#116 - Can I Still Be Assigned Stock After I Close My Option Trade?
Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and on today’s daily call, I want to answer the question, “Can I still be assigned stock even after I close my option trade?” Look. This is going to be a quick one today because the short answer to this is no. Once you close your option position, there is no risk of assignment in that contract because frankly, you don't have the contract. I wanted to answer this question because it came in and it made me realize there’s still some nuances out there that I think people aren’t clear on and I think it comes down to honestly just over-thinking things, so just not thinking through the process, assuming that there's always still this lingering risk. But again, everything is actually pretty black and white when it comes to options trading in the sense of contracts, expiration, closings, etcetera. In today’s example, obviously, if you let’s say sold an option contract and you collected a premium which is what we typically do as option sellers at Option Alpha, we sold a contract, collected a premium, then we are at risk of assignment because we basically are short an option contract. Now of course, we’ve done podcast before and many, many case studies that show that the risk of assignment is not as great as you think and that risk of assignment actually increases as you get closer to expiration and obviously, only if your contract is in the money. Typically, out of the money contracts do not get assigned and if they do, it’s probably just somebody being frankly, not thinking through the process maybe and being a little bit dumb about it and just clicking a button they shouldn’t have clicked. But in either case, the risk of assignment is not that great for selling options out of the money and only would be great as you get towards expiration and if your contract is in the money. But as soon as you buy back that contract and close the loop if you will, this loop that we always have to close in trading which is we either have to buy first and then sell or sell first and then buy. Once you close that loop, there’s no risk of being assigned stock. That's really the simple answer to this. And so, if you want to remove that risk of assignment, you close the option position. Where we see this happen where we would want to deliberately close a position, knowing that assignment is coming up is probably when it comes to dividend assignment for short in the money calls. If we ever have a short call option that’s in the money and the stock or ETF has a dividend payment coming up, our contracts may be at risk of assignment. Not all the time. Maybe at risk of assignment. And so, that’s where we would close the option position to remove that risk. If we close the position, then we’re not at risk of being assigned the stock and that’s really what it comes down to. Again, a very short one today, but hopefully this answers the question. As always, if you guys have questions along these lines… Again, there’s no question obviously I won’t answer. I’m trying to answer as many questions as possible here on the daily call, on Facebook Live, on Periscope Live, etcetera, so please get your questions in (it is always first come, first serve) to optionalpha.com/ask. That’s where you can submit a question to me. You can send us a message, leave us a voicemail, shoot me an email, tweet, Facebook, whatever you want to do. Get your questions in because that helps us make sure that we get the right answers to you guys moving forward. As always, hopefully you enjoyed today’s show. Until next time, happy trading!