Weekly Income Alert – April 10, 2026

Welcome everyone to Weekly Income Alert. I’m Marc Lichtenfeld. Glad you are with us. We’ve got tons of people here.

I see Rock4446 from New Hampshire, DeCart38 in Greenville, South Carolina, and Andy G at his mountaintop cabin in the Ozarks, which sounds lovely. And congratulations to Andy G who shared with us. He got his black belt in jujitsu this week. So awesome job, and thank you for sharing that with the group.

Love to hear it. So that’s good news. Bad news is, as you’re probably aware, we are looking at a loss today.

Markets ripped higher on Wednesday and then continued higher yesterday after a ceasefire was negotiated and or at least agreed to.

I was a little surprised actually yesterday that the market continued to rally because though we’re not shooting at each other, which is certainly positive, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and now they’re charging a toll. Iran’s charging a toll to any ships that want to go through, which I believe was not the case before. So it certainly doesn’t seem like we are out of the woods yet. It seems like at least publicly both sides are saying that nothing has been agreed to in each side’s terms.

But I guess the fact that the ceasefire is holding for now is a positive, and the market certainly reacted to that. In my technical pattern profits Friday forecast that went out, I did point to a few things that are very positive for the market right now, not just that the market went up. Obviously, that was positive. It did break through various supports I’m sorry, various resistance levels. But we really started to see a shift in breadth, which is the number of stocks going up versus the number going down.

And seeing some other sentiment indicators, things like consumer discretionary stocks, which are considered a risk on trade versus consumer staples, which is considered a risk off. We kind of watched the ratio of those two sectors against each other. And for a couple of months now, consumer staples had been outperforming, which suggested risk off. That was even before the market sold off in March.

We have started to see that turn now and actually broke an important resistance level. That’s a positive. I also pointed to something. There’s a phenomenon called a Zwieg breath thrust, which is when breath gets to extreme negative levels and then within ten days switches to an extreme positive level.

So in other words, decliners are far outpacing advancers, again, to where you would consider it extreme, And then the opposite happens within ten days. And when that happens, that is typically very, very bullish. It’s a very bullish signal. We didn’t quite get that.

It didn’t happen in ten days. It happened in twelve days.

Technically for it to be a Zwieg bread thrust, it has to happen in ten days. And that’s the signal. The fact that happened in twelve days, I’m assuming that is a positive. I have not seen any studies on whether what happens if that occurs in twelve days. So I can’t say for sure that, yes, this is a bullish signal, but it certainly feels like that’s a bullish signal, even if it might not be quite as bullish as it happening in the ten days with as wide breadth thrust. So there are a lot of positive things happening in the market. That being said, we are still in a situation where we are one headline or one truth social post away from the market falling hard or ripping higher as well.

Things are still pretty volatile. Now, obviously, that can happen at any time. But if we were not at war right now, if the market had just been behaving this way and markets get volatile sometimes even without geopolitical conflict. If that had been the case and we were not at war and there was not a geopolitical event looming over our heads And now starting to see these things, I may have switched to a bull put spread today. Maybe, I’m not one hundred percent sure.

But the fact that we still do have this headline risk, I do want to continue with the iron condors for at least one more week. Again, gives us a bigger credit. It lowers the loss if we do take a loss, But again, it increases the chances of a loss if the market continues stronger. So that is all something to consider.

But for right now with the headline risk, like I said, I’m seeing a lot of positive things, but I don’t think we can definitively say yes, we’re back in an uptrend. The bull market’s continuing. I won’t be surprised at all if that’s the case and if next week we get more bullish and switch back to the bull put spreads. But for right now, with this headline risk out there, I still want to keep the iron condors on.

Regarding this week’s trade and the portfolio, so as I mentioned, we are in a loss situation right now.

