What I have been up to?

Ok, it has been a long while since my last posting. I feel guilty for leaving the blog catching dust lately, but at the same time day-to-day workload has increased a lot and when I come home I barely have time to say hi and it starts the dinner, bath and bed routine with the kids.. :)

Needless to say, I had to adjust my trading routine to adapt to this new reality, so I have limited my trading to a few strategies on stocks instead of the NDX Iron butterfly, mostly these are no maintenance trade, except for watching the stocks to make sure they don't bite the dust..

I have what I consider long-term positions on GLD, KO, PG, WMT; GLD is mostly a hedge against inflation in my portfolio, we're looking to get back into real estate so I may move away from GLD and go into brick and mortar rental properties :)... KO, PG and WMT are what I consider stable plays and I'm using two strategies on them: Cash-secured Puts and synthetic covered calls.

I'm also reading the IBD newspaper on a daily basis and watching for breakouts among the IBD top 50 stocks. So far I have two break outs: COH and ORCL.

All and all, the portfolio is stable and seems to be a good fit to our busy life.. I refresh the positions once a month by rolling to the next expiration cycle. My stop loss is to close any open position if the underlying stock falls over 8%.. So far they're doing good and I'm keeping a "sane" balance to life and trading!

Cheers!
Gustavo