Turning $10K into $50K by Jan 21st - Week 16 Update (Members Only)

What a wild ride!   We’re right at the mid-point after 3 months after starting this group on June 11th, when the Dow was at 10,200 and we’ve been up and down over 5% in each direction several times since then.  Despite the aggressive nature of the virtual trades listed here, we try to keep this a low-touch portfolio to better teach the effectiveness of letting the strategy do its work by NOT adjusting the positions from month to month.  So far, so good as we’re up over 160% in the first 3 months and back to mainly cash as we head into the home stretch . Of course, if something drastic were to occur, then adjustments would be necessary but, on the whole, we’ve been fortunate to have the market pretty much behave right in line with our expectations.  We are now turning bearish so it’s time to cash out our remaining bullish winners or, at least, be prepared to!   The idea of these picks was to find $10,000 worth of small plays that we thought could gain 500% by Jan 21st as part of a larger portfolio. If you can do this with just 10% of a $100K portfolio or 5% of a $200K portfolio, that’s plenty of risk for these uncertain times and it’s a nice 25-50% bonus on the entire portfolio if it works out. Risk can be a component of a conservative portfolio if we wall it off safely. Our first play was a fundamentals play on YRCW, assuming they wouldn’t go bankrupt.  That went very well ( see prior updates for details ) closed out with a  total profit of $7,710 .  YRCW is now YRCWD after doing a 1 for 25 reverse stock split that took them up to over $5 and, of course, they get interesting to us again under $5 but our big money was made on a Double Down at .11, 25x of which is just $2.75 so we’re not going to get too excited unless we see around $4 for a new entry. 20 C Dec $3/4 bull call spreads were .62 each ($1,240) and paired with the sale of 10 2012 $4 puts at $1.08 ($1,080) for net $160 investment in the artificial buy/write. The $3/4s are now .85 ($1,700) and the $4 puts have dropped to .70 ($700) so now up net $1,000 (up 525%), slow but steady progress. This one is a fine example of Theta decay…