A pretty dramatic fall this afternoon for our calls to end up out of the money, which is what we want, and then the position to turn profitable. If something happens, you know, certainly, I will try to let you know sometimes these things happen quickly. But if you see the market dropping quickly and you can get out for less than the maximum loss, you probably want to take it. If you’re new and we’re in a situation like we are today where we’re facing the maximum loss, you don’t need to get out. You don’t need to exit. Okay? The reason is the trade will settle at expiration, which is at the close today.

When that happens, again, because we’re trading an index, there’s no assignment. It’s not like you get put or called the issue. It’s cash settled. What that means is one thousand dollars per contract will come out of your account. With this trade, our official open price was six seventy. So we made six seventy dollars that was in your account. So the net loss would be three thirty dollars when that one thousand dollars comes out of your account.

And at any time when you’re looking at a loss, if you check into your account and let’s say you see that the debit, if you wanted to close the trade was ten dollars or higher, you’d never want to exit the trade because the maximum loss is ten dollars or one thousand dollars because it’s one hundred unit is the way that options are done. If it was a stock, it would be one hundred shares. With the index, it’s one hundred units. So at ten dollars or higher, there’s no reason to ever close because it can’t get worse than ten dollars No matter what the market does at expiration, it can’t be worse than ten dollars because our strike prices are ten points away from each other.

If they were twenty points, the worst loss would be twenty points or two thousand dollars but we’re keeping it at ten points. And that includes the iron condors. Even though we’re trading both sides, the maximum loss is ten points or one thousand dollars again, minus the net credit. So there’s never a reason to close early if that net debit is going to be ten or higher.

Because in that case, even if it’s ten and you close out, you’re still going to have a little bit of commission. If you saw a price of ten point one five and you closed out, you’re actually taking a bigger loss than you would at expiration with the maximum loss. So never close out the trade if you see the net debit of ten or higher. You only want to close it out if it’s less than that.

So like I said, right now, today’s trade facing the maximum loss situation, we would need a drop to twenty five forty on the Russell before that trade, before that price becomes a little bit less, which is what we want. For next week also, all three positions are currently in the red because our calls are all around the same price. Actually, calls for next week and the twenty fourth are at twenty five point five zero, twenty five point six zero next week and twenty five point six zero, twenty five point seven for April twenty fourth. So right now we’re going to leave those open because yes, if you close them out now, you probably, you would get out with a smaller loss, but we still have a week and two weeks left to go.

So I want to give it plenty of time. Anything can happen in the next five and ten trading sessions. So I do want to give it some time, see what happens. We very, very rarely, I don’t know if we’ve ever closed out a position earlier than the week of expiration.

We want to give that trade time to reach our, to get back out of the money, to get closer to expiration, give those options time to decay.

So yeah, that’s what we’re doing right now. So again, today’s trade, don’t need to do anything.

If we experience a maximum loss situation where if we experience a loss at expiration, the money will automatically come out of your account. And again, the maximum loss based on the open price of six seventy will be three thirty dollars So iron condors, I was thinking about this yesterday and today. What would have happened if we had just put on the bull put spread like we used to do back in the day?

Then it would have been a positive trade.

Certainly wouldn’t have made, the credit wouldn’t have been as high. But also, you know, three weeks ago, the market was looking pretty, pretty sick. It was not looking great. And so let’s face it, if I had said, all right, we’re just doing a bull put spread today, a lot of you guys would have thought I was crazy that we weren’t hedging our bets with the call spread when market didn’t look great.

So that’s the thing about these iron condors, you know, where we and bull put spreads. With the bull put spreads, I really want to be pretty certain that we are in a bull market again. We’re in an uptrend. Otherwise, I’m going to hedge my bets, take the larger credit.

So that’s kind of where we are today and why I’m sticking with the iron condor for at least another week. Again, if the market stays strong, then we’ll consider changing that next week. By the way, speaking of next week, Anthony will driving the ship next week as I will be on an airplane. And so probably would not be able to handle the trade at the Wi Fi on Delta Airlines probably not what we need it to be and also don’t wanna be telling my seatmates about iron condors.

