Assignment Risk, Short Calls, And Ex-Dividend Dates

If you are short call options in a stock or an Exchange Traded Product (ETP) like SPY or IWM you need to be aware of ex-dividend dates.  If your calls are in the money, even barely, your options may be assigned right before the security goes ex-dividend—and then you may have a problem. For example, let’s say you hold a credit call spread position: short …

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Profiting from Special Dividends: What Won’t Work, What Might

With the expectation of  tax changes next year some companies have been declaring eye popping special dividends, for example AOL is giving out $5.15  and Costco $7.  Intuitively it seems there should be some way to profit from these events, but as is always the case with Wall Street, there is never anything that approaches a free lunch. At open on the ex-dividend day a …

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Protecting High Yield Bond Investments with VIX/VIX3M Based Timing

The holy grail of investing is a market timing method that gets you out of the market on bad days and gets you in for the good days.   There are innumerable methods for doing this, ranging from slogans, “Sell in May and Go Away” to closely guarded multi-factor proprietary algorithms. The worst methods have no apparent causal relationship between the predictor and the thing being …

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2023 Ex-div & Paydate: SLYG, SLYV, SPYG, DGT, SLY, SDY, VLU, and others

The 2023 Ex-Dividend and Pay Date information below is based on data from SPDR referenced in this post. 2023 Ex-Dividend Dates Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 20-March 20-June 18-September 18-December 28-December (potential capital gains) Pay / Distribution Dates 23-March 23-June 21-September 21-December 3-January-2024 (potential capital gains) In alphabetical order: DGT SPDR Global Dow ETF (DGT) KBE SPDR S&P Bank ETF (KBE) KCE SPDR S&P Capital Markets …

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