PM went ex-dividend on 12/20/11, so these shares were called away so that somebody could collect the dividend.  I would have liked to continue holding PM because of the dividend (6.94% on my basis as of the prior payout in October 2011) and for the option premiums from selling Covered Calls.  However, the stock price rose high enough that I could not roll the Jan13 Calls out for a net credit transaction.

I may purchase PM again in the future but will wait for it to pull back before I do.  In the meantime, I will deploy the new cash in this in something else.

I had been attempting to roll out the Jun11 Puts for a net deposit but was not able to get it to happen before I was assigned the stock.  I briefly debated about just selling BALT and taking the loss but decided instead to sell the Covered Calls and begin to collect some dividends, assuming that BALT will continue to pay dividends.  BALT was ex-dividend yesterday, 5/11/11.

BALT is a dry bulk shipper.  I already own 500 share of Diana Shipping (DSX) which is also a dry bulk shipper.  A difference between the two is that BALT is still paying a dividend, currently 6 cents quarterly or about 7.96%, while DSX suspended its dividend after its Nov08 payment.  However, I do expect that DSX will resume paying dividends sometime in the future.  BALT and DSX were both favorably mentioned by a Motley Fool analyst.

I am rolling the dice here by continuing to hold BALT.  There is a lot of negative news about the industry being very over built.  I believe the success of any of the dry bulk shippers depends very much upon an improved world economy.  That will eventually occur of course so the question then becomes which shipper will survive long enough to reap the rewards?

This was not a total surprise to me as ACAS had been rising for awhile and was well over $10 last Friday.  However, I was expecting that it would not be called until the 13th when options expire.  I had already pretty much resigned myself to letting it go because I just could not see a way to roll it out for a net deposit even at the same strike price.

Without going into any detail I will just say that I am glad to be out of ACAS at this time so I can redeploy the cash into assets that provide me with a better return.

VZ is ex-dividend today so I am not surprised that it was called away early.  In fact, I was anticipating it.  They are paying out .4875 per share which is about a 5.39% yield on its current price.

I would have liked to have continued to hold on to VZ but it is deep enough in the money that I didn’t see a way to roll it out for a net credit, which pretty much surprised me.  So, I will now look at either selling some Puts on VZ or perhaps just buying it back to capture the dividend and selling Covered Calls on the new stock.

I tend to think of VZ as part of my core holdings because they pay a good dividend and because I believe telecom is a good growth industry.  I think that VZ in particular will benefit this year when the iphone begins to join its wireless networks.  I suspect that VZ will gain some of that market at the expense of AT&T.

I only accidently noticed that these shares had been called away when I was doing some research in my account.  For whatever reason, E*Trade does not provide an alert when shares are sold as a result of a merger or reorganization, which is what happened in this case.  I’m pretty sure I lost money on these shares, even after dividends are considered but because I have not always kept track of the dividends received I don’t really know for sure.  I only know that I’ve received 30 cents per share since the beginning of 2009.

CKR was taken private.  The last I looked the offer was at 11.50 per share so I was surprised to see that I actually received 12.55 per share.  I sold the Sep10 12.50 Calls back in Mar10.  Maybe getting the higher price had something to do with that but I don’t really know.