Anthony will be handling things next week. So let’s get to this week’s trade and I will share my screen. Let me just take a quick look, make sure the markets haven’t moved too drastically from where they were.

Alright, so Sorry, one second. Let me just take another I think it’s going to be close to the same, but I just want to make sure it’s going to be yeah, okay. So let me share my screen.

Oh, and one other thing. I know I’ve been promising for a long time a demonstration on Thinkorswim. I was actually planning on doing that today. I had thinkorswim loaded up here and figure out a way to hide some of my personal details.

And then there was no way to share the thinkorswim platform.

The way I can see the only thing I can share is a web browser.

So I’m going either have to do the Thinkorswim web browser, which I’ve never used, or hopefully I’ll get some technical help in a couple of weeks and we’ll get, I’ll figure out a way to share, think or swim. So, all right. So you can see my screen here. So like always, we are trading the Russell dollar sign RUT.

The strategy, we are doing the iron condor again, so select iron condor.

All right, so we are going to buy to open the twenty five forty puts.

And I was looking at different strike prices. Trying to figure out does it make sense to go a little bit wider. And the credit on the iron condor, if we went five percent is not very strong.

I didn’t feel like it was worth it. And I’m also sticking with the system.

I wanted to stick with the system because that has what has worked historically. And we’ve had times where the market has kind of bounced around and come you know, and kind of finished right around that three percent number. So I’m going to stick with it, get that higher credit, and just kind of stick with what has historically been working. So that’s not right.

So we are selling the 2550s. Okay. All right. So we’re buying to open the oh, sorry.

Got to change the date here. So the Russell all right. I don’t know why this changed. So let’s go back to the top.

So we’ve got dollar sign RUT. We need to change this to iron condor.

All right, now we’re going to the May first. There we go. Changes everything. So we’re buying to open the twenty five point four zero, selling the 25.50s. Then on the call side, this is a little bit different than usual.

Usually we go with those numbers that end in zero. Today, I’m going with the twenty seven.

We’re selling the twenty seven fifteens buying the twenty seven 25s, just a little bit more open interest. That’s not usually the case, but there is today and that’s kind of where the numbers line up well.

So that gives us a credit of four.

That’s not what I saw earlier. I saw a much higher number. Let me just check one more thing. When I checked at the open, it was much higher.

Sorry, give me just one second here because Okay, interesting. Yeah, when I checked at the open this morning, the credit was over five.

Let me see, what’s the VIX doing? VIX yeah, VIX is down again, so that might have something to do with it.

Alright, let me just check my numbers one more time. So twenty five we’re at twenty six point three four.

So Sandman’s saying he’s showing about five point two zero.

Let me just check my numbers one more time. So I’m selling, buying to open the 25.40s,

selling the 25.50s May first, twenty seven, I don’t know. Oh, I’m sorry. Okay. There you go.

I was looking. My screen was blocked. I was looking at this number, the four hundred ten thousand five hundred and twenty is the midpoint.

Yeah, I have a little window here showing what you guys are seeing on the screen that was blocking this midpoint. So sorry about that. All right. So five twenty like I usually do, I put my limit price a little bit lower.

So right now we’re bouncing between kind of five twenty five thirty. I’m to leave it at five twenty see if we can get filled there.

Review order.

All right, so you can go ahead and place that trade.

I am going to send it out to everyone.

Let me just check my numbers are buying twenty five point four zero, selling at 25.50s, selling the 27.15s, buying twenty seven 25s, limit price five point two zero.

Let me know if you guys get filled.

All right, I sent that.

Okay, so again, the someone asked me to restate the strike prices. So we’re buying to open the May first, twenty twenty six, twenty five point four zero puts, selling to open the twenty five point five zero puts. Then we’re selling to open the twenty seven point one five calls, buying to open the twenty seven point two five calls, midpoint five thirty. Let’s see if I got filled. I didn’t hear it go off. Let’s see.

