Value Options Letter
Track record
Closed trades and open positions marked to market. Where the book stands today, not just the parts that finished well. The numbers below update automatically.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. The results shown are the historical performance of trade ideas published by Value Options Letter. They are not the returns of any client or subscriber account, and no subscriber should assume they would have achieved these results. Individual results vary with entry price, position size, timing, commissions, and taxes, none of which are reflected here. Options carry substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor; you can lose more than you invest in some strategies. Value Options Letter is a research publication, not an investment adviser, and nothing here is personalized investment advice. The publisher and/or its principals may hold positions in the securities discussed.
How these numbers are computed
- An assignment is not a closed trade. This is a wheel strategy, so a put that gets assigned hands us shares at the strike. The premium is ours to keep, but the position isn’t finished — the shares are still at risk. Those stay out of the closed figures until the shares are actually disposed of, and the same applies to a covered call whose shares we keep and write against again. Counting the premium the moment a put is assigned would make every assignment look like a guaranteed win, which is not what happened. They appear instead under open positions, marked to market.
- Open positions are valued against adjusted cost. Premium collected and dividends received reduce what the shares effectively cost us, and the mark is measured against that adjusted basis rather than the raw purchase price. Where a live covered call sits against the shares, its cost to buy back is netted in too — an in-the-money call caps the upside, and ignoring it would overstate the position.
- Why the closed numbers alone would mislead you. A short option we hold to expiration can only finish two ways: it expires worthless and we keep the premium, or it’s assigned and the share risk carries forward. The first is a gain by arithmetic. The second realizes nothing. Since we take assignment rather than buy a put back at a loss, a closed-trade record on this strategy fills up with gains and postpones losses indefinitely. That isn’t a good track record — it’s a filter. So every headline figure on this page nets the open positions too.
- Positions at a gain counts closed trades and open positions together. An open position marked below its adjusted cost counts as a loss, because that is what it is today. Breakeven closed trades are excluded from the denominator — neither a hit nor a miss — and open positions we can’t currently price are excluded from both sides rather than assumed flat.
- Avg annualized averages the realized annualized return across closed trades where it’s available. Annualizing short-dated options trades over a year is the standard way to make them comparable.
- Total P&L is realized gains and losses on closed trades plus the current mark on open positions, per contract reported. It moves with the market and can fall. The realized-only subtotal is shown separately under “Closed positions” above.
- Subscribers see every trade individually at /app/history— ticker, structure, strike, entry and exit prices, realized return, close reason, everything.
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