Wrap-up of an unprofitable month

August, in my estimation, could have been worse for my account. I say that because, although the total was negative in terms of actual account performance (which is calculated by taking the value of stock holdings on a given day, like the last day of the month, and accounting for booked gains and losses), I am more concerned with booked gains and losses than I am in value of holdings. Why? Because I wouldn't be holding my holdings if I didn't expect them to bring my account value up eventually, for one thing. For another thing, the purpose of my account is to be able to withdraw cash from it on a regular basis, that cash being generated from my booked gains (more so than by booked losses - those aren't great for building up cash.  And my "account value" is not important to me, as long as I have something with which to make something, and keep my ATM running smoothly.)

While I did book more losses than gains during August, due only to ONE unfortunately run-over position (I take the blame, just like I take the credit when things go right - it cuts both ways - it's never "The Market" helping nor hurting me, although to be fair, it really is, in both cases), things could have been a lot worse. The horror story was detailed two posts back, so let's not go over it again. It's healthy to move on and live in the present.

I do want to add something to my record of booked gains and losses for the month of August, and that is the cash generated by the sold puts that resulted in shares being assigned to me. If the shares are going to be part of my family, you can bet that I'm not going to just throw away the money that came in as a stipend toward the care and maintenance of those new cars in the driveway. The brokerage seems to like to calculate cost basis by taking the premium received and setting it against the cost to purchase the put-to shares, but I like to keep things more honest: The stock cost a certain amount - let's just call the purchase price what it is - and I got a certain amount of cash in the account as compensation for my time and trouble; they are two different types of currency, in my mind.

Let's append with the following:

So, officially, my booked gains/losses for August were -$3,060 , but since I like to take the cash received into account, I consider the booked gains/losses more realistically to be -$1,156.11 . Either way, I am sitting on stock that cost way more than the current market value, putting my "account value" and "account performance" down in the dumps month-over-month. Even taking the current value of my put-upon stocks into the big picture and calculating YTD gain/loss as I do every month, I am up well over 50% YTD (fluctuating a few points day by day); how is "the market" doing YTD?