Oh, you know what? I don’t think I sent my order. I think that was the problem. Let’s see.

I think I have to do this again. Don’t think my order went through.

Shoot. All right.

So Rich O says, if it’s my first time, do I just do the buy?

Not sure exactly what you mean by that. Just do the buy. We are selling a credit spread. So I’ll do this again. Follow along with me here.

So we are changing this to RUTW, the May first twenty twenty six. We’re buying to open the twenty five forty puts.

We’re selling to open the twenty five 50s.

We’re and then on the call side, we’re selling to open the twenty seven fifteens and buying to open the twenty seven twenty five. So that is what the order is. So you’re buying to open the twenty five forty puts, expiration May first. You’re selling to open the twenty five fifty puts.

You’re selling to open the twenty seven fifteen calls, buying to open the twenty seven twenty five calls. I’m gonna put my limit price at five twenty, like I said.

Review order.

Okay, now I will place my order. There we go.

Now, let’s see if, I didn’t hear it go off, but let’s see if I got filled.

Okay, so now that is open.

And we’ll see what happens there. So some people got filled at five twenty, five twenty. Not sure why the ask price is one hundred twenty seven point nine zero. I don’t see iron condor. So if you’re on Schwab, let’s go back to, now if you’re on a different site, then it may look a little different. But if you go to RUTW, under strategy, under four leg spreads here, click on iron condor, and then you can change the variables.

Marc, if I decide to just do the bull put spread, you would just do the put side at twenty five point four zero, twenty five point five zero, right? Yes, that’s what I would do. So if we were just doing put spreads, if we weren’t doing the iron condors, it would be the, yeah, that would be the trade. We’re just adding the call spread on top of that. So I guess you’re feeling pretty bullish. And yes, somebody said my order went in at five twenty five. Let me see.

I thought I changed it to five twenty.

Yep, order type five twenty five. So let me change that.

And by the way, here’s how you can change if you’ve never changed an order before. These three lines right here, you click on that change.

And here, you know, all the variables you can change. So I will just change my limit price to five twenty.

All right, place the order. So it’s very, very simple to change that.

And then you just get this note here, nothing to be alarmed about. If we’re unable to cancel the original order, the new order will not be placed. Meaning that if you were changing an order and then you suddenly got filled before it went through, essentially then they’re not changing that order because the original order got filled. That’s all that’s saying.

All right, so let’s see.

Me see if that made a difference. Again, I didn’t hear it go off. I usually get an alert. Yeah, it’s open. So if you’re new, and I say this every time, especially with the iron condor, sometimes it takes a little while to get filled.

It can even take a few hours depending on the market. With the market, so is the market moving much?

Yeah, market’s not moving too much right now, so it’s just a matter of time, I believe, until I get filled.

Susan B. Says right now I’m seeing four forty as the midpoint credit.

That should not be the case unless things have changed pretty dramatically. Let me take another look and see where we are.

I’ll go back and load this trade one more time for anybody who still needs that, and that way I’ll be able to see exactly what the midpoint is.

So we had the twenty five forties.

Twenty five fifties, twenty seven fifteens, twenty seven 25s, midpoint right here, five thirty.

That’s if you might have been looking here, was the mistake that I made before because I had a window blocking that.

So the bid is four thirty. You never want to hit the bid. You never want to trade these at the market because the spread is so wide. If you’re trading these at the market, if you’re buying this, you’d be buying it at six forty.

If you’re selling it, you’d be selling it at four twenty. That’s if you’re doing it at the market. We never want to trade these at the market because the midpoint is really where the fair price is somewhere around the midpoint doesn’t have to be exactly to the penny, But you want to get filled somewhere around this midpoint. So if you see this number, ignore this number.

This is the number. That midpoint number is where you want to place your limit price. And again, you can try it a little bit above, a little bit below depending if you want to place the order and walk away from the screen for a while, you might trade it, you might put it just a little bit below. If you’re sitting here monitoring it, you might put it a little bit higher.

