Welcome

Hello everyone,

Since I have started playing earnings and options more recently, I figured I would start up this blog to give my ideas on any potential plays and review previous ones. While I am still relatively new to the options game, I am in the money in 3 out of 6 plays. More importantly, the winners outweigh the losers by a good amount. So far, I have only tried to do straddle options, buying a call and a put at the same strike price, on the expectation of earnings volatility. I was drawn to this by losing a couple equity earnings plays and noticing the extreme price movements many stocks can have after releasing earnings. I then decided to play options so that I can potentially make money if a stock declines or rises sharply after earnings.

In addition to options, I have been trading equities for about a year and a half. While I have had some big winners, I have taken my licks and learned my lessons (hopefully). All in all, it is a learning process, and hopefully I can continue to better my abilitities in this area of investing as well. Currently, all of my equity holdings are Chinese companies listed on US markets. I feel the China poses a great opportunity as their economy is expanding rapidly and the government is helping some of the new startup companies out in order to foster growth.

Play for tomorrow:
For tomorrow's trading I bought a straddle on AMD at $14 a share. The stock has been beaten down for a while and there appears to be the potential for strong pressure to either the up or down side. While AMD has reported a much wider loss than expected, the stock is currently up after hours as it appears investors might have already factored a major disappointment into the stock price and are showing some optimism for the future. I will try and report back on this play tomorrow.

Thank you for reading,

Brian