Work Squared
This concept is something I thought about going back to 2020 when we were all sitting at home wondering how the world was going to end. Big surprise, it didn’t.
I felt like just investing and buying something, then hoping it goes up is not the way. So I looked into ways to make the money you work so hard to earn, then you invest it supposedly putting it to work. I wanted to make that money also be put to work, so I decided to find ways to push that which I invest to make more than what it would just sitting there waiting.
On May 9th 2025 the GOOG position transitioned from a “trying to buy the stock” to “owning the stock and grinding out gains”.
The opening buy was at $154, but it doesn’t just end there. We don’t just sit on our hands, and wait for it to go up. This is known as the “buy and hold” strategy, but I refer to that as the “buy and hope” method. I prefer to take that money that I put to work, and now, put it to work on another level. I think of this as Work Squared, or “work to the power of…”
Now that there is an owned position, I can work with options to enhance this position. What I am going to do at the onset right now is keep it simple, and sell some covered calls just above the purchase price, and also some more short puts right at the current price along with a couple of short puts slightly below. Here’s how that looks, with some breakdown on that below the image.
This image comes from some custom programming I made, hosted here on xisrc.com where I manage all my thoughts and plans. It helps me to visualize where I am looking, and how to balance my strategies.
Short calls are shown in Cyan, and the number of dots represents the number of contracts that are being sold short. Short Puts are shown in Purple. The tiny triangle is the options “delta”. In options trading, delta or ▲ indicates the theoretical rate of change in an option’s price for every $1 move in the underlying asset’s price. It’s a measure of how sensitive an option is to price changes in the underlying stock
Going forward now, for the week of May 12 to 16th I will be watching to see how I need to modify these positions to continually create cash flow.
Back – Introduction to trading GOOG