Weekly Income Alert – November 7, 2025

Alright, welcome everyone to Weekly Income Alert. I’m Marc Lichtenfeld. Let me quickly get into what happened this morning. So I did send an alert recommending that we close out early.

The market was down and I was very concerned that it would continue to slide lower and that our At the time, we had a small gain, kind of guesstimating at that moment about fifty percent of the total that we had sold the credit for, and I was concerned that that was going to evaporate pretty quickly. You know, we have six hours left to go in the trading day, and I wanted to make sure we locked that in. And then looking at the chat, I see some people took a little bit of a loss on it. And then, course, as probably as predictable, the market bounced a little bit.

But my big concern is, like I said, we have six hours to go in the trading day. The market is especially first thing this morning was getting pretty close to our strike prices. And my first kind of duty to you all is protecting capital. And so I want to make sure I’d rather give up some gains in order to not take a maximum loss.

I was genuinely concerned that the market could continue to slide. Yesterday, the market closed near the lows of the day. It was a rough day in the afternoon with the government shutdown, with flights being canceled. There just seemed to be a lot of things out there that have the potential to push the stock lower.

Of course, the market could bounce, and it did a little bit so far. And who knows? We could finish the day up. But I wasn’t willing to gamble on that.

At the moment that I sent the trade out to close, we had a small gain and I wanted to lock that in so that we didn’t let a winner become a loser. So, I’m going to get into everything else that’s going on with next week’s trade and all that, but I do want to show you how to close the trade in case you didn’t know how to do that because it’s been a while since we closed the trade early. So, let me share my screen with you and I will show you how we close a trade, at least on Schwab, and it’s very easy. It’ll be similar on other brokers as well.

So this is my account and you can see the November seventh trades right here. So we have the November seventh, twenty three point eight zero puts, the twenty three point seven zero puts. The nice thing about trading spreads is you can, just like you can open the positions at once, you can close them. So if you click on these three bars right here, you’ll see this menu come up and you put close positions.

Now the default was just the two thousand three hundred and eighty put because that was what I clicked on. But if I click on this, then you can see that both of them are selected and will close them together. So then I hit close selected. So again, let me make an X sound in case you missed it.

You go to one of the positions that you have, click on the three bars again. This is Schwab with a different broker. It might be a little bit different, but you will be able to do something similar. Close positions, make sure you close both of them.

That’s really important. You want to close them together.

Okay, then I just have to move a window here to see what I’m doing.

So now it’s going to give you the midpoint of both positions. Remember, we always want to close in the midpoint. So the midpoint on the first twenty three point eight zero put is four point three five. The midpoint of the twenty three point seven zero put is two point seven zero.

So the total midpoint combined right now about one point seven zero dollars one point seven two dollars It’s kind of moving around a little bit. As I always say, I put my limit price just a little bit off the midpoint to make sure that I get filled. Now remember, this is a debit, not a credit. This is a debit because we are paying money to close the position.

So when we open a position, I usually put that limit price a little bit lower than the midpoint to improve the odds of me getting filled. This is the opposite. I’m going do it slightly higher to improve the odds of getting filled. So right now I’ve got a midpoint about, it’s vacillating between one point eight zero dollars one point six seven dollars I’m going to move it up to one point eight zero dollars just to hopefully improve my chances of getting filled.

Alright, that looks right.

Place the order. Alright, so that’s how you place that order And I’ll take a look in a minute to see if I get filled. If I didn’t get filled, I would go back in and change the debit price, maybe make it a little bit higher if I need to. And if I were to get filled at one point eight zero that would be a winning trade for today because we sold the credit for two point four zero dollars So I saw some people in the chat not being exactly clear whether they won or lost.

So if you sold for two point four zero dollars and you buy for one point eight zero dollars let’s say, then you made sixty cents or sixty dollars per credit. I know there was somebody early before we went live who was saying that they sold the credit for two point three eight dollars and they bought it back for two point four zero dollars in that case that’s a loss or two dollars per credit loss. So, everybody’s situation is going to be a little bit different. Everybody’s closing price is going to be a little bit different this morning, but it should go down for most of us as a win.

