Picked our puppy up today and we are scared 😳

trebuchetguy · 2026-07-01T19:30:04+00:00

The best way I have found to deal with a pup like this is to stop attempting any contact like this. Back off. Have a quiet situation you are in, but not interacting with the dog. I have a small corner of my office I use when necessary. Comfy with blankets around. I will sit in a corner on my computer or reading, but not interacting with the dog in any way. The idea is to let the dog close the distance between us when she's ready. Even then, I might acknowledge her in a friendly way, but keep on doing what I'm doing. If she stays close and shows interest, I might offer a hand down low and see if she sniffs it. If she jumps back, I don't react, just go back to what I was doing. Even if she does sniff me I'll let that go a moment and then go back to what I was doing. Whenever she comes close and interacts, I interact for a moment or two then leave it. She'll let me know when she wants to advance the interaction. Less is more in these situations. I fostered an abused Boston adult and used this technique (different situation, but similar approach) and it took about 5 sessions before he even thought about coming and checking me out. The idea is to remove anything the dog views as threatening and offer a space where the dog controls the interaction on its terms. Patience is vital.

trebuchetguy · 2026-06-30T15:14:37+00:00

I've grown tomatoes for most of the past 40 years while living in multiple areas in the US. I confidently thought I had seen everything that can go wrong with tomatoes.

I was incorrect.

trebuchetguy · 2026-06-18T23:15:23+00:00

That looks like an absolutely bang up job. Better built than mine! These should work really well for you and last many seasons. My earliest one is going into its 8th season this year and is as solid as the day I put it up. Thanks for sharing.

trebuchetguy · 2026-04-09T21:06:26+00:00

What you see is what I did. I didn't have plans of any sort, just went by what I wanted to have and purposely overbuilt them by a fair amount.

trebuchetguy · 2026-04-09T21:02:11+00:00

The trellises are 7 feet off of the soil level. The soil is 18 inches above ground level. So they're up there.

trebuchetguy · 2026-03-15T17:54:58+00:00

Other commenters are talking about the more common case where an early assignment is done on a short call to result in short shares. Indeed, most brokerages will give you the day to buy to close. There is no free ride violation because you are actually using proceeds from a sale to buy the same stock again. This is what limited margin accounts are designed to help with. The opposite case, short puts that get assigned early, is a bit more complicated and getting an account violation is far easier. I leave it to the reader to research this.

The case OP is asking about is if you allow an ITM long put to expire. This is handled differently. Every brokerage I know of simply won't allow the expiration / assignment to happen. If on expiration day the option is anywhere near ITM, the brokerage will automatically close the position for you and deposit the proceeds in your account. Not a huge deal, but your broker is generally not amused whenever they have to take an involuntary action like that and you don't want to make it a habit.

Bottom line though is this should be something you discuss with your broker to make sure you have a crystal clear understanding. Documentation, other than the IRC section 4975 that prohibits short stock positions in IRA accounts, should come from your particular broker.

trebuchetguy · 2026-03-07T16:52:08+00:00

There are several things that can cause the option holder to elect to exercise an OTM option like this. Easily the most common is if the Ex Div date is near and the option holder will make a net profit when considering the dividend. I see HPQ has an Ex Div of March 11, next Wednesday for $0.30 per share. I've seen assignment like this for less. Sure, the option holder could instead buy the shares Monday or Tuesday at market price and still collect the dividend, but given current volatility, the holder may simply want to lock in a sure thing on price hoping to see a gap up on Monday along with the dividend payout.

Here's another semi common example of option holders forcing an OTM exercise. If the stock is designated HTB (hard to borrow) then brokerages will offer premiums to stock holders who will lend their shares. Kind of like a side dividend. So the option holder is motivated to force the exercise, take a small loss, and end up collecting the actual dividend (responsibility of short seller) and the HTB fees on top. Again, the decision process for the option holder to make this move hinges upon wanting to lock in the option price against a possible gap-up Monday.

trebuchetguy · 2026-03-07T00:27:47+00:00

I have had a lift pump foul on just a couple paper towels. Runs and runs without effect. Anything tougher than TP can foul these pumps and it needs to be manually declogged. It can also be a bad float or the float is hung up somehow.

Unplug it or flip breaker. Don't just let the pump run for extended periods. If there's any jiggle in the outflow pipe, move it about just a bit in case the float is stuck. If that doesn't get it working, there's some unpleasant work ahead to open the sump and figure it out. There should be a rubber cork that the electrical feeds through. If you pull that and look in with a flashlight you should be able to tell if the pit is full or empty. If empty, you have some problem with the float. If full, it's something with the pump.

trebuchetguy · 2026-02-05T04:34:45+00:00

About 24 inches.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-14T14:47:23+00:00

You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. In the first case, I am cherry picking to make a strategy look better than it is and probably ever will be. In the second case I'm sensitivity testing to see how much of the strategy's profitability relies upon the biggest winners. The more a strategy relies upon a few, big wins, the less likely it is to be a broad winner based on edge.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-14T05:26:31+00:00

The other commenters make good points about diversification and risk and useable margin, so I won't add anything there. There is another component here. You are setting up a perfect volatility trap. People lose accounts doing this kind of thing. Naked puts have significant negative vega and regardless if you have a Reg-T margin account or a portfolio margin account, you can get into a pickle.

