Capturing dividends with covered calls—are you ready?

In a recent post I gave an overview of dividend capture strategies. In some situations, an effective way to hedge risk with a dividend capture strategy is to use covered call options.  If you are not familiar with options this might sound exotic, but it’s truly the training wheels of option trading.  With covered calls, you can introduce yourself to the conservative, hedging possibilities of …

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Dividend Capture Strategies

In trying to capture dividends there is no free lunch. In fact, since Wall street is involved, the best you can hope for is an affordable lunch. I have looked at, and tried quite a few approaches—most of which don’t work, but I have found one approach that does work with some ETFs. Ironically you don’t actually collect the dividend most of the time, but …

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Betting on the bear

I put a bear spread into place on SPY,  selling  April 100 calls at 8.10 and buying April 108 calls at 1.30 — net credit of 6.80.   Worst case loss is 1.2 per call pair, best case profit is 6.8 per call pair.

2023 Ex-dividend and Pay date information for AGZ, CFT, CIU, EMB, GBF, GVI, MBB, MUB, NYF, SUB, MUAE, MUAG

The 2023 Ex-Dividend and Pay Date  information below is based on Ishares distribution schedule. MONTHLY DISTRIBUTION — BlackRock, Bloomberg Barclays, iBoxx, JPMorgan 2023 Ex-Dividend Dates 1-Feb 1-Mar 3-Apr 1-May 1-Jun 3-Jul 1-Aug 1-Sep 2-Oct 1-Nov 1-Dec 14-Dec Pay / Distribution Dates 7-Feb 7-Mar 7-Apr 5-May 7-Jun 10-Jul 7-Aug 8-Sep 6-Oct 7-Nov 7-Dec 20-Dec AGZ      iShares Barclays Agency Bond Fund (AGZ) CFT     …

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Time for divergence from 2004?

Looking a the chart below you can imagine this year’s stock market getting back on the 2009 trend line,  leaving the 2003/2004 correlation behind.  But I’m still betting that the market is in a sideways mode, rather than a continuing raging bull. The most notable change in the curves since my last update on the 18th of March  is the big drop in normalized volume–something …

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