It will be a small win, smaller than usual, but it will be a win.

So, that’s what’s happening there. Now, let’s talk about next week. So, week we’ve got the November fourteenth.

Let me just take a quick look here because I don’t have this one in my account because I wasn’t there that week.

So let me just take a look at the portfolio. So November fourteenth, we’ve got the twenty four forty, twenty four fifty spread. So right now we are, in the money, which is what we do not want. So that that trade has gone against us, but we have a week to go and it doesn’t take that large of a move.

As the week goes on, the options will decay a bit. So if we do get any kind of a bump, that decay should really rapidly increase, which would be good. I’m not going to panic yet. You know, if the market doesn’t come back, then we have a situation where we’ll be taking a loss. But right now, we still have, you know, five days plus almost six hours to go before we have to worry about this. So I’m going give this one a little bit of time.

Usually, as you know, we’re waiting until expiration to close these out or very close. I believe every time we’ve closed out early, it’s been on the Friday or maybe that Thursday afternoon right before.

Yeah, I’m not going to worry yet about this. Again, if the market continues to slide, then we’ll have a problem with that position. But right now, we have a little bit of time to go. And the other one, the November twenty first, twenty three point eight zero and twenty three point nine zero is kind of in the same spot that the trade we just closed out that expires today is. It’s right at that strike and we’ll we have also a couple of weeks to go for that. So I’m not going to worry too much about that one yet. Again, if the market slides, then we have an issue.

So let’s talk about the upcoming week or today’s new trade.

So this will be a November twenty eighth expiration. Now remember that is the Friday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. If you have some plans or what have you, then for Black Friday and you won’t be on the broadcast, hopefully it won’t be a problem. We just let it expire worthless and there’s there’s nothing to worry about.

But if we have to do something and we are gonna place a new trade on November twenty eighth as well. So if you can make it on Black Friday, you need to get away from the kids or grandkids for a half hour, or you wanna show them what we’re doing and how they can make some money too, that’s perfectly alright. But just to keep in mind, November twenty eighth is the Thursday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday. So let me just take a quick look where the market is right now.

Alright. So what we’re going to do is we are going to let me get back to trading. So now I have to open up a new window to make the trade.

Alright. So as usual, we have the new trade here and we go to the Russell, dollar sign RUT. We’re going to a vertical put spread here.

And if you’re new, you definitely want to put it in as a vertical put or a credit put.

You definitely want to trade them together. You don’t want to or you don’t want to sell one option and then buy another one separately. You want this trade to happen together.

Remember on Schwab, we need to bring this down to RUTW in order to get the other expiration date. So we can choose November twenty eighth.

And we are going to do the twenty three twenties.

I’ve gone the wrong way. Alright.

So I’m do the twenty three twenties and the 2310s.

So right now, it looks like we’ve got a credit of about two thirty five, so let me just double check this. We’ve got sell to open the Russell November twenty eighth, two thousand three hundred twenty put. Buy to open November twenty eighth, two thousand three and ten. Midpoint is two point four zero dollars so I’m going to bump mine up to two point three five dollars see if we can get filled there.

Before I do that, I’m going to send it out to everyone.

Alright, let me just make sure everything is looking good.

Tom is pointing out that the market closes at one o’clock on Black Friday. Thank you for that reminder. That’s helpful.

And that’s actually a good thing for us because that accelerates the option decay by just a little bit. Alright, so I posted the trade that should be sent out. I’m going to send this out right now.

Alright, and let me just take a quick look and see if any of my trades got filled.

So I did get filled on the one point eight dollars when I closed it, and the open is still open.

If that doesn’t get filled, the market starts moving away from us, then I will change the limit. I’ll cancel it and change it. Let me see if I can just refresh real quick.

See if that changes anything.

Nope, still open. So, I’m to give it a few minutes, see what happens, and if not, then we’ll make a change.

