Beagles on the Bright Side

It's once again time for America's favorite beagles – Baxter and Daisy,
to guest write a post in the Broken Pawn. It seems these most literate of beagles are in a surprisingly optimistic mood.

Hi Everyone! It Daisy… … and Baxter here with another blog for our readers. It sure has been a while since Hank let us take a turn at his blog, Daisy! I know Baxter. It's a shame because this was one of the most eventful winters ever. That right! And a lot of stuff happened too! Sigh…I suppose that’s one way of putting it. The big news was Hank spent two of months home with us. His last job ended in December and he took a whole month off spending time with Kathy and us before he even started looking for a job. He was doing some part-time programming but that was only a few hours a week and he spent the rest of his time walking us and eating at home. I like it when Hank is home with us. Me too! We love Kathy and she is home with us a lot but Hank does one thing that Kathy never does. Eat Meat! YUM!!! I love Meat! Kathy is a vegetarian and doesn’t eat any meat. But Hank eats lots of meat. When Hank works he makes a bologna sandwich to take to work and share with us but when he was home he ate lots of soup. That’s because in the winter all the grocery stores had sales on Progresso and Campbell’s Chunky Soup for 99 cents a can or less. Hank got lots of soup with beef and chicken in them. YUM!! I love beef and chicken. Every day Hank would heat up a can of soup and share it with is. My favorite was the Campbell Chunky Sirloin Burger soup, Baxter. It had lots of Sirloin Burger pieces for Hank to share with us. You certainly can’t go wrong with Chunky Sirloin Burger soup but my favorite was the Progresso Beef Barley Soup. It had lots of cubed beef chunks for Hank to share with us and there was so much barley in the soup Hank would get filled up and give us almost all the Beef! YUM!! That was wonderful to have soup every day but now that Hank is back working all was get is part of his bologna sandwich. It’s so sad. Cheer up Daisy! Maybe Hank will get laid off and then we can get back to eating soup every day! That’s right Baxter! There’s a bright side to almost everything if you know where to look.

Here's some of our favorite soups! Campbell;s Chunky Sirloin Burger is my favorite!! I like Progresso Beef Barley! YUM!!

Sure! Like when our neighbors Gary and Linda’s car got stuck in their driveway. It looked like they were going to be stuck in the driveway until spring but we were walking by with Hank and Kathy. Another neighbor was also walking by and Hank helped push the car out of the driveway. We helped too! That’s right! We barked and howled and were so loud that Hank and the other neighbor pushed extra hard so we would get back to our walk and stop being so noisy. The next day Gary gave Hank FIVE DOLLARS for helping him. And because we were such good helpers Hank decided to get us a treat with the five dollars! Hank got us a bag of Jack Link’s AM Dried Breakfast Sausage made with applesauce. I don’t care much about applesauce but like the Jack Link’s website says “Sausage is delicious and amazing!” The website also talks about the “magic of portable sausage” and I agree 100%. The sausage tasted even better than our beef stick treats and I didn’t taste any applesauce. We didn’t get the sausages every day so they lasted over a month! Now every time it snows we head over to Gary and Linda’s driveway to help if they get stuck but it hasn’t happened yet. It just snowed last weekend. Maybe we’ll get another blizzard before spring so we can get more of Jack Link’s AM Dried Breakfast Sausages! YUM!!

Jack Link's breakfast sausage treats are the BEST!! I wish our neighbors car would get stuck more often!

