The Nineteenth Day by Chestnut + Hazel # 3

I'm still so irritated about everything. I don't ever want to take another class again. I never seem to be able to fall asleep. I'm really. Kind of. Irritated. A level of irritation that I can't even explain.

Today is Monday the 25th. Memorial day. So this 19 day project is almost over. So annoying. Life is a nightmare. Even with. even when this is resolved. it isn't like that's the end of whatever problems i have to deal with; it is kind of just the start of dealing with some other problem.

Looking through old posts, mostly stuff that seems to have reader hits, and I come across a post about writing covered calls. it is a post titled: Letters from Sanford Street # 185. I think that this was one of my first attempt at a covered call strategy. in this post i use the phrase issuing covered calls. it . this post was dated or is dated october tenth twenty-twenty [10/28/2020] . six years ago already. it was dealing with PEY etf shares. I remember those getting called away a few days before the dividend was issued. that was annoying.

covered calls. I still do them, but. I really only do them once a month. it isn't really daily stock trading like what i was doing at the beginning of last year. i really dislike day trading stocks. it is like my least favorite thing to do ever. covered calls are. sometimes. a [headache] and well. if they are a headache they are a headache once a month.

Sometimes covered calls can be a prolonged headache. I think. sometimes they get assigned. the covered calls. and then. i have all this cash i wasn't planning on having, and . i [basically have to] buy in all over again at a higher price. I think that I had a huge assignment a while ago. probably 10 months ago or so, and I remember the kind of headache of buying back in.

i really don't like writing because, you know, it clearly means I have nothing better to do. right now it is almost 1:00 AM on 5/26/2026 and I haven't fallen asleep. it's so hot and I'm probably going to wake up late tomorrow.

covered calls. so it's possible to get s&p 500 mutual funds at a lower expense ratio than s&p 500 etf shares, but you can't write covered calls on a mutual fund position, at least I don't think so. I just don't see how that is possible. and. you can write covered calls on etf shares. it just tends to be more advantageous to take the position in etf shares rather than in mutual fund shares or units of a mutual fund or whatever.

last month. April. i wrote some covered call contracts. they were filled at between 5 and 25 dollars per contract, and I think they hit as high as 90 dollars per contract before expiration [they may have gone higher but 90 per contract was the highest i remember seeing] . whoever bought those made a killing, or could have made a killing if they [closed out their positions] before expiration. [because] well, they expired worthless. but that's the whole idea of American style options, being able to close out the position before expiration. if a person buys at 5 and closes out at 90, that person made 1800 percent on that trade. i would be surprised if the person kept holding until expiration, or kept holding to squeeze out another 200 percent or whatever, or tried to squeeze an even 2000 percent on that trade.

there was something with stock trading that I had been working on for a while, but i don't know if i'll ever work on it again. there were a few changes in 2025 that kind of make this thing a headache. at some point in September of 2025 fidelity started requiring that all etf shares must be purchased with cash, and are not marginable for 30 days. of the s&p 500 etfs, i remember that IVV was already sort of like this, and i remember some Franklin Templeton large cap ETF also worked like this. i

guess it really doesn't matter because i don't really like day trading stocks and. i guess i just don't really want to so it really doesn't matter. i don't really buy into the reasoning given. the reason that fidelity gave for making this change. the other change that i remember happening in 2025 was that SPLG became SPYM, or you know, SPLG changed its ticker symbol to SPYM. this is kind of annoying. i remember being invested in mostly large cap ETFs for a very long time, and it took a while to come across SPLG. The reasoning given behind the change was that SPYM is basically related to SPY as a smaller type of ETF or whatever, but there was a different kind of logic to SPLG, and it was basically that SPLG is the Large Cap fund, SPMD is the Mid Cap fund, and SPSM is the small cap fund.

I'm going to rewrite this one:

[original]

Whenever you send a letter
the letter become the property
of the recipient.
You know that for ten-thousand
years the pony express sold dimes
for the ten cents on the dollar, and then
I became rich.

[rewrite]

Whenever you send a letter
the letter becomes the property
of the recipient.
You know that for ten-thousand
years the pony express sold dimes
for basically ten cents on the dollar, and then
I became rich.

[thoughts]

I don't know what I was getting at in this poem. some of the things I write are: Whatever.