If you don’t get filled, you can always bring it back down to the midpoint, even bring it back down below if you need to.

What I do as a reminder, I usually put it just below the midpoint just to give us an increased chance of getting filled because our official track record is based on my actual fill. So if I don’t get filled, then the trade is not official in our track record. And even though many of you might be filled, if I’m not filled, then it’s not officially in our track record. So we’re trying to emulate what at least the experience that most people have. So in order for that to happen, I need to get filled. And granted, I might be getting filled at worse prices than you guys because you might be truly hitting the midpoint and I might be going a nickel or a dime below that.

A couple of people getting filled at five twenty. The big techs finally filled at five twenty. Again, this could take a couple of hours. It happens sometimes, usually within the hour, but sometimes it does take a few hours. So be patient. If the market starts moving strongly away from us, then I might send out an alert saying, hey, we need to change the price. But generally speaking, it takes a little bit of time.

So Maria NNZ, on Fidelity below the iron condor, it says net credit, then it says amount. What do I put there? So I’m assuming that that is the they’re asking you for a limit price. So our limit price on this trade is five twenty. So that’s what I would put. And then you should hopefully get billed at five twenty.

JVW fifty two, my Schwab screen does not show May first twenty six options for dollar sign RUT. It goes from April seventeenth to May fifteenth. So that is an important part, an important thing on Schwab.

This thing right here. So you have to put in dollar sign RUT in the symbol. When you do, this is what you’re looking at.

Right? And that’s why it says April seventeenth. Those are called the monthly options. Those expire on the third Friday. But if you change this to RUTW, then you get all these other expiration dates. So change this right here under option.

The default is RUT, but change it to RUTW and then you’ll get all these other expiration dates.

John **** says, I know your back testing analysis of the vertical put spread strategy showed an eighty plus percent success ratio. Have you analyzed the iron condor strategy to determine the win ratio? I’m guessing somewhere between sixty five percent and seventy percent. It was actually nearly identical to the vertical put spreads. It was, I can’t remember if it was eighty six percent, which is the vertical put spread or eighty three percent. It right up there. So that’s one of the reasons I have felt so comfortable going to iron condors and sticking with them for now.

CJ1 getting filled at five twenty.

Susan B says Fidelity is still putting the midpoint at four thirty, leaving my trade at five twenty. Hopefully they finally come around.

Polaris says, Marc, last week we closed the position early because of headline risk. Why didn’t we do the same this Tuesday before the eight pm deadline? It would have been roughly even. What was different this time?

That’s a really great question.

Basically, I was not expecting the market to rip higher like it did. Even if a ceasefire was announced, I did not expect that the market would put so much credence into that the ceasefire would hold, that it was particularly meaningful. I certainly didn’t expect oil to fall as hard as it did. So also kind of one of the reasons that I am leaning towards getting more bullish now because realistically, when you look at the news, yes, it’s certainly positive that there is a ceasefire, but not that much has changed yet.

And so the fact that the market is responding positively is a good sign. I just did not expect the market to rip higher like it did and then to continue higher even on Thursday. But that was basically it. Was I surprised the market went higher on a ceasefire?

No. Was I surprised that it went as high as it did? Yes. And I thought there was certainly an equal chance that nothing would happen because at that point, you know, heading into the close Tuesday, there was no indication that Iran was going to come to the table.

So, you know, and kind of when you really think about it, nobody’s agreed on anything other than to stop shooting at each other until, I guess, today is when they are going to sit down and start negotiating.

So, yeah, so it a matter of on Tuesday, were, I believe we were looking at a loss still, a smaller loss for sure, but still a loss.

And so I wanted to give it one more day, see what would happen. And yeah, the markets went strongly against us when the market ripped higher.

