After having a few beyond expectations income months, I wondered how long it would last before I hit the wall. Well, we finally have the answers! Funny enough, it was not the Market that made me hit the wall, it was Amber Tree that did this all by himself! Well done…!
August Dividend Income
Let’s start with the positive news on the dividend income. In August 2016, I bagged my first triple digit dividend income. My dividend stocks payed me 112,12 EUR of income. Not bad at all. That covers a few G&T on the beach for the summer. Or I could reinvest….
Year to date we have made 409,98 in dividend income. Considering that this is a try out for me, i can not complain. Given the high tax burden we have in Belgium, I am not yet sure to continue to make this grow. I actually consider just keeping what I have and have covered calls do the selling…
August option income
Last month was a BAD month. A really BAD month. I paid a lot of money on training. Not classroom training or webinar training. Nope, I paid it to have mental training.
In August, I lost 331,82€ with my option writing strategy. Will I continue? YES! Why? I have learned a lot on myself, my strategy, me being mechanical and stubborn. I will actually write a full post on my August failure in the coming weeks: In short – I wanted to time the market with my vision. When that failed, I got stubborn….
Due to some residual ashes from the summer experiment that failed big time, September will be a slow month as well. Let’s do our best to have a rocking final quarter
Year to date, I am still up close to 2K in option writing.This by far exceeds my initial expectations. This does not yet allow me to Financially Free. It is a small extra step that I would not have made otherwise.
August trading income
This is a chapter that I do bot have that often. At the start of my play money, I expected to report on this more often. Due to the same summer experiment, I am actually in negative territory YTD, down 158 EUR. I am not too worried about this as there are a lot of unrealised gains in my playmoney portfolio that can offset this loss.
How was your August? Better than mine?
amber tree leaves 
That sucks that you lost money in options, would love to hear what you did exactly as I’m thinking getting into option trading.
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In short: I tried a new product and when that went wrong, I decided to trade even more rather than to stop. My regular options actually offset a big part of my greedy trades that went wrong
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Congrats on hitting triple digits. You will nail those options in the future.
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We have time to master the options trading. i guess I need to get some unrealistic thoughts and ideas out of mu system first.
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Every makes mistakes just you have to learn what you did wrong. I am a slow learner so I would probably make the same mistake over and over
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Sometimes you learn most by making mistakes… I once lost nearly €100k (!) within a few days time by writing uncovered put options. It was one of the best lessons I ever had. Good luck!
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compared to 100K, my 300 euro is nothing. Agreed, it is a good way to learn. That is why all of this happens with my playmoney.
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Need more explanations… I am too curious now… O.O
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Oh and if it might help I also threw away 180 euro by playing truth or dare with the market… 😦
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Thx, I feel better now 😉
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Ouch! Nice job with the dividends ATL, shame about the options. We had $0 dividends this month, but that still means our month was better than yours, lol..Better luck next month!
Tristan
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Ah well, small price to pay really for a good learning moment. You may end up making thousands more after this mistake. Curious about the upcoming article where is went wrong this time around.
Nice dividend income by the way, great progress for a first year of dividend investing.
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It happens ATL. The key is to learn from your mistakes and move on. It sounds like you’ve done this. I’ve had up and down months with options. Then again, I’ve had up and down month with stocks, budgets, etc.
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Can’t make money every month forever if taking on risk, right? It’s still good that you are up for the year! My August was such a roller coaster ride, I lost 3k in 2 weeks to make 5k the next 2 weeks. I ended up being positive 2k for the month but it wasn’t fun being down 3k!
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indeed, taking risk comes with making a loss once and a while… IT is hard, it is my first big loss since my new approach
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Hey ATL, it is better to make the mistakes early on in the FIRE journey….because you have less money leading to small mistakes 🙂 Seriously, mistakes happen and lessons are taught. My only hope is that the lessons are not too expensive….which seems to be the case in your example.
You have been trading options for a couple months now. How do you see the time effort cost for options trading? If you divided profits by number of hours spent in analysis and study, are you seeing more profits from options vs individual stocks investing that you were doing before? Just curious on how the trade off is working out.
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The mistake has thought me yet again a few things about myself. Let’s hope the lessons sticks. All in all it was a total of 1000 ISD loss, compensated by other option income.
The effort to trade options is quite low. About 10 minutes away. actually, some days just a look at my spreadsheet and nothing else, other days i trade 4-5 times and spend like 25 minutes. When you know the stock and ETF you want, there is not a lot of effort needed.
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Unfortunate that the option income/loss didn’t fall in your favor this month. However, that comes with the territory I guess. Looks like you had a solid dividend income month though! Hopefully you can turn it around and show some insane numbers in September!
Bert
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The august cleanup should take care of all trades i do not want anymore. Lets wait for the end of month. I am positive…
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Sorry about the Options bud, awesome though with the triple digit dividend income. I just hit my first above $30 dividend income month. #GoodFeeling
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Don’t you typically sell covered calls? What was the new strategy this month that took the premium below 0. Did you go long one some calls that didn’t pan out?
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I usually sell puts on stock I do not mind owning… This went wrong as I did not understand the stock. A post to come on Thursday.
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The summer months does seem to be more expensive until December comes around. 🙂 Nice progress on the dividends!
-Jeff
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Congrats on earning triple digits in passive dividend income for the first time. Must be a nice feeling seeing your dividend income grow. I’m very curious to read about your options trade. Seeing more and more dividend bloggers getting into options trading I am interested in learning myself from the successes and failures of trades. As long as you learned something from your ‘bad’ month of trading it should serve you well going forward. Look forward to reading that post.
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How did you lose the 300? Was it bought to open options that didn’t pan out?
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