But for now, that trade is open and ready to go.

So let me stop sharing and I’ll let you know if we need to change that.

Alright.

Looks like people are getting filled at two forty, two forty, two thirty, two forty.

A little bit lower. Yeah. I still haven’t gotten filled at I still haven’t gotten filled yet, so I’ll give it a few minutes. Actually, probably more than a few minutes right now.

I’m going to give it some time. As I’ve always said, sometimes you have to wait a little bit. You have to wait an hour, two hours, three hours. Usually we don’t, but that has happened in the past.

If let’s say by lunchtime or something we haven’t gotten filled, then maybe I’ll change it and send it back out. Let me just take a quick look where the market is.

Yeah, it hasn’t really come in that much, so we just might need to give it a little bit of time.

All right, so let’s get to some questions. Aaron Mira says, I had trouble getting in at the beginning. Did we end up closing a position? Yeah, we closed today’s expiration early.

I sent out that alert at about nine thirty ish, nine thirty five. So you should have that in your inbox or on your phone. But if you didn’t, I am recommending that we close it out early to take a small gain just basically to ensure that we don’t take a loss if the market slides over the next few hours because we only have one day left to go. We’re getting a little close to our strike price.

And so very often you’ll see we haven’t done it a lot because the market’s cooperated. But when we get real, real close to expiration and we’re getting close to our strike, very often I’m going to on the side of being conservative, preserve your capital, preserve my capital and make sure that we’re not taking a loss if it can be avoided. I’m not going to risk a loss. You know, if the market’s far away from our strike price, then I’m not going to worry.

Certainly anything can happen. Markets can slide on no news or certain news. But when we are close to that strike, I definitely want to preserve capital. That is important to me.

Right, let’s see.

Dilip said, I’ve been going five percent to six percent below the current price. That gives me a premium of about one point two five dollars but so far I do not have to buy back the trade. Yeah, so that’s an excellent point. Any time you change that strike price, so if you make it further away, you’re taking less risk.

As a result, you get less compensation because you’re not taking as much risk. If you were to tighten up that difference, instead of three percent, you did two percent or one and a half percent, you’ll get paid more because the risk is higher. So whatever is going to work for you. So if you feel more comfortable having less risk and being willing to accept less of a premium that you receive, great.

Helps you sleep at night. You’re at less risk.

Whatever’s going to work best for you. As I always say, the back test, three percent was kind of the golden number. That’s what worked really well in the back test. What’s been working well so far as well.

You do what’s going to do, what’s going to work for you. JPS says, what about the November fourteenth option? As I mentioned, we’re going to wait and see what happens next week. Right now it’s against us, But there’s plenty of time.

There’s still, you know, five and more than a half trading sessions left to go until then. And so we just need a little bit of a bump up in the market and we’d be in a good spot. So I’m going to wait. I’m not I’m not going to exit the position at this point.

Christian says, We’ve been moving down for three weeks. Why are we not doing vertical call spreads? So that would be a bearish position. So if we decide to get bearish, that is basically the way you do it.

You instead of doing a vertical put spread, you do a vertical bear spread and use calls instead of puts, and that takes advantage of the market going lower. So the market hit a new high. The Russell hit a new high on October twenty seventh, so it hasn’t been three weeks. It’s been about two weeks.

And like I said, I am not going to change the strategy just because we have a slight sell off. Mean, we are let’s see, we’re about one hundred and forty points from the highs, so that’s a five point five percent decline from the highs. So that’s not nothing, but it’s not a real serious move yet, and it’s only been two weeks. I need to see real proof that the bull market is over or the uptrend is over.

I’m not going to be juggling back and forth between this week we’re going bearish, next week we’re going bullish. Up, the market’s duked to the downside again. Now time to get bearish. As I’ve said before, in our backtest where we had the eighty six percent win rate, it was using the put spreads.

We do have the option of using bear spreads, using calls if we want to and if we see that the market is truly in a downtrend.

But I am I’ve seen I’ve seen some technical analysts saying this a lot lately and I fully agree.

