September 3, 2026 · Portfolio 1 (Growth) · Tony Rihan
Two more closes in Portfolio 1 late this morning, three minutes apart. Gold ran, so the December zebra came off after three days. And the Smart SPY structure — the 1-1-1 — went out the same way it came in: for a credit.
The Trades
Paid subscribers — both trades below
Tony Rihan Commentary
On gold: “Closing a GLD Zebra after a large GLD run over the last few days.”
On the other one: “this 1-1-1 trade was put on for a credit and taken off for a credit this is a good teaching experience.”
The 1-1-1, and why it’s the better lesson of the two
He’s right that this is the teaching trade, so let’s take it apart properly.
We opened it on August 18 and were paid $257 to do it. We closed it today and were paid another $185. Total: +$442 on a position where we never once wrote a check for premium. Leg by leg, from the fills:
The short put did most of the work, and it’s worth being exact about why, because the obvious explanation is the wrong one. That put was sold with SPY at 767.89. The exit implies SPY around 768.20. That’s thirty-one cents, four hundredths of one percent, over sixteen days — the market went nowhere. The $419 on that leg was time decay and a softer volatility bid. Almost none of it was direction. We were long SPY twice over and SPY didn’t move; we got paid anyway, and that’s a fact about the structure rather than a good call on the market.
Now the part worth slowing down for.
Money coming in both times does not mean the trade was free. It means no premium was paid. Capital was committed the whole time, because a short 750 put is a short 750 put whether or not the package around it produced a credit.
So the honest headline is not “we got paid twice.” It’s $442 on roughly $11,000 of committed margin over sixteen days, about 4%. On the cash-account figure it’s 0.59%. Neither of those is an infinite return, and there’s no version of this trade where the return is infinite, because the denominator was never zero.
One-lots on a million-dollar model book are the sizing here, and that’s the part to copy. If $75,000 on a cash account is more than you want tied up in one name, the adjustment is a lower strike, not a smaller contract count — you can’t sell half a put.
Annualize the 4% if you want to. We’d rather you didn’t. One sixteen-day trade doesn’t repeat twenty-three times a year on a schedule.
Gold: three days, $590
The zebra reconciles two ways and both give the same answer. Net to net: paid $62.70 ($6,270) on August 31, sold at $68.60 ($6,860) today, so +$590.00. Leg by leg: the two long 375 calls went 43.67 to 48.57 for (48.57 − 43.67) × 2 × 100 = +$980, and the short 405 call went 24.64 to 28.54 for (24.64 − 28.54) × 1 × 100 = −$390. Same $590.
That’s 9.4% on the $6,270 debit in three days, and the debit was also the maximum loss. There’s no margin-versus-cash-account split to show you on this one — a zebra is a long debit structure with no naked short leg, so the capital committed was the $6,270 we paid, full stop. The two-column margin picture we publish on short puts simply doesn’t apply here, and pretending otherwise would be dressing it up.
Where the money came from is worth understanding. We paid $1.87 of time value on this package at entry — $62.70 against $60.83 of intrinsic value with GLD at 405.83. Above 405 the structure carries about 100 deltas, so gold’s move had to cover that $1.87 first and everything after it was ours. Three days later it had, comfortably.
Tony’s reason for taking it off is one line and it’s the right one: gold ran hard, fast. This was a December position sized to be patient. It didn’t need to be.
Two zebras, same structure, opposite outcomes
We closed a second zebra this morning, the SPY Sep 4 762/767, and Tony sent that one out in a separate alert earlier today under the heading “P1: Taking the Zebra off that was not working Before the Jobs Number.” We’re not going to re-run it here. But put the two side by side, because the contrast is the most useful thing on this page:
Identical structure, identical holding period. One scratched: it cleared its 768.16 breakeven by four cents and paid us four dollars for the trouble. The other made 9.4% on its debit.
The difference wasn’t the structure. It was that one of them was given four days to be right and the other was given a hundred and nine. Both cost real money to own; only one had room to work. A zebra doesn’t have an edge. It has a cheap way to express a view, and the view still has to be right inside the time you bought.
Portfolio 1’s three closes today came to +$1,036 in total, which is about a tenth of one percent of the book. The SPY zebra’s +$4.00 is from this morning’s separate alert and its record on the dashboard; the other $1,032 is the two trades above.
Portfolio 1 Greeks
One caveat, and we’d rather flag it than paper over it. The right-hand column is a single portfolio header read at about 11:36 this morning — the same minute the gold ticket filled, and three minutes before the SPY ticket did. We cannot confirm whether it already includes the 1-1-1 close, so treat it as a reading taken during the closes rather than a clean post-trade snapshot. We’re not going to publish a confirmed “after” we haven’t verified. The clean post-trade Greeks will be in the next Portfolio 1 letter.
What the direction tells you is safe enough. Delta down about 122 — we sold two long structures and gave back the long exposure. Theta up about 72 — the zebras were paying time value every day and they’re gone, so the book earns roughly seventy dollars a day more than it did on Friday. Buying power down 1.10 points, a little over eleven thousand dollars on this account, most of it the short 750 put’s margin coming back.
The Decision Framework
Why close gold three days in. The position was built for December. Gold delivered a large chunk of the move it was bought for in three sessions, and the structure’s job — 100 deltas above 405 for $1.87 of time value — had been done. When a long-dated position pays you most of what you asked for in the first week, holding for the rest is a new decision, not a continuation of the old one. We’d rather make that decision with cash in hand. The Aug 26 short 395 put is still on, so we’re not out of gold, we’re out of leveraged long gold.
Why close the 1-1-1 with 106 days left. Because the reason for the trade got weaker while the price got better. It was a directional bullish position with a breakeven 2.66% below spot, sitting on the same December expiration as another short SPY put. Two short puts in one expiration is a stack, we said so on August 18, and taking one off ahead of a jobs number is how you unstack cheaply.
What would have stopped us. On gold: if the run had been our own thesis playing out on schedule rather than faster than expected, we’d have let it run. On SPY: if the 750 put had been the only short put in December we might have carried it — the structure was working.
The sanity check we ran on the margin figure. Our SPY naked-put estimate is $11,000 against $75,000 on a cash account, which is 14.7%. We expect an equity-ETF naked put to land between roughly 14% and 20% of that cash-account figure. It does, so the $11,000 is a reasonable number to divide by. If an estimate falls outside that band, it’s usually the estimate that’s wrong, not the market.
How to adapt this. The transferable idea from the 1-1-1 has nothing to do with SPY. It’s this: when a structure is opened for a credit, work out what capital it ties up before you decide what the return was. A credit-in, credit-out trade with a short put underneath it is a very good trade. It is not free money, and anyone who describes it that way has skipped the only step that tells you whether it was worth doing.
Disclaimer
This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.
A zebra, or back ratio, is a long debit position: the entire amount paid can be lost, and it will be lost in full if the underlying finishes at or below the lower strike at expiration. The structure closed above contained an uncovered short put; receiving a net credit to open a position does not make it low-risk and does not reduce the downside. Assignment can occur at any time before expiration, not only at expiration. Margin figures shown are estimates that vary by strike, expiry, volatility, broker and margin regime — our accounts run portfolio margin, and your own broker’s number is the one that matters. Realized figures are calculated on the entry prices carried in our book for the legs that were closed.
Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.
Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile · Squared T Capital
Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.