Most things have a bright lining, but there was nothing good about what happened at the pond by the cemetery this winter. That’s right Daisy. First Mr. Goose died. It was very cold and when we went there for our Sunday morning walk so Hank could take pictures he was curled up in a ball. He didn’t even move to get any of the bread Kathy brought to give all the ducks and geese. Kathy threw some over to him so he got something to eat but he barely moved. Hank thought he was sick and then on Tuesday the paper said he died. I guess everybody dies but I’d hate to die on a frozen pond outside in the winter. Me neither! I’m glad Kathy and Hank have a nice warm house for when we get old. Not that that’s going to happen anytime soon. A few weeks after Mr. Goose died, a loose dog attacked Bob the Swan at the cemetery. He went to the vet but he died a few days later. It was so sad. I was afraid the cemetery would ban dogs but it’s still Ok for us to go there if we are on leashes. We’re always on leashes when we are outside so we don’t run away or get hit by cars. Sometimes we go to our backyard and then there’s no leashes so we can run around a little. I miss seeing Bob and Mr. Goose at the pond. I miss them too, Baxter. There are still plenty of ducks and geese at the cemetery though. Lately there is the funniest duck – he is all black except for some red on his face. He’s funny looking but pretty cool also. I hope he sticks around for a while. I like seeing the different animals at the duck pond but it is very dangerous living outside all the time.

Rest In Peace Mr. Goose and Bob the Swan...Welcome to the neighborhood red-faced duck!

A big thing happened just last week, Daisy. Last Saturday it snowed but then Kathy left and didn’t come back until Sunday. She had to go to a bridal shower for her niece, Lauren. We were lucky that Hank stayed home with us. Hank walked us a lot but he left for the entire afternoon to help the Boy Scouts with some chess stuff. We were so lonely. I was lonely too but I just took a nap and Hank came home while I was still sleeping. You are always sleeping, Baxter! It’s what I do best! I stayed alert for intruders. Of course no one would dare intrude when I was on duty. We didn’t like Kathy being away for a whole night but there was a bright side, Daisy! There sure was! Kathy made us a slab of corned beef for us to share with Hank! No one can make corned beef like Kathy!! YUM!! It was moist and tender. And it had a layer of juicy fat around the edge of each slice! It was the best corned beef ever. I thought Kathy was going to be gone a whole week to give us time to eat all the corned beef. But Kathy came home the very next day. It was the best of both worlds! We didn’t have to stay home alone while Hank went to work on Monday… …and we got a whole corned beef! Not only was there a bright side to Kathy leaving, there was a side of corned beef! YUM!!

It's always good to see the bright side... and no side is brighter than a side of corned beef!

Movie Review - Death Wish

The remake of Death Wish is out!

  I was looking forward to seeing the remake of ‘Death Wish’ as soon as I saw the previews and would have seen it on its opening March 2nd weekend except that it did not make it to the local Marshalltown movie theatre until this past weekend so Kathy and I went to the Saturday matinee with 11 other movie goers. 45 years later the original ‘Death Wish’ is dated but at the time it was a controversial film. There was an unprecedentedly graphic and violent rape/murder scene that was completely omitted years later for the movie's network television debut. But what caused the majority of the controversy was the correctness or incorrectness of the concept of vigilante justice. In the original film architect Paul Kersey’s wife is murdered and daughter raped in a home break-in. Kersey deals with his grief and the inability of the police to bring the perps to justice by arming himself and heading out to the streets of New York. Armed first with a roll of quarters in a sock and quickly graduating to handguns, Kersey makes himself a seemingly easy target who switches from victim to hunter and metes out justice as the judge, jury, and executioner.

  Aside from the monotonal all-time tough guy Charles Bronson as Kersey, the movie features solid character actor Vincent Gardenia as Detective Frank Ochoa who finds out that Kersey is the vigilante but allows him to escape charges if he moves into another city. This offer is due to the falling crime rates ever since Kersey has started his activities and the desire of the city authorities to use the vigilante threat to keep the crime rates down. The movie became part of the national consciousness and was propelled into franchise-hood after the Bernie Goetz ‘subway gunman’ shootings in 1984 brought the vigilante question back into the headlines.

  Bruce Willis was cast as Paul Kersey and given a new job as a Chicago doctor instead of a New York architect. I thought Willis was a good choice to give Kersey a lighter touch and was excited to see how the vigilante question would be treated 45 years after the original Death Wish with the debates over gun rights and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws at a fever pitch and this was even before the firestorm caused by the latest school shooting in Florida.

