Hey everybody, good to be here today. My name is Brent Moors. It's time for Managing an Options Portfolio. So today I want to talk about looking at your portfolio in terms, looking at your portfolio in helping you to decide what option trade that you want, what option strategy you want to add. Okay, so that's what we're going to talk about in terms of what we're doing today. But let me just also mention a couple things. One, Mr. Mike Fairbourn's helping me out in the chat today. I always appreciate that. Mike's a good friend and he's familiar with what we're covering. So, as you have questions between Mike and I, we'll do our best to help you out if you're watching live. And if you're not watching live, if you're watching on a recording, that's great too.
We're glad to have you. You can follow us on X at BrentMoorsCS at MikeFairbournCS. And before we get to that, let me just mention a couple things. One, options do carry a high level of risk and are not suitable for all investors. And the information today is not an individual recommendation of any security, strategy or chart type. We may look at some technical analysis but remember that Schwab does not recommend technical analysis as the sole means of investment research. Paper money application is for educational purposes only. We'll be using the Thinkorswim desktop platform today. For the sake of simplicity, I may not take into commissions on any sample trades we do. Just realize those are a factor. All investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
And past performance of any security or strategy does not guarantee future results. Short options can be assigned early. Remember that. It won't do that on the paper money platform, but in real life, it can certainly do that. And so just be aware of that. Okay, so today what I want to do, I want to look at the portfolio and I want to consider what option trades we may do from that. And just make sure you subscribe to the Trader Talks channel here. Let me do this just to kind of kick us off. And I want to mention. When we're looking at option trades, there are probably three main drivers of what we're going to determine is going to help influence how options perform. And I abbreviate them PTV.
Price, time, and volatility is what they stand for. Price, time, and volatility. When I say price, I don't mean the option price. Because all three of them are the same. When all three of these go into determining the option price, I mean the stock price. So stock price is the P. And so that's what the stock does. What the market does may influence us on what option trades we do. Okay, so that's the price. And for each of these, price, time, and volatility, there are Greeks that we can look at that kind of help measure that. So the option Greek that helps us assess the impact of stock price movement on the option is delta. Now, by the way, there are more Greeks than what I'm about to mention.
But these are the three biggest ones. And there's more than just price, time, and volatility that impact it. For example, interest rates can impact them. But for shorter-term options, they typically have less of an impact than some of these others there. So delta is the Greek that we use to kind of determine the stock price. And we can kind of consider that the price risk of the portfolio or the price risk of the trade. If the stock moves down a lot and you have a call option, how much is that going to affect that option? And vice versa for a put option. In terms of time, the Greek that we're going to look at is theta. Theta. That tells us how much time decay, everything else being equal, comes off that option price.
Just from a day passing. And that can be helpful or harmful. You may think, well, look, the option degrading because of time is a bad thing. But that's not necessarily a bad thing if you have a short option. So that's going to be a big factor there. And then finally, volatility, the Greek that measures volatility, then its impact on an option move is called Vega. It's kind of easy to remember in the theta, T, Vega, V. It doesn't quite work that way with delta and P. But those are the ways to remember those. So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at the volatility. We're going to look at our portfolio, look at our option Greeks on our portfolio to start out.
And then kind of make some decisions based on that. Right? So let me move that off and let's go to thinkorswim. Now, here I go. I'm going to go to the monitor tab. And I want to look at our delta on our portfolio. The delta tells us how much the option is likely to move based on a dollar move in the stock price. So on Bank of America on this trade, and this trade, by the way, is a spread trade, but it has different legs, but those legs partially offset each other. My net delta on Bank of America is 0.04. That's not very big, only a 4-cent move on that option based on a dollar move in the underlying stock price. Now, some of these are going to be more American Express for a $49.
99 move. But that's only partially helpful because a $1 move in Bank of America is very different than a $1 move on American Express or any of these others. So if we want to compare, if we want to compare apples to apples here, what we're going to do is we're going to beta weight this. This is actually already beta weighted. So let me un-beta weight it here. I didn't realize that was beta weighted already. So a $1 move. On Bank of America, that makes more sense that it would be there. It would make a $6.84 move on the option, okay? And a $1 move on FDX, it's a negative delta, would make an $18.46 move on the option prices that I have here.
