As mentioned earlier, right after August expiration I began looking for new covered call opportunities. As mentioned earlier in this blog, one of my strategies is to look at the Dividend Aristocrats list for companies who will likely be paying dividends prior to next month’s option expiration, so that’s what I did.

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Early last week, I executed a number of covered call trades but didn’t get around to writing about them until now. Here’s a summary of the first one, a covered call with Alcoa (AA) and a bullish Sept $13 call (AA IO)

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I had two covered call positions waiting on August expiration, which was Saturday. My AA HO (Aug 09 $13 strike) almost certainly expired as AA closed at $12.56 on Friday — I just can’t be sure until Monday morning given past experiences with TradeKing notification. And I’ve received assignment notification on the short-term JGL HY (Aug 09 $27.50) play even though HD closed at exactly $27.50 Friday. Not quite sure why some one would exercise that, but they did. So what do I do next?

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After doing some research last night, I identified three short-term covered calls to track briefly this morning. I ended up pulling the trigger on a trade involving Home Depot (HD) and the Aug 2009 $27.50 strike call option (JGL HY). Here’s my analysis.

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I received an e-mail from TradeKing just a little more than an hour ago informing me that my AJO HE options (Aug 2009 $31 strike) had been assigned and my shares of AFL sold. This is pretty much what I expected to happen given the option contained so little time value: assignment before the ex-dividend date of Aug 19th. So here’s a summary of round-trip trade.

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