Day 96
Welcome to Year 2 on my journey! Happy New Year 2026!
I am excited to go into the second year of this journey. I am starting the year with more knowledge and more capital than I started my first year. If you missed it, here is a recap of 2025: https://www.foolishtrader.com/2025-a-year-in-the-trenches/.
Last year, I had too many trades to manually track each strategy, and that is likely to grow even more this year, so I am primarily going to share trades here that are either something novel for me, or have moved my account positively or negatively. I still want to track the overall account growth, so I will be sharing those numbers.
Market Recap
SPY was up 1.66% (~$11) last week, ending the week on ~$694.
QQQ was up as well, growing by 1% (~$6), ending the week on ~$627.
There is some uncertainty but not enough to cause a decent volatility spike. VIX is still below 15.
Trading Update
I have several open positions right now, most of them in tech stocks. My open positions are in AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, PLTR, and SOFI.
Some Trade Ideas I am Thinking of For Next Week
AAPL and NFLX have come down a lot. AAPL has fallen from $280 to $250s, erasing a few months of growth. NFLX is down nearly 30% in the last few months. These are both highly profitable companies. And they have both been growing generally in the last 1, 3, and 5 year terms. They both seem ripe to me for Selling Puts.
I have been backtesting some random ideas that would suit my regular work/office life, and I seem to have found a very simple strategy that if executed over either the last 1 year, or 2 years, or 3 years shows to have returned over 200%! That is mind boggling. Now I don't know if real-life trades would get a similar fill rate or value, but I am really excited to try that out this year. Quite clearly, I am not going to share that strategy here but you can track my account size for results. Hopefully it works. Wish me luck!
Portfolio Status
I have started the year with ~$27K across TastyTrade and Robinhood.
Here is the current status.
My aim is to make ~$6K this year. That turns out to be ~$500 per month. And it would give me a growth of over 20%. That likely would also beat SPY and QQQ. Fingers crossed.
I am leaning in to trade small and trade often this year. What have you planned on your trading journey?
Thanks for following along. See you next week!
📌 Disclaimer: Nothing on this site is financial advice - I’m just here to entertain! Here’s my introduction, my trading philosophy, and some ground rules.