Your analysis, what is the definition of a positive trade? Keeping the full credit truly a great win or keeping any of the credit? I would say any of the credit. You know, now if we’re making a nickel, you know, then that’s not a great trade, but it’s certainly better than losing money. But some reasonable profit. Let’s, you know, to, I don’t know, to have a very general statement, let’s say fifty percent of the profit certainly on an iron condor where those numbers are bigger. If it’s a put spread And like back in the day when we were starting and those numbers were much smaller, let’s say, and we’re earning two dollars to two point two five dollars If we’re keeping half of that, you know, that’s again better than losing, but that’s nothing great, nothing to write home about.

Positive, yes, but nothing great. So the smaller the credit, obviously, the more important it is to keep as much of that credit as you can because that’s what’s going to generate some strong returns. On the iron condors, because the credits are so large, you do have a little bit more leeway. So that’s how I would determine what is positive and what is not.

Some people getting filled at five twenty, some not. Let me check where I am on this.

Yep, still open.

We’ll again give it some time. I’m not worried at all.

So this is a good question, WJO, and I was looking at this. Since the iron condor trades earn five hundred dollars to six hundred dollars credit versus two hundred dollars to two fifty dollars for the normal trade, why not increase the margin on the iron condor to where the credit’s around three hundred dollars but the risk is lower?

Excellent question. So I was looking at that today because we do have headline risk and looking, hey, should I increase the strike prices to five percent instead of three percent? That does give us a wider margin for error.

But as you mentioned, it’d be a lower credit and the credits were in the three hundreds.

And so my thinking is that size credit is not that much larger than just the bull put spreads, But we’re taking on some additional risk in that if the market goes higher, we’re facing a potential loss. So again, with iron condors, the size of the loss will be smaller if we take a loss, but the chances of a loss are higher. So if I’m gonna increase the chances of a loss, I wanna get paid for taking on that additional risk. And for me, that, you know, three, three fifty versus let’s say two, two fifty just wasn’t worth that additional risk.

I am willing to take that risk for, you know, double or close to it, the amount that I would get for that bull put spread. So, you know, a five, six dollar credit, I’m willing to take that chance. And then if we have a loss, you know, it’s less than five hundred dollars Whereas if we take a loss on a wider iron condor, we might be looking at a six fifty dollars seven hundred dollars loss. So to me, I want if I’m gonna take on that additional risk, I wanna get paid for it.

And I just didn’t feel like five percent and getting a three, dollars three fifty credit was worth it to take on that additional risk. Obviously, everybody feels different. You should do what is best for your tolerance for risk. But for me, I wanted to be compensated for that additional risk.

What is the max loss for today’s trade? Why is the max loss amount for today’s trade so much higher than previous weeks for the iron condor? Because volatility is down. Because the market has gone up so much, volatility has come down, which means the option prices will go down.

The more volatility there is, the higher priced options are. So as the markets are falling, we’re trading these iron condors, the options have a lot of juice in them. Volatility has now fallen. Think are we still below twenty percent, twenty on the VIX?

Yeah, we’re at about below nineteen on the VIX, which is fairly bullish territory. So option prices don’t have as much juice in them. So they’ve come down. And so if we get filled at five twenty, that means that our potential loss, max loss would be four eighty.

Whereas last week when it felt like you know, the markets were falling and it felt like they could really go into a free fall, there was a lot of juice in those options because there was a lot of fear in the market, a lot of volatility, people bidding up, especially put prices. So those option prices increase. When we’re selling those options, we’re getting a lot more for them. Really good question there.

So bobd33 notes that a five percent spread would not have helped us on today’s expiring trade. Yeah. And that’s something to keep in mind with credit spreads and these iron condors is that we’re going to have markets that really take off to the upside or really crater. And this strategy is not the strategy that takes advantage of that. This strategy is for markets that are behaving a little bit more normally, that are generally trading.

I’m not going say within a range because they can certainly trend higher, but that are not moving very, very quickly. You when you think about it, if the market goes up an average of, let’s say, eight to ten percent a year, on average, that weekly number is gonna be a quarter of a percent a week. So let’s say less than one percent over our three weeks. Now, obviously, markets don’t just track that way.