And again, there's multiple, this is a spread trade I have on that. But to put them all to the same, compare apples to apples here. I'm going to beta weight it to the SPX. And what that's saying is, for a one-point move on the SPX, now realize the SPX is about 6,000 right now. It's roughly 6,000. And therefore, a one-point move on the SPX is not much. That is how much I expect this Bank of America trade to move. Or that's how much I expect this Walmart trade to move. With a one-point move. Well, let's kind of make it more of a one, let's think about a 1% move in the SPX. Well, 1% of 6,000 is about 60. So I would have to adjust these by 60.
But what I want to do is I want to take these and I want to look at my whole portfolio. But we have a challenge here. The challenge is that I have like a subtotal here, for this group, and I have a subtotal for this group, and so on down these different groups. But I want to look at my portfolio as a whole. Okay, I want to look at those portfolios as a whole. So what you can do is you can go up to your little gear up here, not gear, the little three-line menu. And you can say, you can uncheck the show groups for a bit. And then what I can do is I can look at my Delta Theta value. If you don't have these on here, by the way, you can add those.
Just go to the gear and you can add those and then you can go down and you can see what your totals are here. And you can see how those totals, this is for the whole portfolio. This is just summing each line item here for my portfolio. And so I can see my total Delta for my portfolio is about 27. All right. So how much would say a 1% move in the SPX mean for my total portfolio? Well, the portfolio we said the SPX is about 6,000. A 1% move would be about 60. So 60 points times my portfolio of 27. What impact would that have on my portfolio? I'm going to take my calculator out. I'm going to do 60 times 27.
And I come up with about roughly a $1,600 move to my portfolio. And this is positive. Therefore, what that means is, and this is just an estimation. If the SPX were to go up about 60 points or 1%, which is a decent move, but not, you know, it's not unheard of in a day. That would benefit my portfolio to, would say approximately $1,600. Or if the SPX went down 1% in a day, we'd be losing about $1,600. Is that too much? You can multiply that and say, well, what about a 10% move to your portfolio? Well, 10% move would be about $16,000. Now, is that too much? It depends on the portfolio. So let's say you had a $100,000 portfolio.
Well, that, you know, for a 10% move down, that's probably, you know, that's kind of in the ballpark, what you may expect. But you may say, that's too much. I want to lower my delta there. And in that case, what I can do is I can look, do strategies to lower my delta. Okay? And see on that. Or if I had, say, a million-dollar portfolio here, that would probably be a pretty small amount. Of risk there. But part of it is just how much you're comfortable with. All right? So that's that on the portfolio. And I want to look at each of these. And, but you've got to decide partially on your delta how bullish you are on the markets.
So the first thing I want to do is I want to show you how to judge where your portfolio currently sits. And to do that, you can beta weight it. And you can look at your totals there. And if you need to, you can show those groups. Let me get out of this. You can hide, excuse me, hide the groups by clicking on that little line. By the way, if you don't, one little trick on thinkorswim is these column headers. If you click on this little, this is supposed to be a little anchor symbol. If I click there, then when I scroll down, look what happens to those column headers. They're still there. So that makes it a little easy, easier when I'm looking at these totals right there. Okay?
So take advantage of the anchor. Take advantage of hiding the groups here to see the totals. Now, I really like those groups. And I want to go back to those groups in a little bit. But in order to see the subtotal for the whole shebang, the whole portfolio, I need to hide those groups. Okay. Let me just go and just double-check questions here a little bit. And then I'm going to go to talk about this. And then I'm going to talk about now that we know where the portfolio sits, what do we want to do with it? Okay? So let's see. Let me just see if I've missed any questions here. What's the goal of the portfolio? That's what I'm trying to get at today, Andy. Good question.
Our goal is going to be it's going to depend on what we see on the markets doing. And, of course, it's going to depend personally on you and your portfolio. But for this portfolio, I want to look at the current markets and see if we're appropriate, if we want to see more. Be more bullish or more bearish on this. Now, there was a question, why are the deltas 4 and 6? Because some of you are looking at these deltas and going, look, I'm used to deltas between 0 and 100. Right? What does this delta mean here? This delta is positioned for this. Remember, it's beta weighted. So what this means is this individual stock, which we say Visa, if SPX moves up a dollar, we'd expect about a $2.
