Where are the free chicks?

So I had fallen for a online site that promised a bunch of options advice for the low price of $50/mon. And there I was, last week of march, on vacation skiing in Montana, and the service sent their first set of recommendations. I had sporadic internet access, basically leaching off of some neighbors wireless in the timeshare I was staying in. So I ignored the 'recommendations' and went skiing.

When I got back to real life the next monday, I discovered that the 3 bull debit spreads they had recommended were not quite at the same price. So I modified one (moved the high strike one notch higher) and got into the another at only a a slightly higher debit. And then discovered that I was short of the margin needed for the third. Damn. Oh well.

I was set for a max loss of $1785 and a max gain of $520. Everything was at least 8% in the money. All was going to expire in May. It wasn't as much as the $640 I would have had potential for if I had gotten into these on time, oh well. Roll the bones. Lets see what happens.

A couple days later I moved (via ACH) another 5K into the account. No more worries about margin. And it only took a couple days (and one phone call to get it moved from 'cash' to 'margin')

But that got me thinking about 'long' buys again. Buy and hold. Isn't that the way we are supposed to invest. The meme attacked me.

I had always been a fan of the value investing idea. And I had always been a fan of ROI. I had enjoyed reading Greenblat's stuff a while back so I picked a couple of his magicformulainvesting picks and planned to hold them for a year.

And the options service was sending me a couple daily reports which included some bull credit spreads and covered calls. During the 3rd week of april I picked two that expired in May and went with them. TIVO 5/7.5 bull put (with tivo @8.50) and AAPL 55/60 (AAPL @ 69). Added $4375 to my max potential loss but only $325 to my potential gain.

So I now set up to lose upto 6Kish and a potential gain of $845. Sounds risky, but I really had check each one of these out and but the technicals, the deltas, and just the basic 'cushion' was pretty good.

And it was all gonna be over by 4th week of may. This stuff was easy...