December ended and we have a new year again. It was time to review our achievements and set new goals.
I cannot believe we are again at the beginning of a new year already. Really.
Many people considered 2016 year a dismal year. At least that’s what I have read on the internet so far. I considered 2016 successful to us and our trading business.
Although December itself wasn’t good for our trading, the entire year was.
Let me first announce a few changes as far as this blog goes.
· Future of Hello Suckers blog
I started this blog in 2008 to document my personal journey in investing and trading.It was a good journey, full of great successes and terrible, costly mistakes.
I started investing in 2006 but had no clue what to do.
I believed I could learn by doing. There is nothing wrong with that if you really learn and know what to learn.
That was the biggest issue. What to learn?
Starting this blog 2 years later was a big help as it showed me all the flaws of learning how to invest successfully. However, later I finally had my first “aha” moment when I started searching for similar bloggers writing about investing and trading.
At that time, there weren’t many. But I found a few who continued writing about dividend investing. Some no longer exist and no longer write. New emerged.
I would like to thank to all of them who continued writing about their own journey, their own achievements, and educating their readers. You definitely helped me to start a great investing and later trading business. So:
THANK YOU!
In 2012 I started trading options as addition to my dividend growth investing. It was a completely new path to me. I had to learn a lot. And once again I made many costly mistakes.
In 2014 I decided to start a business involved in security trading, our ZZ Capital Management company.
It was definitely an interesting endeavor but not easy. If you are involved in trading business you are on your own. No one will help you, no one will be willing to help you.
You will feel like having a leper whenever you ask for a business loan, tax help, or any business related help. When you reveal what business you are involved, one group of people turn away from you, some will think you must be rich and ask for enormous money to get paid for their help, or have no clue how to help you at all (for example my tax accountant who had no clue how to deal with my trading reports).
In December 2016 members of our company decided to officially transfer this blog to the company. So from now on this blog will serve as informational blog about our company, our company trading, trading education, and announcements. I will no longer be posting any personal achievements or personal investing.
This change will also have an impact on our reporting. It will no longer be done in the format I have been doing last year. We will write about our achievements and income to be transparent and establish a good track record for our followers and investors.
· Trading Group
We started a trading group on Facebook last year. The group is an online platform where we post our trades along with other traders/members. We have great members, great experienced traders in the group. Many are willing to teach others and help novice traders to learn trading options.
I am personally happy to see how this group evolved and progressed so far.
If you want to learn trading options and interact with us online I recommend you to join the group and follow our trades, ask questions, and learn.
· December 2016 trading results
Trading in December wasn’t good for us. We suffered some serious losses this month. We lost $5,339.38 dollars this month.
So what happened?
It was my favorite WYNN stock which hurt our business this month. This stock is not a stock for active trading if you do not have enough time to watch it actively.
We were already over-exposed to that stock and had too many open positions but it was all manageable. If I was there to manage the trade.
I had to leave for a meeting and in the meantime the stock crashed 10% in 15 minutes. And I wasn’t there! When I got back the damage was already done and we saw margin call on our account.
If I was sitting in front of the computer and saw the stock tumbling I could adjust my positions to avoid the damage. We had puts only against the stock. We could reverse them all into calls and be good. But I wasn’t there. I had to go on a meeting!
The toll was high. We lost more than $6,000 dollars ($6,964.00 to be exact). When you get a margin call you have no other option than close the trades – at a loss!
So we had to take a loss.
For the rest of the month we slightly adjusted our trading plan and worked on recovering our losses. The final bill was -$5,339.00 so we recovered $1,625.00 dollars this month.
However, this hiccup didn’t have a serious impact on our overall trading!
I am happy to announce that in 2016 we made $19,054.12 dollars trading options.
We took a loan from a company member who took a personal loan and then loaned the money to the company which we used for trading. We paid back $6,158.00 last year.
I think, this is a great result showing that our operations are sustainable and that we can make money to pay for our bills.
We are still building our company and it is still a financially fragile business but it is already working.
Our net profit for 2016 after all bills and losses is $12,229.00. Remember, we started this year with $1,500 dollars in our account. We borrowed some cash and finished with $12,229.00 profit.
When looking at reporting though, you may notice that our net-liq value is low (at around $3,000 dollars without a loan). It is a bit stretching but it is a result of our open trades mainly our WYNN trades which we still have adjusted and which are blocking a lot of money in our account.
In 2017 it will be our goal to get rid of those trades.
· Trading results publishing
We will no longer publish detailed reports about our trading as I did in the past year. We will write about our trading, we may mention our results, but all our results for the month and year will be visible in our section Trades & Income.
You will be able to visit that section at any time and see the most recent trading result such as:
– month-to-month trading income showing how much money we made in premiums per month
– account value and chart
– individual trades journal which you can use to review all our trades and eventually back test them.
Hope this change will simplify our work and make reviewing our trading results better and consistent. Reporting the way I was doing became so robust that it consumed a lot of time. We want to focus on trading and helping others to trade and not spending weekends writing lengthy reports.
I hope that you will like the new format and if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.
I wish you a Happy New Year!
Thx for being transparent on your results. It is a good lesson for all of us.
Yes, I want to be transparent although, as my friend put it, when you have a loss it sucks to be transparent. But I want to show my success as well as my hiccups so others can learn from my mistakes.
Thank you for stopping by!
Ciao Martin,
I had a very “eventful” December after realizing that my reporting of options was totally wrong I spent 4 days reprogramming my spreadsheets and found out that instead of a modest 1500 euro profit in 2016 to report to the taxman I actually run a loss more in the region of 1500/2000 euro!! (dividend excluded, they are taxed according to strange systems in Italy)… But I managed to solve everything and now all is good. I hope…
Still it looks like you’ve had a great year, so this glitch surely will help improving next year performance!
Ciao ciao
Stal
Yes, except December, I really had a great year and made decent money. I am glad you caught your mistake in your spreadsheets as I did in mine. It would save us a lot of future headaches. The dividends in the US are also taxed differently and what I could learn in many countries such as Germany or Australia, they also tax them differently.
I wish you a great new year and a lot of gains!
Ciao Martin,
I had a very “eventful” December after realizing that my reporting of options was totally wrong I spent 4 days reprogramming my spreadsheets and found out that instead of a modest 1500 euro profit in 2016 to report to the taxman I actually run a loss more in the region of 1500/2000 euro!! (dividend excluded, they are taxed according to strange systems in Italy)… But I managed to solve everything and now all is good. I hope…
Still it looks like you’ve had a great year, so this glitch surely will help improving next year performance!
Ciao ciao
Stal
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Hi Martin,
what about previous blog posts about your (private?) strategy and other stuff. Will they remain in the blog, as they are a valuable information source?
And happy new Year!
Best regards
Hi Michael,
probably not on this blog. I might be moving that portion to a different blog. I will know more when the transition is done and post it.
Regards,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Im feel with you about WYNN. I am long the stock and trying to get rid of it.
But.. how was it possible to get a margin call? that means that you were overtrading, doesn’t it?
best regards
Chri
Of course I was over the limit. Partially by a mistake, partially by a greed. But it is behind me, moving on…
Thanks for stopping by! Hope you will be able to get rid of the stock too soon.
Bummer about WYNN. I agree with you on this one. the stock is very volatile. I make money on it, but I need to watch it daily and close contracts frequently. Yo cannot win them all, but as long as you win most of the time, your solid. Best of luck this year.
Yes, i made nice money on WYNN but also got bitten by it. But overall I am doing well.
Thanks for stopping by!