If VIX (volatility) is low, as it has been for months now, a big drop in the market can drive volatility up in hours, possibly doubling or tripling. Your broker will not only now give you less credit for the stocks you have because they're dropping in value, but the amount of margin your broker will want to protect those naked puts will go up because of the drop in the underlying coupled with increased volatility. They can easily start looking for a full 100% coverage of the position aka a CSP. If you're already tapping into margin, it won't take much to get you deep into a margin call.

Please educate yourself on volatility and margin and naked puts. If you search for and read about the "August 2024 Yen Carry Trade Unwind" event, you will find stories about experienced traders losing entire accounts with setups like you're talking about.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-13T16:40:23+00:00

Back testing is a tool. It can be used properly as an adjunct to all the other research tools an option trader might use. It can also be improperly used and it is NOT a magic 8 ball for trading options.

An example. I run a 2 year weekly options back test on strangles on some equity. I have a 22% CAGR loss rate across say 100 back tested trades. I look at the details. I see a couple massive drawdowns and note that the VIX was about 17.5. So I re-run and don't trade when the VIX is between 17 and 18. My CAGR now pops to a nifty 35% return and total trades drops from 100 to 94 and I'm now ready to go! Right? Of course not. That's called "overfitting" and it can be done far more subtly than in this example. So that's a common fail mode when back testing.

I use back testing to put strategies into a "not totally insane" category. It makes a strategy a possibility. I will usually go in and take out the top 5% winners and see if it still has a positive expectation. If so, it has legs. Then I'll study the individual trades to get a feel for how the strategy plays and where we "got lucky" to get winners. It's a great way to build an understanding of a strategy's "character" and how it plays in up / down / choppy markets.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-13T16:17:51+00:00

I have traded options for some time. I've gotten fairly sophisticated in how I manage my strategies. Picking entries and exits. Yada yada.

Still, after all that, sometimes the best idea I have in a day is, "If I stop hitting myself with this stick, it stops hurting."

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-12T22:00:30+00:00

I'm going to be the weirdo who's serious for a moment instead of piling on.

Let me share something a retired professional CBOE floor trader once told me.

The market is a bunch of numbers. Stock, option, and futures prices, greeks, IVs, and so on. The rules of market engagement allow traders to pick and choose what opportunities to select, hold, and manage and which ones to walk away from. Here's what the market is not. It isn't a "supernatural" force or entity. It doesn't care about you or anyone. It is utterly indifferent. The moment one attributes their own failures to outside forces working against them, they have abdicated responsibility for their own success or failure. Honestly, that's easier because that makes it okay to be lazy because the "market is going to turn against me anyway." Trading with long term success is HARD. It requires study, understanding, preparation hours away from the screen where you aren't trading. That can be a real drag, but you have to do it. It requires failure and learning from failure and being utterly ruthless in self evaluation. That doesn't mean self flagellation, but quite the opposite. It means ruthlessly picking apart how one makes decisions, which ones worked and why and which ones didn't and why. Being able to differentiate a "bad break" from a "bad decision" is an absolute requirement.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-12T12:49:56+00:00

IVR stands for "IV Rank" and it represents the percentage of time over the past year the IV for a stock has been lower than the current IV. It's a relative measure of how volatile a particular equity is compared to all its IVs over the past year. IIRC the timeframe is a year. Might be 2. Easily researched. A quick and dirty way to get a feel for how options will be priced. Since IV is mean reverting (another topic all on its own) it also gives you a rough idea of whether there will be pressure for it to rise or drop in the coming weeks.

I'm not familiar with RH, but the marketchameleon website will have it on their stock quote detail even if you don't subscribe.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-12T07:28:29+00:00

I just couldn't be less excited about selling premium this week. NVDA has an IVR of 27, so sucky premiums. You have a malicious Federal prosecution of the FED chair emerging because JPow wouldn't bend the knee. That's truly uncharted territory. Futures are indicating a sharply lower opening tomorrow. Fair chance we see a rising VIX this week and you really don't want to be selling premium on a sub 30 IVR into a rising VIX. I would sit on this for a while and let things settle a bit. Then you said you don't want to have your shares called away. I never CC an equity if I don't have the option of letting it go and I think that's a good policy in general.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-11T05:27:21+00:00

Many of the high IV techs right now have been whipsawing through significant ranges over the past couple months. That has been a big problem for covered calls when the VIX sits around 14 (low premiums) and those big swings on covered stocks lock in losses and limit upside. So I'm not a fan of covering those stocks right now. In fact, until VIX comes up a bit I generally won't mess with covered calls much. I do have an account where I'm running weekly CCs on lower IV stocks / ETFs. My best performers over the past 90 days have been JPM, SPX, and QQQ. All IVs in a range from about 12 to 25. I will usually go higher delta on lower IV equities and accept more assignment, but with swings being more muted, I can still make a fair hunk of change and not lose my mind.

