First the good news. I retired today after a consulting engineering career of 30 years and 18 years with my current company, most of it as a Director and owner. Retiring was only made possible thanks to investing in TSLA and particularly the knowledge gained in this thread giving me the confidence that I could continue to earn in retirement.
Now the bad news. I was greedy and not thinking rationally in the second week after Elon started selling. I sold way too many BPS, too close with the strikes and they went deeply ITM at the end of that week when everything went South. I've spent the intervening weeks rolling (largest positions at 1000/1060) trying to buy time for a sustained recovery but the rolling is eating into my cash balances and net liquidity. My main problem is that the portfolio margin IB uses (the only margin they have here) is effectively locking down my accounts, preventing me from earning extra premium. BPS, BCS and even CC's now require a large amount of maintenance margin (BCS/CC are normally negative margin) and I'm already tight. So the rolling eats into cash and I realise if this keeps up for several weeks, my account could effectively bleed out.
I'm mostly rolled out to next week so have some time to wait for a slight recovery. However I'm coming to the realisation I will need to trim back my positions, at least until the margin lets me trade my way forward. This is likely to be expensive and cut very deeply into my overall portfolio. At this stage I will still have enough to work with even at a max loss as long as I can act and soon, hopefully on a partial recovery. I fully expect the stock will rebound sharply in coming weeks but I just can't risk everything waiting on that. I'll be trying everything I know to get the best out of this current position (split rolls, roll down to expire, protective puts etc) and am trying to maintain a positive attitude. I know I can rebuild, but it will take time as it will be done much more conservatively. So be safe everyone, we'll get through this and don't get greedy.
Now the bad news. I was greedy and not thinking rationally in the second week after Elon started selling. I sold way too many BPS, too close with the strikes and they went deeply ITM at the end of that week when everything went South. I've spent the intervening weeks rolling (largest positions at 1000/1060) trying to buy time for a sustained recovery but the rolling is eating into my cash balances and net liquidity. My main problem is that the portfolio margin IB uses (the only margin they have here) is effectively locking down my accounts, preventing me from earning extra premium. BPS, BCS and even CC's now require a large amount of maintenance margin (BCS/CC are normally negative margin) and I'm already tight. So the rolling eats into cash and I realise if this keeps up for several weeks, my account could effectively bleed out.
I'm mostly rolled out to next week so have some time to wait for a slight recovery. However I'm coming to the realisation I will need to trim back my positions, at least until the margin lets me trade my way forward. This is likely to be expensive and cut very deeply into my overall portfolio. At this stage I will still have enough to work with even at a max loss as long as I can act and soon, hopefully on a partial recovery. I fully expect the stock will rebound sharply in coming weeks but I just can't risk everything waiting on that. I'll be trying everything I know to get the best out of this current position (split rolls, roll down to expire, protective puts etc) and am trying to maintain a positive attitude. I know I can rebuild, but it will take time as it will be done much more conservatively. So be safe everyone, we'll get through this and don't get greedy.
