It's been a crazy few months as we saw Micron and Intel hitting all time highs. Photonics was another sector I was looking at and seeing Lumentum and Coherent hit all time highs, I do feel a huge sense of FOMO for not putting more money in. Overall, FOMO not putting more money into the semiconductor industry as Nvidia hits all time high this week.
As mentioned in one of my previous post, I am selling cash secured puts with a low 5 digit sum that I received early March, today, I like to record on the strategy so far and why actually if I had just invested, it might have provided better gains than selling cash secured puts. Some semiconductor stocks like Coherent, Lumentum, Aehr Test Systems and AXT Inc do provide some juicy premiums but like some have said that they have priced a lot of future growth in and in the long run, if we do have a bad earnings or performance, it can be reflected on their stock price so I am cautious on that as well as I sell CSP on them.
1. Profits so far and my strategy
As of 15 May 2026, I have earned about USD $4164 which is about SGD $5319 from 19 March 2026. So it seems pretty good yea, I mostly did it on stocks that provided great premiums due to the high IV and mostly on stocks that are popular. These were the stocks that I did my cash secured puts on: BE, CRCL, SOXL, NBIS, TQQQ, MSTR, AXTI and AEHR.
There are quite a few counters considering it was only since March 2026 but because of how the market has been on a rip upwards, I took profit often and opened new positions. I mostly opened 2 to 3 weeks positions but would take profit within the week since the stocks went up so much.
2. Constantly looking at prices to see if I should take profit or leave it rolling
Some trades were honestly unnecessary as I could have leave it to earn the full premium but I tend to open my brokerage app more often and this lead to me having itchy fingers and making more trades than needed. March was all right with just 2 trades but April and May 2026 were ridiculous with an excessive amount of trade and one trade just giving me a premium of $13 USD, I think I saw another more attractive trade and decided to do that instead.
This was not very healthy as my nights were spent looking and even some nights, I had disrupted sleep. So I am trying to not make myself so addicted to checking prices and opening my app so excessively. I try to just make trades on Mondays and to close the position only if 50% profit has been made, meaning that if I buy it back, I pay 50% or less.
3. Better to have it just invested and chill?
There were many counters that I did CSP on that went up so much, I haven't calculated if I would have performed better holding them than doing CSP but I think it would have definitely used lesser effort. One of the ticker that I sold often was SOXL and on 19 March 2026, SOXL was at $54.85 and it grew to $186.19 on 14 May 2026.
This means that for each SOXL stock, if I bought and held on, I would earn a profit $131.34. With just 100 shares bought at $54.85, if I held on till now, I would have earned a profit of $13,134. Of course, this is all on hindsight, if I really did hold it to be honest, I would have sold it when it reach $100 or if I had some kind of profit.
Anw, I don't think I would want a position into SOXL considering the run up although it might still go higher since the semiconductor run is fuelled by AI which seems to be printing money now for compute and chips. But I think owning a broad based ETF is really what I want to be in currently.
I own QQQ in my portfolio which has also seen quite a run up from March 19 2026 where it was $593 and on 14 May 2026, it is at 719, which is a profit of $126.19, I don't have enough for 100 shares but it would have been significant profit, not as much as SOXL or my options profit but would be something that can be held on for long term and compounded. So it does seem to be better to just invest that sum of money from the beginning I received it. I guess we also had a really great run up the past few months as the environment and earnings seem to show that AI is indeed a reality that we need to accept as companies are readily adopting it and spending money to improve their AI infrastructure.
What am I planning to do from now onwards?
I like having this sum of money on the side to pump it in or do some cash secured puts on the side while I wait. I used to not have a substantial sum of cash on the side as I prefer to be 100% invested at all times but having this lump sum additionally does provide some different strategies that I can work with.
With the premiums earned, I have pumped most of them back into the market and my portfolio is at all time highs though not like Micron and Intel kinda performance but I am going to continue to sell puts and try to accumulate and if we do see any kind of downward movement then I would consider adding otherwise my itchy fingers would anyway make me buy more index ETF or maybe get some Bitcoin. Nothing planning to do any lump sum purchase now but might do so in the future depending on the market.
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