and GPL, I thought were going to surge up; but they have been doing the opposite.  I expected that they would pull back a little bit, but not to this degree.  If it is difficult for you to stomach big swings in the market, you might want to sell some of your stocks to limit potential losses. I still think both of these stocks will recover in the not too distant future, but their swings are nerve-racking. Also, stay far far away from long term Treasury Bonds.