  The movie starts out much like the original. Kersey is a law-abiding citizen livingh an ideal family life with his wife and daughter on Lakeshore Drive. There is even a bonus as his deadbeat brother is played by the exceptional Vincent D’Onofrio (Kingpin in Daredevil and Detective Goren in Law and Order : Criminal Intent). The story continues with the brutal murder of his wife in a home burglary but without the rape. Although the daughter still survives she is in a coma in Kersey’s hospital.

  The movie continues to track the original as Kersey sinks into despair at the loss of his wife and the ineffectiveness of the police to catch the perpetrators. One 21st century twist is that Kersey has a therapist to talk to so we know what is on his mind. Kersey tries to thwart a mugging but gets beat up for his trouble. He then flirts with the idea of buying a gun but ends up getting an untraceable one that improbably drops out of a shooting victim’s waistband while in the emergency room that he learns to clean, load, and fire from watching You Tube videos. While riding the trains to keep his mind off his troubles, Kersey uses his gun to thwart a carjacking and shoots a helpless and disarmed carjacker dead. In another 21st century twist the act is caught on a video that is uploaded and gone viral which leads the same detective that haven’t found Kersey’s burglars to look for the vigilante.

  At this point the movie stops following the ‘Death Wish’ plot and turns more into a revenge\morality play. At the hospital, Kersey looks at the gunshot wound of a child whose transgression was to go home from school through the territory of the drug dealer known as the ‘Ice Cream Man’. Using an address gleaned from the youth’s medical records, Kersey heads to the Ice Cream Man’s block in broad daylight and empties two clips in him. This premeditated act is not the kind seen in Death Wish. The only public controversy is from Chicago radio hosts debating vigilante justice and a chief of detectives demanding the same detectives that have a wall of unsolved crimes (including Kersey’s) catch the vigilante.

  The plot goes further astray when Kersey attends to the wounds of a gunshot victim that is wearing Kersey’s watch that was stolen in the burglary. The movie morphs from ‘Death Wish’ to ‘Revenge Wish’ as Kersey is no longer looking to rain death on criminals but just to avenge his wife. The rest of the movie is entertaining enough as Kersey tortures one of his wife’s murderers, dispatches another thanks to a well-timed bowling ball, and finishes off the third in a finale worthy of any action movie. It just isn’t Death Wish anymore. The movie ends with some similarities to the original in that Kersey and his daughter move to another city but instead of a tacit agreement on the part of the police Kersey is let off scott-free by the detectives that have gleaned his identity.

  ‘Death Wish’ is a well-made film. I like the idea of Kersey being featured in a viral video and getting firearm basic training from YouTube videos. Willis and D’onofrio give fine performances. To me the film’s glaring flaw is that it seemingly wanted as little as possible to do with the original except to draw an audience. This movie is a cut above Willis’s recent forays into the Direct-to-DVD market but has a lot in common with them as soon as it drops the transformation of Paul Kersey from citizen to vigilante. I’m sure the remake aspect was necessary to allow for a bigger budget but after three weeks has barely grossed its' 30 million production budget. I consider this a Red Box special which is a shame because by being truer to the original film I believe the movie would have capitalized on the growing discussion over gun ownership and violence instead of being a revenge vehicle for an aging action hero.

Ultimately the Death Wish remake misses out on the central theme of the original - the transformation of Paul Kersey...

For good or bad I must say they don't make gunfights (or hair) like they used to. The scenes from Death Wish III (my personal favorite of the series) from the 3:00 to 7:50 marks are classics!

TV Binge Review - Jessica Jones Season 2

Marvel Comics' Jessica Jones is back on Netflix with the recently released Season 2!

