No. of Recommendations: 10
so if it isn't attractive this year, simply don't do it this year
...
I really liked that strategy when it was discussed in some depth (mostly provided by you) on the BRK board.
But it seemed like "this year" wasn't a great year to get an attractive return, nor the following "this year", ... and so I snoozed it.
As a crude rule of thumb, if VIX is over 25 it's usually easy to find great picks more or less at random, but when it's under 20 you have to be a bit more judicious.
The main thing I changed in the strategy was switching from a diversified (not too closely examined) portfolio to a short set of tickers that I knew reasonably well well.
The thing is, a cash-backed put outperforms the stock if the stock falls a lot, falls a little, breaks even, or rises a little. It underperforms if the stock rises a lot in the option's time interval. My insight is that very few stocks rise a lot in a lot of intervals one after the other, so if you do *repeated* cash backed puts on the same ticker over time you do pretty well. It has to be a firm you trust that the actual value isn't falling, and it isn't overvalued. It works spectacularly on a stock that is very out of fashion but which you believe is supported by value--lots of pessimism means high premiums, and a low and flat stock price, so you get the high premiums sometimes for years at a time. For example, Sears went bankrupt, but I made an IRR of 28% writing puts against it because it took so darned long to fail.
With that in mind, I only had to stop doing put writing on rare occasion when the option premiums are super low on everything.
Jim