You know, I’m not a technical trader in the sense that I’m trying to predict every move of the market. I’m a trend follower. And right now, the trend has not changed drastically. It’s stalled, no doubt about it.

That uptrend has stalled over the last is it now, eleven days? And that’s not even all trading days, but just eleven days since October twenty seventh when we hit the high and the Russell. I need to see real evidence that things have changed before I start changing a strategy that worked incredibly well and has been working well for us in real life. So I’m not ready to make that call yet and pull the ripcord and start getting bearish.

I need to see a real change in the market for that to happen.

Let’s see, Mike says, Would you mind sharing the bid ask in the alert when closing a position? IBKR doesn’t give the bid ask on options before nine forty five. Because of that, was flying blind and panicked, accidentally doubled my amount of contracts instead of liquidating them.

Yeah, the only thing is, you know, those bids and asks move very, very quickly and they’re also very wide. So, you know, that’s why I typically am using the midpoint. So I can certainly say this is what the midpoint is at the moment.

When we’re closing a position, though, that’s going to change. When we’re closing the position, I’m usually not giving that specific limit like I am with when we’re entering a position. We’re entering a position. I want make sure we’re getting a fair price. When we’re selling and we’re selling early, I out.

Right? The reason that we’re selling early is we want out. And not that I’m willing to you know, part with the position at a fire sale, but I am willing to sell it at perhaps not the I might not stick to my guns on a limit price. If at the moment that I enter the trade, if I see that the limit is one point eight zero and I put that out there in an alert, you know, five minutes later, that might have to go down to one point seven zero dollars or sorry, go up to one point nine zero dollars or two dollars And you know, I want to avoid confusion and blasting you guys with alerts.

But that is a good suggestion. I will put in what the current midpoint is as I’m sending that out. But understand that you you may have to adjust it if you can’t get it, because I won’t be saying, you know, limit price on this exit position a dollar eighty. It’ll be exit, you know, get as close to the midpoint as you can.

Current limit price is a dollar eighty. But thank you for this suggestion. I will put that limit. I’m sorry.

We’ll put that midpoint in there at the time that I send an exit trade.

Let’s see.

Why didn’t you sell today’s Russell yesterday with how the market has been doing? Thought you were too late. Yeah, that’s fair criticism. We can always point to if I’m too late, too early.

That’s certainly going to happen. I wanted to give it another day. Basically, you know, as you know, options decay, the decay intensifies the closer you get to expiration.

So today I wanted to give it one more day.

If the market bounced at all, those options were going to decay very, very quickly. So even if we considered getting out early, let’s say the market had only been up a little bit at the open, I might have still exited, but that decay would really, you know, be kicking into overdrive because we’d only have a few hours left. So I did want to give it overnight, have that overnight decay for whatever that’s worth, and see where we are in the morning. Because also, just because we closed lower yesterday, as we know, we’re still in a bull market.

So it doesn’t mean that we’re closing lower today or sorry, opening lower today. You know, I was assuming that we might and ready to go. I mean, I came in at eight thirty in the morning and started loading up this trade ready to go so that at nine thirty, if I felt that we needed to do it, all I had to do was click the button. I didn’t have to start loading up the trade, researching the prices and all that.

So it was certainly on my mind. But yeah, I wanted to give it the chance because when we’re selling spreads and we’re selling options, we want to try to give it every chance we can to let it go until expiration. And, you know, again, this morning I just didn’t feel like we should, but I wanted to give it that chance this morning. And obviously that was a risk.

The market could have gapped significantly lower and then, you know, this trade might have might have been a meaningful loss at that point. But I was willing to give it that that that chance. I didn’t think it was going to, you know, gap three percent lower. I didn’t think it would be a monster gap lower, but that was certainly the risk.

So every trade you’re weighing risk versus reward. Do I wait you know, do I wait till the morning and see if we can get a little bit back on this position?

Do do we cut it out, cut it early?