  Jessica Jones’ second season is the latest Netflix\Marvel superhero collaboration and was released this past weekend. While it has taken me a week or longer to watch the previous 6 13-hour productions from Netflix/Marvel (and less for the 8 episode Defenders) once I started watching Jessica Jones on Saturday afternoon I could not stop. I watched the first six episodes on Saturday and the remaining seven on Sunday despite losing an hour sleep to daylight savings time. As the ‘too-long/didn’t read’ crowd may surmise I found the series to be stellar and I put it as a narrow second place behind the first Daredevil series for how I rank the eight Netflix\Marvel series produced so far.

  Jessica is running her private investigation agency and gets some information from her adoptive sister Trish Walker which is a lead to a link between the car accident that killed her family and her subsequent super powers. Meanwhile she is approached by a character called the ‘Whizzer’ who claims to have super speed but only when scared. Jones puts off the Whizzer as a fake but finds out that he does have his super speed moments before he is murdered which Jones links to the medical facility where she vaguely remembers being kept and experimented on and the ‘accidental’ death of the doctor running the facility.

  At this point the story looks like a pretty routine hero-villain story as Jones is hunting down the super powered being that is hunting other super powered beings (including Jones) that were treated by a mysterious IGH corp. At least it was pretty routine until the murderer is found to be Jones’ own mother who has even more super strength than Jones but is hampered by an unstable mentality that leads to fits of violence to anything that upsets her or threatens her husband (IGH head experimenter Karl Mallus) who has taken care of her and mostly successfully moderates her bouts of rage.

  The story then weaves Jones’ conflict between bringing her mother to justice and trying to understand her motivations as well as get her the help she needs with the other subplots that center around series regulars that want to use powered beings or gain super powers themselves. High powered attorney Jeri Hogarth discovers she has ALS and tries to find a rumored IGH experimentee that gained ‘healing’ powers to cure herself. Trish Walker gets addicted to a performance enhancing inhaler used by ‘Nuke’ in the first season. When the inhaler runs out and she can’t reproduce the contents, Walker kidnaps Mallus and tries to make him alter her DNA to give her powers. The experiment seems to fail but there is a hint at the end that Walker may have gained the super reflexes of her comic book ‘Hellcat’ persona.

  The show was less a super hero series than a show about people with powers trying to deal with them. Once the murderer was revealed to be Jones’ mentally ill mother there wasn’t any villain although season one bad guy Killgrave did make a one-episode appearance in Jones’ visions when she become too much like her mother for comfort. The show was about a group of dysfunctional people with and without super powers whose actions oscillate from being helpful or incredibly destructive to each other to satisfy short-term goals.

  The pace of the episodes was excellent. All the previous Netflix/Marvel shows have three or four episodes of downtime where the plot slows to a crawl while we explore some aspect of the main characters past in snail-paced flashbacks. Jessica Jones had one bottle episode which was an extended flashback to explain her mother’s motivations but the other 12 episodes all worked together to advance the plot. Except for cameos from the petty theif ‘Turk’ and lawyer Foggy Nelson from Daredevil there was no crossover to the rest of the Netflix series. I thought this helped the show keep a lively pace as too many characters from other shows tend to lead to extra character development and explanation that slow the plot. The lack of crossover left more time to delve into the motivations and actions of Hogarth, Walker, and Jones’ private investigator assistant Malcom.

  Another aspect of the show that compared favorably with the recent Netflix/Marvel shows was the complete lack of the countless ninja fighters that infected Daredevil Season 2, Iron Fist, and the Defenders. All three of the shows would take the easy way out from any character conflict by conjuring up dozens or hundreds of ninjas for our heroes to battle to get some pointless action scenes (pointless because the supply of ninjas were inexhaustable) and then rush through the characters' individual situations. The ‘no-ninja’ policy forced Jessica Jones’ showrunners to deal with the messes they created for the characters instead of dissolving them into ninja-mania.

