About two weeks ago, I made a covered call play with AFL and the $31 strike for August expiration. AFL closed yesterday at $36.60, so my call is deep in-the-money. Looks like I way misjudged where AFL might end up, though we’re still 24 days away from expiration. I’m wondering what I should do to try and capture more of that run up for myself?

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Earlier this week I executed another covered call trade, this time using Alcoa (AA) and the Aug09 $11 call (AA HL). This wasn’t quite according to earlier mentioned plans, and I’m now wondering if I made a mistake.

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Just logged in to the Ally Bank website and noticed that the yield on their OSA (online savings account) is down to 1.8500%. Combined with my post last week on the same topic, this seems like a rather disconcerting rapid drop.

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As mentioned in my posts last week, my wife and I have decided to consider dividend paying companies as the underlying stock in future covered call trades. The idea is to not only capture the call premium, but also receive a dividend during the period in which we hold the underlying shares. It’s important to note that using a single company as the underlying adds concentration risk compared to using an ETF, but we hope to mitigate that somewhat by picking our companies from the list of 2009 Dividend Aristocrats.

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Just a quick note to record that Ally has dropped their online savings rate to 1.9313%, which means an APY of 1.9500%.  This is down from a 2.00% APY the last time I checked (sometime last week.)   I think they change there rates on Thursdays and hold them until next Thursday, so that would mean [...]

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