18 impact on my portfolio. So it's doing the math for you. Okay? If I go back here and I un-beta weight and I just look at a single, let's just look at a single stock here. A stock with 100 shares is going to have a delta of 100. Let me go to a single option. What do we got? I'm trying to remember. Here's Visa. It's just a long call. This delta right here of 74. 9 would be the equivalent of what you may be used to seeing of a 0. 74 or 0. 75 delta there. Just to make it clear for you. Okay. So, all right. Let's go ahead and do this. Let's look at the market real quick. I'm just going to use the S&P 500.
And I've got a six-month chart on the market. And so if I'm trying to match what I want with my portfolio to what the market is doing, one thing I may very well look at is technical analysis. I may look at support and resistance. I may look at trend. And I may look at maybe the momentum of what the current market is doing. In this case, what I'm going to say, though, is this. I'm going to say, in general, our trend has been going up. It's consolidated a little bit, though. We're going a little bit more sideways right now. Although, we went up. In fact, what you can do is you can say this. You can do, we had kind of this way. We had this pullback in the market.
We went up. We came back down. We tested it and bounced not only off our 30-day moving average but our trend line and a nice little bounce. So, what I'm going to say, I'm going to call this moderately bullish. Moderately bullish. So, that's our assessment we're going to take today in this class. Now, you may disagree, and that's absolutely fine. And if you do disagree. And you're more bearish, then what you're more likely to do is you're more likely to go to your portfolio and say, 'I maybe want to lower my delta.' I want to add some negative delta or at least take off some positive delta off my portfolio if you're bearish. But for our purposes, using our first thing, which was the delta, we're going to say we want to lower the delta a little bit.
We're looking for more for a bullish trade. Okay? So, question in the chat. And Mike answered it. But just for everybody's sake here, the question is, what's this 7? If I want to link to my chart and I want to bring up, say, Biogen, I just click on that 7. And then when I go to my chart, it has Biogen up there. Okay? So, that's how I do that because I have it linked as a 7 orange, whatever color you want. Now, we mentioned delta. We mentioned theta. Theta is not quite so good. Clear-cut, I guess, in terms of this. Theta, we may say, hey, we want, I want positive theta. Remember, this is the time decay. I want time decay to be working for us here on this portfolio.
And that's great, but it's a two-edged sword there, though. There's pros and cons to the theta. Okay? So, do I want more of a directional reward on my trades? If I'm trying to do more directional strategies, I'm probably going to have negative theta. Okay? If I want more time decay in my portfolio, then I want more positive theta. And theta and vega kind of go hand-in-hand on single options. The sign on those, the positive or negative sign, are going to be opposite. If I do a positive theta trade. In other words, a short option, then my vega is going to be negative on it and vice versa. So, therefore, we can kind of look at these two together, theta and vega. All right? So, there's pros and cons to that.
But in general, what I'm going to say is, hey, look, here's our theta. Look, kind of a weird one right here. Minus 419. Now, this caterpillar trade that I have this huge vega trade. What I have this huge vega on is a long straddle. Okay? That is a long straddle. It's only two days. This is based on earnings. If you're interested in learning about an earnings trade called a long straddle, I did this just a few days on the 24th in the advanced options class. And what I'm going to do is, if you're interested in that, I'm putting a link in the chat for you. Or if you're watching on a recording, just go to advanced options playlist and look for the class that was on the 24th on long straddles.
That's what this trade is. But this is really skewing this pretty significantly here on this trade. Like, if you look at my theta column, let me make it a little bigger here. You can see how big that is compared to everything else. This is a very temporary thing. I could just get out of this. But I want to do this as an earnings trade. So I'm not going to get out of this right now. I'm going to wait until earnings. Earnings is tomorrow on this stock. And therefore, we're going to wait on that. And I'm going to let that be. But if I take out that negative 427 from my total, then I'm at about negative 40. Something like that. Which is a much more reasonable number. But I want to increase that.