  My favorite side piece was Hogarth’s revenge against the IGH nurse Inez and her ‘healer’ friend Shane. The pair con Hogarth into getting Shane out of prison and putting the pair up at her penthouse apartment while Shane is healing her. Hogarth feels like she is being cured only to discover the pair has stolen everything they could and split. Hogarth finds out where the pair live and convinces Inez that she has evidence of Shane conning multiple women and Inez is about to be left as a victim to take the fall for the theft of Hogarth’s possessions. She seems convincing to me and especially Inez, who accepts a gun from Hogarth and shoots Shane while Hogarth reports the gunshot to the police. I expect to see Hogarth cured from her ALS at some point and her conniving performance makes me think the character could carry her own series if needed.

  The series ended with very few loose ends but enough lingering conflicts to set the stage for a third season. Jessica is left distanced from former assistant Malcom and friend/sister Trish but has a new love interest in building superintendent Oscar and an attachment to his young son Vido to set the stage for a possibly revenge filled third season. The only Netflix/Marvel series scheduled are Luke Cage season 2, Daredevil season 3, and Iron Fist season 2. If they can bring back the same showrunners for Jessica Jones I expect there will be a season 3 sooner rather than later given the high quality of this recent series.

On The Road Again

  A little more than two months ago my contract ended at the place I was programming at in Ames. I didn’t have another job lined up and had resolved to be a bit choosy in picking my new job with the end result hopefully to be making closer to the incredibly generous rate I was being paid in Ames and working closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile commute to Des Moines I had in the past few years.

  In order to let the world of recruiters know I was available I updated my resume on dice.com and changed my status on LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’. Almost immediately recruiting companies started making contact with me. Most of the jobs openings were what I considered low-paying ‘contract to hire’ jobs with no benefits with the idea that the promise of being hired after six months to a year will make up for the low rate.

  I explained to the recruiters that my salary range was higher than the openings and also explained that that my range was subject to change. That was good enough for most of them. One recruiter submitted me for a direct hire position but would not accept my explanation about not considering a particular contract to hire position. The same recruiter wrote to me two weeks later to ask about the contract to hire position and I replied asking if he heard anything about the direct hire position he had submitted me for. I got a reply asking me if I would talk to his supervisor about the contract to hire position.

  I said OK and talked to the supervisor in the afternoon. The supervisor told me that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t consider the contract to hire position because he had ‘been in this business a long time’ and they were offering the going rate. I couldn’t resist asking how old the supervisor was. He was 32 which meant that I had been programming before he had been born and we probably had vastly different ideas about what ‘a long time was’ (he has been a recruiter for 7 years which may be a long time for being a recruiter but I wouldn’t think so).

  The supervisor and I weren’t going to agree but when I asked why I didn’t get any feedback about the direct hire job he said he was going to call his contact at the company in the next week and apologized for the ‘mis-communication’ which was really non-communication since there would have to be a communication in the first place for a ‘mis-communication’ to have taken place. I heard back from the recruiter the next week saying the position had already been filled which tells me that this recruiter had no relationship with the company except to spitball resumes in their direction or else he maybe would have known how the hiring process was getting along. I haven’t heard from the recruiter or the supervisor since which means I haven’t had any time wasted by them which is a positive in my book.

  When you deal with the recruiters of the world (or at least in Central Iowa) you get a good feel for who has relationships with the hiring companies and who is just throwing resumes at companies. Most of the recruiters are trying to get candidates for a few jobs at the same companies. When only one recruiter is mentioning a company that is a good sign they have a personal relationship and you will be considered more carefully if they submit you. By the middle of February I had four in person interviews and two phone interviews in the span of two weeks. All the face to face interviews went well enough and three of them were for what I would consider top-shelf companies that had good pay and interesting work. I thought I did well in the interviews where I was asked concrete questions (solving deadlocks, dealing with an unforeseen issue) and less well where I was asked questions where the right answer was some buzzword that I wasn’t familiar with. I felt the buzzword type of questions were trying to see of someone my age was up on newer technologies since they were almost always brought up by younger interviewers.

