On 7/23/08, I sold 9 ALSK Jan09 15 Covered Calls for a net deposit of $67.25 in my taxable account and an IRA account.  My basis in ALSK is now 14.72 and 12.48 respectively after considering option premiums and excluding dividends received.

After selling these Covered Calls for such a small premium I began to question why I continued to hold ALSK.  I was able to sell the Jul08 Calls for about 2.5 times as much as the current Calls.  I don’t keep track of a stock’s price when I sell an option but from the chart I can see it was about $2 higher than now.  In both cases I sold options about 6 months out so the higher price in Jan08 accounts for the difference in option premiums.  It is so obvious once I looked.

Even so, why am i keeping ALSK?  It is for the dividends which are .215 per share per quarter or about 7.08% annualized.  The option premiums are a bonus.  Although this is less than my nominal goal of 20% per year I think I am still okay with ALSK because it adds to my annual dividend income and will be easier for my wife to work with if she is left with all of this one day.

I am still catching up from being on vacation for 17 days so I am still a little behind posting recent activity in my various accounts.  I think I can post everything today.

July has been an okay month for me.  Or was it?  I own 200 shares of IndyMac Bank (IDMC) and used to own 200 shares of Countrywide Financial Corp (CFC).  Of course the CFC is now 36 shares of Bank of America (BAC) which is a little better than CFC. 

As I wrote earlier, I was assigned 300 share of Yamana Gold (AUY) in an IRA account which I am okay with.  As document earlier I rolled out several Jul08 options that I did not want to be assigned or called away.  All of the rest of my Jul08 option positions expired worthless allowing me to keep all of the option premiums.  Here is the list of those options that expired.  Note that the Total Received column may be higher because it is the result of rolling out a prior option.  For example, the AGU Put was originally sold in Dec07 and rolled out three times before it finally expired in Jul08.  The actual net received was 8.72 per share or $1744.  Still not too bad though.  Also, where there are multiple rows for a stock each row represents a separate trading account.

This morning I BTC 2 ALSK Jun08 12.50 Covered Calls and STO 2 ALSK Oct08 12.50 Covered Calls for a net deposit of $91.01 in an IRA account.  My basis is now $14.70 after including option premiums received.

ALSK will go ex-dividend on 6/26/08 and I did not want to have it called away so somebody could catch the dividend.  So, I rolled these Calls out.  ALSK pays a dividend of .215 which translates to 6.82% at current valuations.  I noticed in my tax statements that part of the dividend is actually a return of capital which is not taxable.

I own 1100 shares of ALSK in various accounts and still have 4 GGC 15 Oct08 Put contracts outstanding.  I have rolled the Puts out at least once and may attempt to do it again unless they have previously been assigned to me.