To The Moon

Mathematical Money | October 4, 2026

$MARA$ closed Friday at $11.24. A week earlier it was $12.53, so that's down 10.3% in five sessions and roughly 15% below where it traded in mid-September.

I run both sides of a wheel on this name — calls above the position, puts below it. This week the two sides did completely opposite things, which is a useful illustration of what you're actually signing up for when you sell premium in both directions.

The calls paid, because the stock fell

On 18 September I sold calls at the $14 strike expiring 9 October, taking $0.73 each. By Thursday the stock had dropped far enough that those contracts were worth $0.0565 — effectively nothing. I closed them for a realised gain of $2,633 and immediately wrote new ones at the $13 strike, two weeks further out, for $0.3182.

Same story with a second batch. Calls at $14 expiring 16 October, bought back at $0.11 for a gain of $1,104, rewritten at $13 for 30 October at $0.44.

That's the mechanic working exactly as designed. When you've sold calls above a position you own, a falling stock makes those contracts cheaper to close, and the money collected up front stays yours regardless. Across MARA alone the week produced about $4,248 of realised gains, essentially all of it from calls decaying as the share price dropped.

Rolling down from $14 to $13 is the other half of it. Once a stock has fallen, the old strike barely pays anything, so I move closer to the money to keep collecting something meaningful. The cost is giving up the upside between $13 and $14 if the stock snaps back — a real cost, accepted deliberately rather than by accident.

The puts went the other way

Here's the same week from the other side.

I'm short MARA puts expiring this Friday, 9 October, at the $12 and $11.50 strikes. With the stock at $11.24 both sit in the money, which means that unless the price recovers this week, I'll be buying shares at those levels.

Worth noting when I sold the $12s. That was 18 September, the day MARA closed at $13.24 after jumping 14% in a single session. The strike sat 9% below the price and looked like a comfortable margin at the time. Three weeks later the stock is 15% lower and that margin has gone.

The lesson there isn't about this stock. It's that a buffer has to be measured against how much the underlying actually moves. Nine percent sounds generous right up until you check what the thing does in an average month.

How I'm thinking about Friday

Assignment is not the thing to be avoided here, and I'd rather say that plainly because a put going in the money tends to get described as something going wrong.

The premium changes the arithmetic. I collected $0.49 on the $12 strike and $0.53 on the $11.50, so the effective purchase price on assignment is $11.51 and $10.97. Against a market price of $11.24, one leg would have me buying about 2.4% above the going rate and the other about 2.4% below it. On balance that's buying roughly where the stock already trades, having been paid to wait for it.

So there are two sensible paths and neither involves taking a loss to make the position disappear.

I can take the shares and start writing calls against them straight away, which converts the assignment into an income position immediately. That's the core of how this strategy earns, and more shares simply means more contracts to write against.

Or, if the price is still sitting around this level into Friday, I can roll the puts out to a later expiry, collect premium again, and come back to the same decision with more information.

What decides it is unglamorous — whether the roll pays enough to be worth deferring, against the appeal of owning the shares now and starting to write calls on them.

Where I stand on the underlying

My view on the company hasn't changed this week. I've been content to own this stock at these prices for a long time, almost all of my shares arrived through assignment at strikes I picked in advance, and nothing about the business is different today than it was a fortnight ago.

What has changed is the shape of the position rather than the thesis. "Would I be happy to own it here?" stops being the only relevant question once a holding is already the dominant one in a book — and that's a genuinely different problem from deciding whether a stock is cheap.

Two things I'd like other views on.

If you were short these puts, would you take the shares and start writing calls, or roll out and collect again? I can argue both, and I'm curious which way people lean when the position is already a large one.

And more broadly — do you treat assignment as a failure or as the strategy working? I've come round to the second view, but I know plenty of people who sell puts with no intention of ever owning the shares, and I'm not sure they're wrong so much as playing a different game.

#options #wheelstrategy #cashsecuredputs #coveredcalls

Stop guessing. Start calculating.

Live to fight another day. 🤙