  I decided that I would want to work for three of the four companies I had interviewed with and would accept an offer from any of them given the right compensation. The only problem was that the companies are all 60 miles away in Des Moines. I had a phone interview with a company in Grinnell that was 45 miles away and had the perk of being able to work from home two days a week but they were deliberate in their hiring process and had scheduled a face to face interview for a week after the other interviews.

  The next week my face to face interview in Grinnell got postponed for a week but a recruiter called with a job opening in Marshalltown. We talked in Wednesday and scheduled an interview for Friday. The only problem was I got a job offer on Friday morning from a company in Des Moines. I said I wanted to take till Monday to think it over which was accepted. I told the people in Marshalltown about my situation during the interview but they told me that the process would take at least two weeks to determine if an offer would be made or even if a second round of interviews was going to be necessary.

  The interview went well enough and I let both the Marshalltown and Grinnell recruiters know that I had to make a decision on Monday. I didn’t hear from anyone so I decided to accept the job I was offered and take myself out of the running for the other jobs. Did I make the right call? I’ll never know. I do know that I was concerned with being the second choice from the other jobs and not having any job after interviewing for a bunch of top-shelf jobs.

  There was a third option that I didn’t pursue which was to accept the job and renege on the deal if a better offer had come along. From a cold analytical standpoint this was the correct option to take as long as I didn’t mind giving my word and going back on it. For me this was not an option. I’ve accepted jobs in the past and then gotten counter offers to remain where I was and increased offers from other companies and increased offers from other jobs. I’ve never gone back on my word and never regretted it either. I like being able to go to sleep not thinking about having broken my word. Also almost every job I’ve had has either provided me extra income after leaving or new skills to make me more valuable to the next job and I don’t expect this job to be an exception, The only downside is that I am back to the hour long commute each way which is 40 minutes longer per day than the commute to Ames and an hour longer than the commute to my living room if I could have gotten a work-at-home job.

Unlike Willie Nelson I am not looking forward to being on the road again, perhaps because while Willie will be in places that he's never been, I will be on the same stretch of asphalt over and over and over...

In The Fall

  When I last checked in to describe the progress of my stock market forays using my self-directed 401k along with my Found Money Fund or FMF (money I get from secondary programming jobs, chess coaching, etc.…) it was just before Christmas and I was of the opinion that the stock market was primed for a fall that I didn’t know when and where it would occur. Since then the stock market reached record highs in late January before dropping 10% in 2 week stretch and settling around 4% off its previous highs.

  My Found Money Fund followed this same pattern, hitting an all-time high in profit and assets between January 26th and February 1st and then dropping 7% in the next week before retracing to a 3.7% loss over the rest of the month. Losing the 7% was especially sad as it represented a 44% drop in my FMF profit which happily did not turn into a loss. All in all the FMF is back where it was in the beginning of January with heavy investments in the three pillars AT&T (T), Phillip Morris (PM)), and Coca-Cola (KO)) with a minor position in real estate trust KO). What all four stocks have in common is dividends ranging from 3.5% to 11% a share with the three pillars having raised their dividends every year for the past 10 (PM) to 50 (KO) years. Fidelity automatically reinvests the dividends for me and when the market is down those dividends are able to purchase more shares. The FMF uses the classic ‘buy and hold’ strategy with minimal option plays. When my pillar stocks were at year highs I used my excess cash to play my option game with Intel through most of 2017, netting $600 and 3.5 shares from reinvested dividends in profit from November 2016 to November 2017.

