Oh man, it’s been a long time since I posted a blog. Mainly because the stock market has shot higher, with the exception of the stocks that I sold in my last post. Since I sold my UNG (natty gas etf), it’s gone down over 15% or $1,500 because I had 1,500 shares short. Also ETFC, Etrade Bank, has gone down over 2 points, or 20%. I had 1,000 shares…that’s another $2k. Ugghh.
Here’s what I’m holding now:
- -750 SBUX at $32.88
- -400 BBY at $36.49
- 6 BBY March 2012 $33 puts at $6.50
- 1 AAPL April 2012 $400 call at $28.75
- 1 GOOG March 2012 $575 put at $32.00
- 5 SBUX April 2012 $50 puts at $9.35
Yes, I started my long AAPL and short GOOG again with April 2012 options. I don’t normally play out of the money options, but both of these have about a .40-.50 delta, which gives me 40% to 50% of the move of the stock. Also, I want to reduce my risk by keeping the options at around $3k-$4k each. Every time I look at GOOG, I think that it’s making all of the wrong moves. Yes, I use gmail, I Google everything, and I use adsense/adwords, but honestly, I think their search will only take them so far. I mean, I signed up for Google+, but never use it. I signed up for Google Music, but rarely use it. This is pretty much an ongoing theme with Google. They have so much money, but yet their innovation compared to Apple is nubs. I just signed up to iTunes Match for $24.99/year…it’s money compared to Google Music, mainly because I can use itunes instead of Google Music terribly slow user interface. Anyways, short GOOG, long AAPL.
Looking at my portfolio, I am probably going to roll over my SBUX jan puts and switch them over to the April 2012 puts. Same with my remaining Jan 2012 BBY puts. As a matter of fact, I am probably going to add more BBY puts for the “longer term”, since we’ve gone up about 5 points since when I initially sold. I want to decrease the volatility of the Jan 2012 puts as well.
Another thing that I’ll be looking to do over the next few months into the new year is to buy banks. I’m looking at WFC (Wells Fargo), BAC (Bank of America), and UYG (bank etf). I’ll be adding about $20k of each when it’s all said and done. Based on what I’ve read and heard from all of my sources, I am expecting a decline here after the new year, so I probably won’t start accumulating any longs until the new year comes.
I’m also keeping a close eye on UNG for a long. The stock almanac says that February is a good month for natty gas. Natty gas has been pummeled over the past few years…I think we’re gonna get a nice pop here soon. UNG is trading near $8/share right now. I’m gonna try to get about $20k worth of natty gas related stocks going into Feb 2012.
So, that’s my plan for the new few weeks/month for the stock market. I just sold my BBY and SBUX Jan 2012 puts. I think I made about $1k on BBY and lost $2.8k on SBUX. I’m bidding to roll these over to the Mar/April 2012 puts now…
What else? Christmas season is coming up, so I’ve been working pretty hard on my other site B**gspace. I don’t want to spell out the name because I don’t want the search engines to pick it up and link my blog to the site. Not like I have anything to hide, but probably not a good idea to link my ideas with the site. Anyways, it looks like traffic has picked up about 10% from last year. The busiest time is from now until about December 23rd. I’m getting about 4k-5k uniques and about 15k page views per day right now. This year is the first year that I put up Google Adsense ads, so that’ll be an additional source of revenue. It’s actually been a pleasant surprise. I’m making about 76 cents click with the CTR of .13%. Not that great of a CTR, but I didn’t expect much anyways. I imagine that I will probably make an additional $500 from Adsense this year.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time patching up a few bugs here and there. Changing the layout of a few pages, etc. Right now, it seems as though a lot of people are complaining about the ease-of-use, and user-friendliness of the site. It all makes sense to me, but maybe that’s because I built the damn thing?? 
I wonder if I can hire someone to do some QA for me…maybe on elance.
Also, over the past few years, I’ve been ranking #1 for the term “secret santa generator”, which has really helped me bring customers to the site. Additionally, I picked up the domain names secretsantagenerator.com and secretsantagenerator.co.uk from godaddy at regular price ($7/year). I have yet to build them out, but I think I’m gonna create two separate versions of the sites, probably using PHP and Amazon SES, then maybe get some link juice to b**gspace from these two sites. The problem is, I don’t really want to give someone my ASP code to rewrite it in PHP, just in case they decide to steal my idea, so I think I’ll need to do it myself. It shouldn’t be too hard, but to be honest, I don’t know PHP very well. That’s why I’ve been putting it off.
I’m really starting to expand my affiliate marketing to outside of the gambling space. Similar to investing in the stock market, I gotta diversify, otherwise, I’ll be left behind. I don’t want to get left behind. Anyways, it’s fun trying to make money in other spaces. I’ve been doing Boogster for about 7 years now. It represents probably about 99% of my income. With the double Black Fridays, April 15, 2011 – DOJ indictments of the major online poker sites, and October 2006 UIGEA, I’ve seen so many affiliates (and professional poker players) go out of business because of these surprise events. The truth is, until online poker is regulated in the US, owning any type of business in this market will be volatile. Expect the unexpected is what I’ve come to realize. Gotta be prepared for anything and everything. And this probably applies to all small businesses.
So, since shorting Starbucks, I downloaded Howard Schultz’s book Onward. I wanted to find out what’s going on in the mind of the current Starbucks CEO. I will say that my mind is changing about Starbucks as a company. However, I’m not sold on the fact that changing the mentality of a company will ultimately change it’s bottom line. We’ll see. Until then, I’m still short this bitch.
Golf. I’ve played quite a bit of rounds this November. Normally, I tend to shut it down towards the start of the NFL season. I definitely don’t play on Sundays anymore. But this year, I’ve already played like maybe 10 rounds. My buddy, who’s a low single digit handicap, we have a standard $10 bet every round, match play. Sometime in the middle of the season, he was giving me 8 holes. It got all the way up to 18 holes. Basically, he was giving one stroke every hole, match play. And he was winning. I think I lost about $150 to him throughout the season, but now we’re down to about 15 strokes again. I’m not playing all that great, but I’ve been doing enough to beat him.
My handicap is at 13.8 right now. My goal to become a single digit handicap will have to be postponed until next year. I feel as though if I spent some more time on my short game, I’d be there. So, next year, I will make it a point to focus on my short game.
Alright, that’s about it for now.