I want to add some positives. Negative theta. So what I'm going to look for here on this trade is I want to look for something that is delta positive. Also known as a bullish trade. I'm going to look for something that is theta positive as well. And by the way, there's a survey link in the chat here, everybody. So that probably means we're going to be selling a position here. But let's also look at Vega. Because remember, these kind of go hand in hand. Theta positive is going to be Vega negative. And I may not want to be Vega negative if my implied volatilities, if I'm looking at implied volatilities, and they are rock bottom. Because what that's going to mean is implied volatilities are more likely to go up in that situation.
And we're also going to be selling for very little money. If my implied volatilities are very low. So let's look at that. Let's look at implied volatilities. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bring up the VIX. So here's the VIX. Here's a measure of implied volatilities on the S &P 500. And here's where we are right now. We're right there, right about where my cursor is. And I'm going to call that kind of mid-range here. I could draw a line if I want to on this. Oops, I clicked on the wrong thing. I could draw a line right where we're at right here. And I'm going to say this line is kind of mid-range here. So it's not a strong influence on me right now in terms of implied volatility.
But if we were very low on the implied volatility, we may be more likely to do a buying strategy. If we were very high on implied volatility, we may be looking more likely to do a selling strategy. So, we've looked at the three things. We've looked at price, time, and volatility in terms of influencing our decision. We decided we're going to look for something that's a bullish selling strategy. And I'm going to be fairly simple today on this because I want to save time. And then I don't want to be too confusing on this. And then what I want to do is I want to look at our existing, our various existing options portfolio and talk about management on that options portfolio. But what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to the S&P 100.
Here's the S&P 100. Let me scroll up. And because we have earnings season, right, and we have so many companies with earnings right now, if you want to find earnings, go to MarketWatch, Calendar, and you can see this is just S&P 100 stocks. But look at all these earnings that we have, including tonight we have Meta, we have Microsoft, Tesla, all today in terms of earnings. Hold on. I got conference. Let me get rid of that and just click earnings. Here's earnings. You can see all the stocks that we have coming up with earnings right now. So I'm going to do my best to avoid earnings. You don't have to. In fact, that strategy I talked about earlier, that long straddle that I put the link in the chat for, we deliberately were looking for companies.
We were looking for companies with earnings. But for my purposes, I'm going to try and avoid earnings. And so all these stocks that have the red and blue circles mean earnings are coming up on those. So I'm going to avoid those. Let me just go to the top of the list here. And we'll go to Salesforce. And, you know, I'm looking for a bullish strategy and one where it's a selling strategy to take advantage of positive time decay. I'm not looking to add that much delta to my portfolio because we're moderately bullish. And therefore, I'm just going to look for a short put vertical on this. So I'm going to stick with CRM. Also, if I already have a trade, I don't think I do already have a trade on CRM.
But if I do already have a trade on CRM, then I may look for a different strategy here, a different stock here. But what I can do is I can look. You can look at other stocks too. Here's Netflix. Bullish? What do you think? I'd say that's relatively bullish. The trend has been up. We had this gap up, and it seems like we've held support here at that level. So I would consider that a bullish possibility. We could do a short put vertical on that. What about Union Pacific? Kind of the same deal. A lot of bullish stocks here. GE? Kind of the same deal. Gap up? Looks like we're bouncing off our low. We held our low here. We've bounced off of that. Those are all possibilities for us.
I could go down the list. Obviously, some will be bearish. Some will be bullish. But these first few I looked at are bullish. And I'm going to consider this to be bullish. We're above both our 10 and our 30-day moving average here on that. Okay? So let's go and I'm just going to say, hey, I'm going to look for something out about a month maybe in terms of time. When's our earnings on this here? Let me just scroll, get rid of this. Earnings is on February 26. So I'm going to try and do this before earnings comes out. So I'm going to go to the Trade tab. February 26, I think we said earnings. So I'm going to go to this February 20. We're only out 23 days. That's okay.
