Dipping our toes in the water a bit this week, we did our first ever covered call trade (also called a buy-write.) Given our small GI portfolio size (only a couple thousand $ transferred and available for transactions at TradeKing), we chose to use the ETF known as UNG as the underlying, and a July $13 strike as the call (UNY GM). You might be asking “Why?” about now.

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I placed my first ever order for an options trade today which I think bumps me up a notch on the capitalist side of the capitalist vs. frugality discussion common to so many personal finance blogs these days. Seriously though, it’s been a month or two learning process to where I felt comfortable doing doing this. Here’s some of the things I learned along the way.

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I recently read an article entitled The best (and cheapest) funds around which purports to tell you when to invest using mutual funds vs. ETFs based on a cost analysis. Unfortunately, they make a few too many generalizations that simply aren’t universally true and so I disagree with their results. (Though I do agree with their analysis of annual expense fees.)

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