TL;DR - August puts expire in the money so I have to buy. But I will get a dividend. I now start writing calls on my newly acquired BHP stock.
Full story below.
You know how I'm always selling premiums..... sometimes that means I have to buy the underlying. Today is one of those days. Here's how it looked today:
Let's look at what happened... On the 7th July, I agreed to buy BHP on 17th August for $43.50. The price at the time was $43.10, so I was essentially agreeing to pay more than what it was worth. But I did so because I was given $1.43 to make that promise.
Fast forward to today, and as luck would have it, the price is essentially the same as it was back on the 7th August, so it looks like I'm going to be automatically assigned 1500 BHP shares into my account... Don't worry, the broker will make sure I pay for them, so my cash balance will drop by the value of the shares. I could have just bought them originally for $43.10, but this way I keep an extra $1. (I made $1.43, by agreeing to overpay by $0.40). Once the trade settles which typically takes a day, I'll be able to start writing calls against the newly acquired shares.
By the way.... If you remember my post from back in July - I wrote these a little in the money, because I was happy to purchase them as they have a dividend coming up.
Essentially over the past few months, I've received several sweet premiums ($4.43) from attempting to buy at a good price. Today I purchase for $43.50, but I've already received $4.43 so my break even is actually $39.07, and the shares are going ex-dividend at the end of the month, so I'll get a few extra dollars there too, even if I start writing calls to sell the shares right away (so long as I'm holding them just before they go ex-div).
*** UPDATE *** So ....... It turns out that even though my option expired ITM, it wasn't exercised! This is not what normally happens, but can do from time to time. End result is that I didn't have to buy the underlying shares! The $2145 could have become a $65k purchase, but in this case didn't! I guess I go back to writing some more puts! Stay tuned.
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