I'm going to look for that. And I don't need all those strikes. Let's go out. And I'm going to do something. We'll say 35, 33 delta works. Now, I mentioned what delta was earlier. That is just a measure of what the stock price is doing compared to the option. Excuse me, what the option, potential option to move is compared to the stock move, a $1 move in the stock. But we can also use it as to try and help us find the probability of it being in the money. We want to keep this. We wanted a higher probability trade. In other words, we want the probabilities to be less than 50% for our purposes today. I'm going to go for something in the 30 to 40 range.
I'm going to go around 34 delta. I'm going to look to sell this. I'm going to click on the bid price. I'm going to go and I'm going to go down. We'll do one strike with $2 . 50. I'm going to control click on that. And on any of these, when you look at it, you can click on confirm and send. You can see how much you're risking, $168. And you can adjust your quantity based on that. So if I want to do two contracts, click on confirm and send, then I'm doubling everything there. One benefit, I guess, of doing multiple contracts, of course, remember your risk, is then if I want, I can actually kind of layer out of the trade at times.
Instead of just getting out of the whole shebang, I can get out of half of it at a time if I want. All right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to enter this trade. I'm going to put it in. I don't know why it's not letting me change my account; I'm putting it in. Oh, that's because I got rid of my groups. I was hiding my groups, I think. Anyhoo, that's okay. I'm just going to send this. I'm going to send that. We can add that later. I'm going to send that trade. Remember, short options can be assigned early, and that has a short option in it. So now here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back here, and I want my groups again.
I got rid of my groups to see what my overall position was here. And just remember, that Caterpillar trade was really skewing the Theta especially, but also to a certain extent the Vega. That's going to be out of the portfolio here. That's going to be out of the portfolio here in a day. We could get out of it right now, by the way. In fact, let me just deal with this right now. Caterpillar is a long straddle. We're making $122 on it. But the intention of this trade, by the way, is to do an earnings trade. Therefore, I'm not going to exit this trade, even though we've made a little profit on that. So I'm going to just leave that in there. Now let's go back to our groups.
I'm going to click here. I'm going to check mark to show my groups. And here we go. And let me just – is that going to – oh, yeah, that's right. Because I have all those there, that works. Okay, so let's go through and talk about management here. But if there are any questions, let me know. There is a survey link in the chat, as I mentioned before there. I'm going to start with short verticals. In fact, we just had a short vertical. We just added in CRM. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add that to the group by right-clicking on it, moving to a group. And I'm going to put that in my short verticals group. Okay. How are we going to manage this?
Well, we're going to manage it such that if we get near expiration, we're going to look to get out. And by expiration – near expiration, that's about a week to go or so. I'm going to say nine days is close enough that we're probably going to look to exit these trades here. We're making a little money, nothing to write home about, really, in terms of money on Bank of America. But we only have nine days to go on this. And it was really a small little trade. There was only a quantity of one. So I'm just going to look to get out of this. Really, there's not that much more left on the table that we can get out. And that is a consideration in your options management.
How much risk do you have left in the trade versus how much potential reward you have left in the trade? So in this case – in this case, how much reward do I have potentially left? Well, I'm going to look at the current price on this. This – The difference between my long and my short is eight cents there, I think, if I'm doing my math right. Or eight dollars. That's the max potential reward I have left if I stay into this all the way through expiration. Okay. Compare that to the – Well, the risk is basically the width of the spread, a dollar. Minus my initial credit, which was about 20 cents, 19 cents. So this could potentially – I'm rounding here, I think, by a dollar.
My risk is still about 80 dollars on this trade. So I really don't have that much left to potentially make on this. Therefore, I'm just going to get out of this, especially because we're getting near expiration. So I'm going to highlight those. I'm going to right-click on it. And I'm going to create a closing order. And I'm just going to put this in. It's at the mid-price. We'll confirm and send and send and see if that can – if we get filled on that. Okay. So a question from Bob was, since the vol crush will – after earnings, isn't there a good chance of losing profit tomorrow when the earnings are announced? So, again, if you're interested in that long straddle strategy, check out that webcast I did. On Friday.