  Once Intel made its big jump to over $50 a share it became less attractive to me. My attention turned to AT&T whose stock price has trended downwards primarily due to a delay in getting permission from the government to complete its merger with Time-Warner. In my last FMF post I displayed how I netted 2.5% over 5 weeks buying 200 shares of T along with an accompanying option sell. When that option expired I turned around and bought 200 more shares of T at 38.54 on December 18th with a $150 discount for selling an option to sell the shares on January 23rd for $38.50. My ace in the hole was that T was issuing a 50 cent dividend on January 9th so if the shares held their price my option would be called after 3 weeks and if the price fell I would get the dividend for myself. T rose over 39 a share at the beginning of 2018 but dropped under $38.50 by January 9th and I collected the $100 dividend. The stock then dropped to $37 and I was able to buy my options back for $3 and sell a new set of options expiring on February 23rd but this time I was only able to get an extra $87. Since then T has dropped even further to a little over $35 and I was again able to buy my options back for a fraction of the cost. At this point I am ‘stuck’ with 200 shares of T showing a paper loss of $33 at last Friday’s close of 36.72. I used the ‘air quotes’ around the word stuck because as soon as T rebounded over 37 I made $44 by selling the option to sell these shares at $39 up to April 6th. In this case I am leaving some option money on the table in the hopes of selling the stock for an extra 50 cents a share with the higher strike price. If the stock drops again I will buy the option back for a dollar or two and be ready to collect another dividend on April 9th, when I expect to be able to sell an option for $38.5 to further lower my break-even point and until then I can collect the 50 cent dividend every three months.

  

12/18/2017	Buy 200 T @ 38.5452	-7713.99
12/18/2017	Sell 2 T Option @38.5 (.84) Expiring 1/26/2018	161.66
1/19/2018	.50 dividend payable 2/1/2018	100
1/23/2018	Buy 1 T Option @38.5 (.02) Expiring 1/26/2018	-2.04
1/24/2018	Buy 1 T Option @38.5 (.01) Expiring 1/26/2018	-1.04
1/25/2018	Sell 2 T Option @38.5 (.46) Expiring 2/23/2018	89.96
2/20/2018	Buy 2 T Option @38.5 (.02) Expiring 1/26/2018	-4.08
2/26/2018	Sell 2 T Option @39 (.25) Expiring 4/6/2018	44.96
	Total (If option is exercised)	467.32	6.06%
	Break even price	36.69

  My self-directed Fidelity 401k saw a wider swing hitting an 8% drop but rebounding to with a half percent of its peak at the close last Friday. The drop and rebound were more pronounced because my largest holding is Apple (AAPL)which went from a peak of $180 to $150 in the two week correction span. I bought 100 shares of AAPL on December 26th and on January 24th. The December buy has been an exercise in buying back my options to sell them again at a higher strike price but with the stock tanking there was no longer a market for these options. The January buy was meant to collect a quick three day profit on an option but the timing was awful being right before the correction. This was a test of me and my system of grabbing small amounts of cash from short term covered calls. I didn’t panic but instead bought my options back for pennies on the dollar, collected a small dividend (63 cents or a third of a percent) on February 9th, and waited. When the Apple rebounded to 165 I sold the option to sell the stock at 177.50 five weeks in advance for $1.50 a share which sounds impressive but was a fraction of what I was collecting before. Since then, Apple has caught an updraft and is over $179 and has yet again set an all-time high this week. I used the updraft to collect an extra $77 by extending the options an extra week. My patience seems to have been rewarded but my decisions will look silly if the stock tanks before April 6th. It is a fact that I would have collected way more for the option by being even more patient and waiting an extra week.

  

12/26/2017	Buy 100 AAPL @ 170.0457	-17009.52
12/26/2017	Sell 1 AAPL Option @170 (1.62) Expired 12/29/2017	156.36
1/2/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @172.5 (1.06) Expiring 1/12/2018	100.65
1/11/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @172.5 (2.69) Expiring 1/12/2018	-274.64
1/11/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.12) Expiring 1/26/2018	106.35
1/22/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.49) Expiring 1/26/2018	-154.64
1/22/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (4.03) Expiring 2/2/2018	397.35
2/2/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (.04) Expiring 2/2/2018	-4.04
2/9/2018	.63 dividend payable 2/15/2018	63
2/14/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.50) Expiring 3/29/2018	146.83
2/27/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.4) Expiring 3/29/2018	-543.17
2/27/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.85) Expiring 4/6/2018	581.82
	Total (If option is exercised)	1311.15	7.71%
	Break Even Price	164.39