They don’t just go quarter of a percent, a quarter of a percent, a quarter of a percent. They’re going go up two percent. They’re going to fall half a percent. They’re to go up three percent.

They’re going to move. But when it’s kind of orderly like that, generally speaking, you know, this strategy works great because we’re selling options, markets are behaving in an orderly, rational way, and we are collecting those credits, and they generally will expire worthless.

When markets fall hard or when they rip higher, this is not that strategy that gets to take advantage of it. So that’s when these will incur a potential loss.

Again, there’s ways of lowering our loss if we had gotten out earlier. But again, that was my call. I just did not expect the market to take off as quickly as it did. To me, there was no indication. Yes, a ceasefire is certainly positive, but we weren’t really seeing improving breadth numbers at that point.

There was really nothing in the sentiment that had suggested we were at extreme levels. There was certainly a lot of pessimism, but we weren’t at extreme levels. I just wasn’t seeing anything in the market to make me think this is the turning point. Looking back, it may well be yesterday or Wednesday may have been the turning point.

We’ll have to see how this shakes out. But as of Tuesday night, I certainly wasn’t seeing that or even Tuesday afternoon. So when markets take off, again, this is not the strategy that’s going to take advantage of that. But generally speaking, these kinds of periods where markets are very volatile don’t last that long.

They happen, it’s not an irregular thing. But once things settle down, then the strategy goes back to doing what it did for, know, let’s face it, it’s been eleven months and heading into today, our closed positions, we have an eighty one percent win rate.

And this does not include today’s losing position.

The average position has returned ten percent. That’s over three weeks. So ten percent every three weeks versus the stock market. The average for the Russell was one percent over three weeks.

And this is over those eleven months. So, you know, the strategy works. It’s just in this exact moment in time. It’s not really, you know, the markets are a bit volatile for it.

Checking one more time to see if I got filled. Looks like I’m still open. So I’ll let you know if we need to change anything in a little bit. Stop sharing there. Let’s get to one or two more questions before we signed off. Coach Tim said he moved it to five fifteen, got billed at five eighteen.

John P, no strategy, makes money every week. Very true. Very true. This one, you know, was fairly consistent, but even even, you know, with an eighty one percent win rate, even when markets weren’t going crazy, we had some weeks where, you know, we took a loss. It’s going to happen.

Those of you who’ve been with me for a while, even before weekly income alert know that I am very process oriented, very disciplined. When something works, you stick with it. And you kind of don’t let markets shake you out of strategies and methodologies that work. So I’m not particularly worried that anything has changed with this strategy. We’re just in a bumpy period right now.

Ross Margaret says, would you close today’s expiration now? Looks better than total loss right now.

Let me see if I can see real quickly.

Let me see if I can see real quickly what it’s trading at.

If any of you see the number you want to let me know what that number is, it’s going to take me a minute to navigate there.

Eight fifty. Some people say nine fifty, eight fifty.

So yeah, I’m kind of surprised because the market isn’t really moving.

I’m taking a look real quick on mine.

Yeah, my midpoint is eight sixty.

So I would say, yeah, I’ll put out that alert in a second. And now it just changed. So yeah, it’s kind of all over the place. I just saw it go from eight sixty to nine seventy to ten forty.

So it’s kind of all over the place. If you could get filled below nine, I think it’s probably worth it to try to close out the trade.

And don’t hate me if the market does drop. It would have to be a pretty big drop at this point to end up being back to where we’re breakeven or in the money, but I guess it could happen.

But if you can get there, again, now my midpoint showing ten point one five. But I will put out an alert saying that we should, if you can get out for under nine dollars and cut your loss a little bit smaller, I suggest doing it. Walter says I’m asking nine point two five. I’ve had a nine point five five buy order.

