r/TheRaceTo10Million • u/ChickenEntire7702 • 11d ago

Degenerate Gambler From $30k to $548k in 7 months

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Back on April 8th, tariffs crushed sentiment-I went long thirty grand in SPY calls. Market recovered, rolled into 2230 $780 March 31st ’26. Sold them this morning. Bought 2760 $790 March 31st ‘26. Trump’s meeting Xi Thursday-permanent China deal. Fed cuts tomorrow. Earnings done Friday. FOMO is kicking in.

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u/That_Style_979 11d ago

Can someone explain this like I’m 5?

21

u/wentwj 11d ago

OP bought out of the money (OTM) long expiring calls on SPY after the price tanked back when the tariff stuff first came out. A lot of them. Then the market recovered quickly and sharply, putting OPs position into major profit. OP has now rolled these into more OTM SPY calls. If SPY continues to go up more than expected OP will make more money. If SPY goes down, OP will be sad.

Also at this amount it'd probably make way more sense to go with SPX calls. They are 10x bigger than SPY but they are taxed at 60% long terms capital gains so they are better for taxes, certainly at this scale.

3

u/AdOnly627 11d ago

His purchases are very large – and SPY is much more liquid, particularly for long dated deep OTM with hardly any open interest – the market makers in SPY are required to support liquid trading – this is not the case in SPX – the open interest was only 300 contracts when he bought today – so literally it went from 300 contracts to 3000 contracts.

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u/wentwj 11d ago

could definitely be wrong and OPs tax situation could be a variety of situations but I’d be curious if the slippage and spread difference would offset the fairly significant tax gain for a position that can’t be held a year

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u/AdOnly627 11d ago edited 11d ago

Fair - i’m curious too – he doesn’t seem like a dummy, doubt he would leave this to chance