Opening a brokerage account

So you have decided that convered calls might be an opiton strategy you are interested in and you want to open a brokerage account. I have tried opening brokerage accounts with several different places, each of which failed for one reason or another. By far the easiest is with Think or Swim. They allow you to do covered calls as well as a bunch of advanced stuff that I hope to cover here some day in the future.

If you already have an IRA or 401k from a previous employer you need to open what is called a rollover IRA account. If you do not currently have an IRA then I suggest opening a Roth IRA. For a good debate on whether to open a Roth vs. a regular IRA just consult the google. If you call up the guys at Think or Swim they will be more than happy to walk you through how to open your account.

Lets start trading

Today is the first day of our Long Term Covered Call portfolio.  This is a virtual portfolio starting out with 100k.  So, lets open some positions.

In the first round we are going allocate about half of our capital, spread as close to evenly as we can, over five positions.

We ended up executing the following trades

12/19/2011  14:30:34 BOT +300 JPM @30.76
12/19/2011 14:31:01 SOLD -3 JPM 100 JAN 12 30 CALL @1.86

12/19/2011 14:31:36 BOT +700 ACI @13.74
12/19/2011 14:31:56 SOLD -7 ACI 100 JAN 12 14 CALL @.79

12/19/2011 14:32:58 BOT +900 FITB @11.92
12/19/2011 14:33:45 SOLD -9 FITB 100 JAN 12 12.5 CALL @.26

12/19/2011 14:41:14 BOT +300 FCX @36.03
12/19/2011 14:41:38 SOLD -3 FCX 100 JAN 12 36.5 CALL @1.71

12/19/2011 14:44:38 BOT +600 MT @17.01
12/19/2011 14:45:05 SOLD -6 MT 100 JAN 12 17 CALL @1.18

Here is a link to a spreadsheet which will keep track of all our positions.