Maybe the gain is less. Maybe we’re taking a small loss, but we’re avoiding a potential big loss. So, that’s always going to be the case when you’re weighing that decision. And as I’ve said repeatedly on this call, I feel like my most important job is preserving capital for you guys. So when we’re getting real close to the finish line and there’s concern that we could take a loss and we don’t have to, I’m usually going to pull the trigger and exit the trade. Might be too early, might be too late, but that’s usually what I’m going to do.

Let’s see.

Mark says, if we look at the whole week, there was a bounce on Wednesday after a big decline Tuesday. Same could have happened today after yesterday’s decline. Yeah, I mean, and again, look at, you know, look at a chart of the Russell. It’s in a clear uptrend.

I mean, it has rolled over slightly since the high over the last week and a half. But this is a this is a strong market. And until it tells me otherwise, yeah, I’m going to I’m going to continue to assume that the trend is higher. Certainly on a day to day basis, anything can happen.

I mean, we could have had news coming out of Washington that they’re closer to opening up the government or the Michigan consumer sentiment data was coming out.

Just news could affect the market. We only needed a little bit of breathing room. You know, if the Russell had gained five points even this morning, that would have given us a little bit more breathing room and, you know, that would have been have been better. So it really felt like anything could happen. And the fact that we are still in an uptrend, I’m certainly willing to take that risk.

Thomas says stochastics are now oversold. That’s true. And stochastics are a technical indicator if you’re not familiar with them. They are they’re very good in trends.

They don’t work great in choppy markets. They do work in trends. And right now they are oversold and are just starting to turn a little bit higher. That’s usually a good sign.

When I trade with using technicals in Technical Pattern Profits, another one of my services, one of my favorite setups are stocks that are in a trend, like an uptrend, but have come down a little bit and the statics are oversold and turning higher. So the statics haven’t made that hard turn yet, but they look like they’re starting to, and that could be a really good indication that we should be in decent shape next week if the stochastics continue to turn. But we’ll see what happens.

You know, and like any technical indicator, there’s not crystal balls, but that’s certainly something that is a positive rather than a negative. By the way, I did get filled on the two thirty five limit price, so the trade is officially filled at two thirty five, so hopefully most of you guys got that.

Stock charts doesn’t seem to have the RUT index. I use IWM to see technicals. Where are you seeing RUT stochastic? So I do that on I’m sorry, on Think or Swin. That’s my trading platform.

Let me just take a look real quick. I do have stock charts up. Let me see if I can find it.

I think you’re right though about the Russell. Yeah, for some reason they don’t have the Russell, which I don’t understand why. I might reach out to customer service.

I found on stock charts their customer support is pretty darn good. So I’m going reach out to them and find out what the deal is. I feel like it’s got to be there somewhere. It wouldn’t make sense that would not have the Russell.

It’s kind of a major index. It’s not like we’re trading something obscure. So I’ll reach out to them and see what they have to say about that. By the way, I do want to mention, if you’ve ever missed any of the trades, here in the weeklyincomealert.com site and platform, you know, obviously you guys are in the chat.

You can see the video.

If you go towards the top right, chat is highlighted. If you ever miss a trade, you can click on trades and you’ll see all the trades that have been published. And so you can also click on mods if you have a message for the moderator. But if you ever are missing a trade, you’re not sure what the trade was, even if it’s if you’ve missed the email, you missed the text, it’s, you know, it’s a week later, what have you, can always click on trades at weeklyincomealert dot com and it shows you all of the trades that we have published. So that’s a good tool I want to remind you of.

Let’s see.

What else?

Do I ever place a trade on Thinkorswim?

Personally, I do most of my trades on Thinkorswim for the weekly income alert spreads. I haven’t been just because, you know, a smaller percentage of people will have that.

But I probably should because people do have other platforms that are going to be similar. So one of these days I will place the trade on Thinkorswim so you can see how that works. I do know a decent number of people use Thinkorswim. Other people use Fidelity’s platform and the platforms are a little bit different than the website.