However, to Bob's question is, look, this is a long straddle. This was Caterpillar we were talking about here, we mentioned. This is a long straddle. Implied volatility drops after earnings are likely going to hurt both the call and the put on this. You're absolutely right. We knew that going in. That's just one of the downsides of the straddle. But the whole point of the straddle is, in this case, is we're expecting a big enough move to make up for that challenge that we have. So, yes, Bob, that is a challenge that we have with long straddles. Hopefully, the move is enough to overcome that. Maybe it will be. Maybe it won't be. Let's keep looking there. Okay? All right. Now, the thing is – let me go here. Okay.
And we just did CRM, so let me go forward. Let's look at FDX. Again, we have nine days to exit. This is an iron condor. We have the call side and the put side of this. And we're actually doing pretty well on both sides of this. We're making a nice little profit on this. So, again, less than 10 days to expiration. I'm just going to look to get out of this FedEx trade here. You can get out either as a whole. Sometimes on these, they are – it's easier price-wise to get out one side at a time here. So I'm going to right-click on this, and I'm going to create a closing order. I'm going to buy that back, confirm and send. I'm going to send that. We're out of that one.
And I'm going to do the same thing on the put side of this. I'm going to highlight those. I'm going to create my closing order, and I'm going to buy that back. Now, let's keep on moving forward. That one has not filled yet, but we'll see on that. Let's do one more here. Walmart. Interesting on Walmart, we have one side that's doing really well and another side that's doing even worse than the other ones doing well. So, unfortunately – well, actually, that's fine. I don't know what I was going to say there. So here's McCall's side. It is not doing as well. And the put side, I suspect if we look at the put side, how much do we have left to make on this put side? Practically nothing. Only a penny to go on this. So even though we have 16 days to go till expiration,
there's practically nothing more we could make on this put side. So I'm going to get out of that put side definitely, and then we'll look at the call side a little more closely. I'm going to right-click on that. I'm going to create a closing order. I'm going to look to buy that back. So we're out of that put side on that. Get out of my way. There we go. Now, let's look at the call side. What I have left is – those other trades we closed out were doing pretty well. This one is not doing very well. This is a short call vertical. Our short strike is 96 on this. Let's look at Walmart here on this. Here's Walmart. We were banking on this in this channel. This is a breakout.
This is kind of an unmitigated breakout. In fact, three days above this, this is looking from a technical standpoint, I think most traders would say from a technical standpoint, this is fairly bullish. Therefore, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut my losses here. I'm not getting out because it's against us right now. I'm getting out because that happens. I'm getting out because it's unmitigatedly bullish right now, it seems like from a technical standpoint, and this is a bearish trade. I'm going to close this one now, print closing order and let's click on 'buy' that back. We're going to get out of that and get out of that. We're out of that. Now, in the chat, we have a question on the serve position.
I actually got out of the serve position earlier today. The reason why was I was actually going to show you it, but what I wanted to show you today, and maybe I should have left it just for this point, is it had on my delta, when I was beta weighting that delta, it was showing an NA on it. You may see this occasionally in your portfolio. One of these, instead of showing zero, it shows NA, and when it shows an NA, it won't give you the column, the bottom total there. I wanted to display the bottom total, so I just got out of that serve position earlier for that reason, but if you ever see the NA here at the bottom, usually what the case is is one of those positions, in your whole list of positions, one of those positions is an NA, and that's what's causing you trouble on that, and so that's why I got out of that, but let's take a look at the serve position.
Let me go and just look at and just remind myself on serve. We had a 18-19 call spread. It was a long call vertical, 18-19. So let's look at SERV. All right, and this was a long call vertical. I'm just going to draw this here. This is one. So this was my short call right here on this, short call right there, and we have a long call right here. What's our goal on this trade? Long call is there. Our goal is the stock to go up above here. So you have to decide when or, in general, the trend was pretty bullish, but it kind of has petered out on us, and so you have to decide when you're going to get out if it's not looking bullish anymore.
You can just get out when it starts to go south on you and get out, or you can say, look, I think we've hit a low the last three days. Let me just zoom in here a little bit. And this is just pure technical analysis. Two days ago, we hit a low right here and bounced up. Yesterday, we hit a low basically at the same price and bounced up. Today, I hit a low basically about the same price, and we're near it, but we haven't broken it. So you can kind of draw a line in the sand if you want on that position. Now, I'm out of this position right now, but you can draw a line in that position right now and say, if we break below that, and you can just put an order to get out if the stock crosses below 16 to get out of that trade and just that, or you can just cut your losses right now.
