SOUN Aug 28 expired — and a lesson on closing early
The SOUN Aug 28 $6.50 put expired on Friday. SOUN closed well above the $6.50 strike, so the put expired worthless and we kept the full premium. Clean result.
But there's a lesson worth documenting. The put had decayed to $0.02 for at least two days before expiration — meaning it was sitting at 80%+ profit with days left on the clock. Rather than closing early and freeing up capital, we let it ride to expiration. TastyTrade's system auto-closed it at $0.01 on expiration day anyway.
When a position is at $0.02 with multiple days left, the remaining profit potential is minimal — but the capital tied up is real. Closing at $0.02 instead of $0.01 costs you $1. Keeping capital free for an extra two days could mean opening the next trade sooner and collecting more premium overall. Going forward: when a position hits $0.02 with more than one day remaining, close it.
Three months in: the honest scorecard
The challenge started June 5 with $500. The account now sits at $612 — a gain of $112, or 22.4%, in just under three months. The annualized pace works out to roughly 106%.
Those are eye-catching numbers, and we want to be honest about them. This has been an unusually productive stretch — SOUN's prolonged roller-coaster gave us multiple rolling opportunities that kept generating credit, and the $44 fee refund padded the balance in a way that won't repeat. A more realistic long-term expectation for a disciplined wheel strategy on a small account is somewhere in the 20–30% annualized range, not 100%+.
Chasing 22% in three months every quarter is where mistakes get made — over-trading, taking on too much risk, forcing setups that aren't there. The goal going forward is steady, repeatable income, not replicating a hot streak. When good setups present themselves we'll take them. When they don't, we'll wait.
How we filter scanner candidates
With the account sitting flat and looking for the next trade, our scanner flagged 43 candidates Friday afternoon. We're not going to trade all 43 — most get eliminated quickly. Here's the rough filter we apply before looking at any options chain:
- Would we be comfortable owning this stock if assigned? If the answer is no, stop there. The whole premise of the wheel is that assignment isn't a disaster.
- Does the underlying pass our fundamental due diligence? The scanner scores stocks on a range of financial metrics, but there's always qualitative judgment on top of that — business model, sector dynamics, and overall risk profile.
- Is the expiration cadence right for the account? We've established biweekly expirations as our standard. Very long-dated options may offer better value but tie up capital too long on a $600 account.
- Are the options liquid enough? Wide bid/ask spreads kill the economics on small premium trades. This is always the final check before committing.
Only after a ticker clears those questions do we pull up the actual options chain to evaluate premium, delta, and specific strike selection.
The five candidates
Here's how the top five scanner results look through that filter:
What comes next
The account is flat, the capital is free, and we're in no rush. One of the disciplines the challenge has reinforced is that not trading is a valid choice. Forcing a trade into a mediocre setup just to feel active is how small accounts give back their gains.
Monday morning we'll check whether Friday's candidates are still valid — RSI, price action, and premium levels can shift meaningfully over a weekend, especially heading into the first week of September. TRIP is the leading candidate from the scanner, but we're also keeping an eye on familiar names like SOUN and BULL. If either opens at an attractive entry, they're known quantities with liquidity we understand and options chains we've traded before.
Whatever we trade next will go up here when it happens.
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