So that’s a good idea. I should do one week on Thinkorswim and then maybe I’ll also use the Schwab website as well just to make sure everybody’s on the same page. But yeah, I do like Thinkorswim. I’ve been using them for a very long time. I think it’s an excellent platform for trading, for technical analysis. I feel like they make it really easy.

Let’s see.

In an undecided market, if you were concerned an option is to move down the strike prices and take a lower credit, I did the two thousand three hundred ten, two thousand three hundred. Yeah, that is like I was saying, if you feel like you want to be more conservative, take the lower credit, make the strike price a little bit lower. It gives you a little bit more breathing room. You’ll get paid less, but if you’re concerned about that, then that’s a way to lower your risk.

For us newcomers, can you show us how to read the positions on Schwab? Let me do that. Let me get to there.

And I’ll share my screen again.

All right, give me one second to share my screen.

Okay, so sharing the screen again. This is what it looks like in my Schwab account. You can see the Russell, November twenty one, twenty twenty five, dollars two thousand three hundred eighty. The price is thirty five point six zero dollars The November twenty one, two thousand three hundred and ninety, dollars three thousand nine hundred and fifteen. So they’re not going to show you that midpoint like when we are making the trade. It’s not showing me the bid and the ask. Let me see if that’s something I can do.

No.

You would have to go into where it says trade, I believe, like up the top trade in order to see the actual bid and the ask and what the midpoint would be. So, what they’re going to show you here is not always going to be a true reflection of the price because they’ve got the price of thirty five point six five dollars thirty nine point three five dollars Let’s actually just see. Let’s take a look.

I’m not actually buying more, but I wanna I just wanna see what the bid in the ask is. So right now, it’s showing me a price of thirty six ten, and the midpoint is thirty five ninety, thirty six, thirty five eighty five. So, yeah. So they’re they’re on the price over here, they’re gonna show you what the last price is, not the midpoint. So it’s not always gonna be an accurate reflection of where the trade truly is. So, if somebody bought, let’s say, one of these puts on the ask, they’re not trading a spread, they just bought the put on the ask, that’s going to show a higher price than if you were trading the spread most likely. So, it does give you the price change.

It gives you the market valuation, but it’s not the most accurate way of doing it. Really, the most accurate way is to see where that midpoint is, to see where the bid and the ask is on each position. Or, you know, you could always just load a closing trade with no intent on actually selling it, but just to see where the midpoint is on that position.

You would have an idea of where the market really is a much closer. Or you just look at the bid and the ask on each one. So, you are in Thinkorswim or something like that and you have a watch list, or I assume the websites here have a watch list too. I never use it.

But if you have some kind of a watch list, you can usually decide that you want the bid and the ask as part of the data that you’re receiving. And then you could eyeball it to see where the midpoints are as well. But just remember, when you see the price here, that’s not going to be the most accurate midpoint. Like you see thirty six point three five dollars thirty nine You can’t just split the difference.

It’s really going to be the midpoint between each bid and the ask, so that’s important to understand.

I may have mentioned already, but I think the market closed at one pm Eastern on the twenty eighth. So that’s again a good reminder. That won’t affect us as far as the broadcast. We’ll still be on at ten am Eastern. But yeah, that does cut the trading day down by three hours, so that is good to know.

So, can you show us the status of the November fourteenth trade? So, it’s still open.

Taking a look here.

So it is underwater. I’m seeing let me see.

That’s November fourth. So I’m seeing the last price on this spread was six point five five dollars So yeah, that trade is underwater, not surprisingly, because the strike price is twenty four point four zero dollars twenty four thirty, and the Russell’s currently at twenty four hundred.

So that trade is against us and we are going to give it into next week to see what happens. And so I’ll be monitoring that closely and if we need to trade out of it, I will certainly let you know. Alright, well that will do it for us this week. Thanks for tuning in as always. I hope you were able to get out with a little bit of a gain today.

Again, just being conservative. Know there’s real money at stake here, so I want to protect your capital like I was saying. But have a great, great weekend and we will see you next Friday.