  

1/24/2018	Buy 100 AAPL @ 175.145	-17519.45
1/24/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @175 (1.62) Expiring 2/2/2018	423.35
2/2/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @175 (.06) Expiring 2/2/2018	-6.04
2/9/2018	.63 dividend payable 2/15/2018	63
2/14/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 1.5) Expiring 3/29/2018	146.83
2/27/2018	Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.4) Expiring 3/29/2018	-543.16
2/27/2018	Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.85) Expiring 4/6/2018	581.82
	Total (If option is exercised)	891.15	5.09%
	Break Even Price	168.59

  With the sudden selloff one of my favorite stocks Exxon (XOM) dropped under $77 a share for the first time in over a year. $77 is a magic number for me because Exxon pays a 77 cent dividend every quarter and a share price of $77 means a healthy 4% return from the dividend alone not even counting the yearly dividend increase that Exxon has provided the past 35 years. On Wednesday February 14th I bought 200 shares of Exxon for 75.62 a share and collected $207 for the option to sell the stock at $75 by Friday February 16th. It was a defensive play designed to give me either a quick half percent profit or have 200 shares of Exxon at an effective price of $74.63 with plenty of upside. Exxon burst over 77 on the 16th and the option was exercised leaving me with a profit of $74.41 for a three day investment.

  

2/14/2018	Buy 200 XOM @ 75.615	-15127.95
2/14/2018	Sell 2 XOM Option @75 (1.07) Expiring 2/16/2018	207.66
2/16/2018	Sell 200 XOM @ 75 (option was exercised)	14994.7
	Total	74.41	.49%

  I was so pleased with this result that I decided to try it again the next week. On Tuesday February 20th I bought 200 more shares of Exxon at $76.62 and made $133 for the option to sell the stock for $76.50 on Friday the 23rd. The very next day the stock market had a bad day and Exxon dropped under $75. I had an automated sell to buy back my option for $20 and it executed leaving me with $113 and 200 shares of devalued Exxon stock. This did not bother me because Exxon is a money making machine that would still pay better than a 4% dividend for me to hold onto it. I didn’t have to wait long. The next day (the 22nd) Exxon rebounded to over $76 and I made another $96 for option to sell the stock for $76.50 by March 2nd. Since then Exxon has stayed mostly above $76.50 and has even flirted with $80 so once again my profit could have been bigger by waiting an extra day or two. Nothing is certain but it appears that my options will be exercised on Friday leaving me with a profit of $180 (1.18%) for an 11 day investment or in a worst case scenario (aside from a bankruptcy or zombie apocalypse) holding a 4%+ dividend paying stock.

  

2/20/2018	Buy 200 XOM @ 76.5967	-15324.29
2/20/2018	Sell 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.70) Expiring 2/23/2018	133.66
2/21/2018	Buy 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.10) Expiring 2/23/2018	-20.08
2/22/2018	Sell 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.51) Expiring 3/2/2018	96.81
	Total (If option is exercised)	180.8	1.18%
	Break Even Price	75.60

  The ups and downs of the stock market have become exacerbated by programmed trades that tend to create spirals of activity driving prices up and down. This seems to play in well to my generally conservative strategy of buying stocks for short term gains through the use of covered calls. I seem to have passed the test of the first correction in a couple of years by not panicking and even had plenty of cash on hand to take advantage of the situation by purchasing Exxon on sale to make a quick profit through options of holding at a reasonable price. This events of the last month only underscores to me the importance of sticking with solid companies that have a history of paying and raising dividends. If I was investing in shaky companies that didn’t offer dividends I’d have probably bitten off my fingernails and fingers also this last month.