That's a long call vertical. Okay, let's go back. Let's keep on moving forward because there's a couple trades, and I'm running out of time here that I want to look at before we get there. Question in the chat, why did it give an NA in the first place? I have no idea, harlot3000 in chat asks, why was that giving the NA, that SERV giving an NA in the first place? The answer to that, I just don't know. Sometimes it does those. Sometimes there's a clear reason I can see. I couldn't see a clear reason, although I didn't investigate it that closely as to why it was. So let's look at some other type trades here. Caterpillar we already talked about. That was that long straddle. Let's look at Intel. Here's Intel.
What do we have on Intel? We have a butterfly spread. We have a butterfly spread. We have a butterfly spread on Intel. Scott in the chat says, isn't that a short call vertical? It was actually a long call vertical. What's throwing you off, Scott, is when I looked at it, you saw credit, where were we SERV? Oh, that's working orders, field orders. You saw credit here, but that was a closing transaction. The credit transaction closed the initial debit transactions. Similarly, debit transactions, these are all closing transactions where we closed a short transaction there. So that's a good comment. Scott, I'm glad you mentioned that. We have a butterfly spread on Intel. How do we manage that? Well, one thing that's pretty much common among all these types of trades, is we're going to get out before expiration on these.
It's going to lessen our risk of early assignment, first of all. Risk of early assignment on short contracts goes up when you get closer to expiration. It also goes up the more in the money you are. But if we're less than 10 days, we're going to get out. That's not the case here. We're 51 days to expiration. If we've made pretty much all we can make, well, that's not the case. We're doing okay on this. We're making $7. 50, which again isn't much, but it's also not bad. And one of the things with butterfly spreads is they're slow-moving trades. That's true with butterflies, typically. You don't see big profits quickly. They're dependent upon time decay, typically. Same thing with calendar spreads. They're dependent on you giving the theta time to work.
So you need to be patient with them. But the question is this. On a butterfly spread, and this is true for a calendar, by the way, think of where you want the stock to go. In the case of a butterfly, where that middle strike is, the 21 strike, is where we want the stock to be. On a calendar spread, whatever strike you have on your calendar, that's where you want the stock to be. This is usually a pretty neutral trade. And therefore, if I want my stock to be around 21, what's my estimation of this? Has this turned bullish, super bullish? I wouldn't have got it in the first place if it were super bullish, but maybe it's turned super bullish since. Or same thing with bearish.
So what we're going to do is we're going to look at that stock, Intel, and I'm going to just say, look, remember, 21 is where I want this stock to be. Now we've got our earnings coming up. So that can move it quite a bit. And so if you want to avoid earnings, you can just get out of this. We've got earnings coming up. Is that tomorrow? Hold on. It's flashing on me. Come on. I don't know. It's not. Let me do this. In theory, I should be able to click on this and it should tell me. And it brought it up on another page. January 30th. January 30th, we got earnings. So if I don't want to go through the uncertainty with earnings, I can just get out of that trade.
Okay. I can get out of that trade. But it's not looking super bullish or bearish to me right now. So for that reason, I could stay in. But I'm going to avoid earnings on this. Sometimes we just do that. We just go out and we're going to say, 'I'm going to get out of, I'm not going to, I don't want to even deal with earnings on this. Mid-prices aid is probably more likely. We'll take a minimal profit here on this trade. Okay. And escape with that rather than the bigger risk of going through earnings. Okay. That's all I have time for today, everybody. Thanks for joining me. Appreciate you. This has been Managing Your Options Portfolio, Mike. Thanks for helping me on the chat. Coming up next, we've got trading price patterns. So I think, yeah, trading price patterns we got coming up next. So make sure you check that out.' And appreciate you all joining me. Appreciate your questions, participation. And make sure you subscribe to the Trader Talks channel. Please like and fill out that survey link. Otherwise, we'll see you all at the same time next week. Bye-bye, everybody.