So yeah, let me know if you are getting filled. I’ll be surprised if anybody does get filled, but I guess you never know. Mean, once in a while we’ve had people getting filled at crazy prices where I think we had an order in for somewhere in the fives. This is when we were selling a credit and somebody got filled at seven. So you never know.

So see what happens. I’ll put that alert out saying, if you can get filled for nine dollars or better, take it. But I don’t expect that many people will.

Yeah. David says suddenly went from eight fifty to ten fifteen. So yeah it doesn’t make sense that it would because we’re so far away. I mean we are three percent away from from the strike price.

It doesn’t make sense to me. Know and again just because that midpoint is there doesn’t guarantee a fill. You know usually when we’re opening a trade there’s a good chance we’re going to get filled. But trying to get out of a trade again, where the midpoint doesn’t make a lot of sense probably won’t.

But if you can get it, yeah, I would say it makes sense to see. And if you can get lucky, then you’ll, you know have cut your loss most likely. Although if you get filled who knows that could mean that the market is tanking and you know there might be a very good reason you’re getting filled. But I think it means I think it’s probably a good a good idea if you can do it.

Ken forty five says which week are you talking about? I’m talking about today’s today’s trade that expires today on April tenth.

Luke says yeah, these orders are unlikely to be filled when the market is so far above the strike price.

T Bill four thousand three hundred thirty four says, can we just close the calls and leave the puts?

Yeah, you could. I mean, the puts are gonna probably be pretty worthless at this point.

Might save yourself a little bit of commission. The only thing is you’re you’re opening yourself up to a little bit of risk that if something happens in the next several hours and markets absolutely tank then you you have that risk on the put side.

Kenneth T. Says should we roll the trade. I don’t roll trades.

My the way I’ve always traded is if a trade is not working you just exit and you move on.

Don’t try to save a trade by just extending it to another week. We just exit the trade and move on. And so that’s all we’re doing here. I mean, are putting on a new trade today anyway, which we do every week. But yeah, generally speaking, you know, a trade that’s not working, we just get out and that’s the end of it.

So alright. We’ll get to this one last question. Eric one hundred, how do you figure out how much cash you need available to fund the trade? So if you’re trading strike prices that are ten points wide like we are doing, you need one thousand dollars per contract because their maximum loss is one thousand dollars minus the credit.

So when you place the trade, you’re receiving a credit. If you suffer a maximum loss, dollars one thousand will come out of your account. So you need one thousand dollars of cash or marginable securities in the account per contract. If you’re trading two contracts, you need two thousand dollars, But it’ll always be a thousand dollars if we’re trading ten point strikes, which so far we always have, and that’s the plan going forward.

If you decide to go rogue and wanted to trade twenty point strikes, then you need two thousand dollars per contract. If you’re trading five point spreads, then you’d need five hundred per contract. But for our purposes, it’s one thousand dollars So it doesn’t look like anyone is getting fill So Cal said he filled April seventeenth at eight eighty five.

Nailesh, can someone tell me if we’re supposed to close April sixteenth? No, we are not closing anything yet.

We’ll see what happens early next week. I generally only close a trade the week of expiration because I want to give it time to work out. So if markets are still strong next week, we’ll see where we are and look into closing it early if we can keep our losses smaller. But it’ll depend on a lot.

There’s a of headline risk this weekend, and we’ll see what happens. So I’m going to leave it there for today. Like I said, I’ll put that order out after I sign off saying, hey, you can get below nine dollars I don’t expect that you will to close out today’s trade, but if you can go for it. But I don’t expect that that will be the case.

But I will put that out there.

So that should hit your inboxes fairly soon.

Again, Anthony will be here next week.

And in the meantime, if you have questions, again, can’t give personal advice, but shoot us an email at mailbagoxfordclub dot com and put weekly income alert in the subject line so that it gets sent directly to me. And I will do my best to answer your questions. So thanks everyone. Have a great weekend. And we will talk to you next week.