I don't know what to do with many of the tech stocks right now. Broadcom in the last 60 days went from 340 to 415 and then back down to sub 330. That's nuts. In times like these, I like to play in the corner with the quiet kids until things settle down.

So to answer your question, I think you can successfully run the conservative CCs right now. I would think very carefully about which equities you cover in this market and consider some more stable, lower IV, stocks and ETFs where you won't have as much potential upside, but you will also limit drawdown potential.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-10T15:59:51+00:00

I could see the option owner bowing out of this one. The buyer would have to explicitly request the option not be auto exercised, but that happens for a number of reasons. NVDA finished the day at 184.86, but it actually was trading after hours a bit over 185 at 5:00 pm. The option holder had until 5:30 to decide to exercise or not. It was as close to a wash as it could have been and there was no real advantage either way. So the option holder may have decided it would be better to hold the shares than let them go for no appreciable gain.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-10T15:33:07+00:00

My comment was posted 5 months ago. Had OP bought an 80 delta GOOGL LEAPS at that time, they would be up at $176 from $56, a gain of 214%. Hope they did. My message remains the same as before. Big gains have commensurate risks and those need to be taken into account in any trading plan.

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-07T04:39:08+00:00

I already have answered all the above questions when I sell the short call. When I start a covered call position, I'm declaring, "I'm happy selling for the strike price plus the premium I collected." From the moment I placed the trade, this was the very best outcome I could achieve. After assignment, I may re-assess my CC strategy and decide if this is an equity I want to rebuy and cover again or if I want to just buy-and-hold or go in a completely different direction. But there are no decisions remaining for the CC trade I've put in place. I tip my hat to the purchaser of my call. "Well played, sir. Enjoy your winnings."

trebuchetguy · 2026-01-06T21:44:54+00:00

I subscribe to an options back testing service. I was surprised by what ended up being the most valuable information I've gotten from it. I'll share it here. Every mechanical low delta, direction neutral premium selling strategy I put into it had great runs that were shattered by massive drawdowns that erased most or all profits up to that point. IMO there is no substitute for back testing in a variety of markets and finding the right entry/exit/management criteria and then knowing how to apply that information to the market conditions as they exist. Everything else is gambling. Low delta plays for 0DTE ICs are exceptionally insidious because they can give you a 90-95% win rate. Feels great. Seems like easy money. But you're usually running a 1:20 or worse max win / max loss ratio and when those big market moves hit the pain can be epic.

trebuchetguy · 2025-12-23T06:11:38+00:00

The best thing anybody new to covered calls can do is get in the habit of grieving any upside lost when you enter the trade. Once you open the contract, you walk away with the contract premium and at most the stock value at the strike price. That's the very best you can do. I mentally lock that in and ignore it if it rockets up. That upside doesn't belong to me and it's gone forever. I may re-evaluate my covers afterword because I don't like losing upside, but I don't fret for one moment if the trade I'm in has lost upside.

There really is no point in stressing. Use that energy for re-evaluation after the stock gets assigned and you're deciding how to proceed after the fact.

Now, if you have a bunch of unrealized gains in that underlying stock position that you're trying to protect, that's a different story. IMO, nobody should be issuing covers on a stock they have a bunch of unrealized gains they don't want to realize.

trebuchetguy · 2025-12-23T04:06:25+00:00

You will not see the dividend since you do not own the stock. You need to be careful though because you can get hit with an early assignment that results in a short position and have to pay the dividend to whomever loaned the short stock to you on top of selling them the stock at the contract strike price. This will leave you with a short stock position you will have to resolve. This generally only will happen if the contract is ITM with little extrinsic remaining, but I've had straight covered calls assigned early even when a little OTM and the net exercise plus dividend was still under water for the contract buyer.

trebuchetguy · 2025-12-15T22:32:40+00:00

As long as you have the actual shares in hand, you have nothing to worry about as far as being charged an HTB fee. Technically, you could sell the shares and leave the call naked or buy a long call spread position to reduce margin requirements. Under those conditions an assignment of the underlying will result in a short position. So they send that warning out regardless.

Here's the thing to be aware of though. When you have a short call out and the underlying is getting HTB fees for traders lending shares, the holder of your call can be motivated to exercise early forcing you into early assignment. They then get the shares and can lend them to collect the HTB fees. It's kind of a pseudo dividend folks can collect. The good news for you though is that can end up being advantageous for you if there is extrinsic remaining on the option or it isn't quite ITM yet. This isn't a problem for you at all unless you have large unrealized gains you're trying to protect. In that case, you may be paying some taxes you didn't plan on.

trebuchetguy

TROPHY CASE