On 7/22/08, I sold 10 AUY Aug08 15 Calls for a net deposit of $360.50 in 4 IRA accounts.  I have owned 700 of these shares for some time with a basis from 6.85 to 10.34.  The basis for the other 300 shares is 12.11.  These last shares were just put to me last weekend.

AUY doesn’t pay a great dividend even though they just tripled it to .01 per month from .01 per quarter.  However, if I can keep selling calls like this my basis will be zero before too long.  My return on invested capital will then be infinite.  :-)  That is hard to beat.  The secret, of course, is that AUY has been tending to channel between the high 12’s and low 16’s for awhile.  When it is above 15 I have been able to roll it out and continue to hold and make additional money on AUY.

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.

I was assigned 2 AUY Jul08 15 Puts in an IRA account.  I had rolled these contracts out in the past and decided that I would allow them to be put to me this time.  With accumulated option premiums I own these shares at 12.48 which is less than the Friday close of 13.97.

I own 700 other shares of AUY and have done quite nicely by selling Covered Calls on them and collecting the small dividend (recently increased to .01 per month from .01 per quarter).

AUY has been a long time favorite of Jim Cramer which is where I first heard of it and why I began my relationship with it.  I haven’t always done well with Jim’s picks but this one has been good for me.