To The Moon

$MARA Holdings(MARA)$  

Mathematical Money | October 11, 2026

$MARA$ closed Friday at $9.65, down 14.1% on the week from $11.23 and through $10 for the first time this cycle. It was an ugly five sessions for a stock that had already had a few of those. I'd been short puts into that expiry at the $12 and $11.50 strikes, sold on 18 September for 49 cents and 53 cents a contract. Both finished in the money on Friday, so the shares were assigned to me. I said in advance that I'd report which way it went, so here it is, with the arithmetic done per share because that's the only way to see it clearly.

What it actually cost

The premium reduces what I paid. On the $12 strike my effective purchase price is $11.51, and on the $11.50 strike it's $10.97.

Against Friday's close of $9.65, that puts me 19% above the market on the first strike and 14% above it on the second, on day one, before I have done anything with the stock at all. There's no version of that I can present as clever.

What I'd push back on is the idea that something went wrong with the mechanism. It worked precisely as designed. I agreed to buy a stock at a price I picked, I was paid to wait, and the stock reached that price so I bought it. The unwelcome part isn't the assignment. It's that the market kept going after it got there.

The risk people warn you about is the wrong one

Almost every warning you'll read about selling puts is some version of "you could be forced to buy shares you can't afford." That's a real danger and it deserves the attention it gets, but only if you're selling puts against money you don't actually have. That wasn't the problem here. The cash was sitting there the whole time, which is the entire point of calling them cash-secured. Nothing was borrowed and nothing was forced.

The cost came from somewhere else entirely, and it's worth separating the two. Assignment risk is a price risk, not a financing risk. You are making a promise to buy at a number you choose, weeks before the date you choose, and the bill arrives when the market walks past your number before that date.

Those two risks have different defences, which is why confusing them is expensive. Against the financing risk you hold the cash, and that's a solved problem the day you decide to sell puts properly. Against the price risk the only real defences are where you set the strike, how big you go, and whether you've been honest with yourself about how far the stock can travel in the time you've given it.

I was fine on the first. I was wrong on the third. When I sold the $12s on 18 September the stock had just closed at $13.24 after jumping 14% in a session, and a strike 9% below that felt like a comfortable cushion. It took three weeks to go through it.

What happens now

The shares went to work immediately. Across Thursday and Friday I wrote fresh calls against them at the $11 and $11.50 strikes for 30 October, and $11.50 for 6 November, taking in between 14 and 30 cents a contract depending on the strike and the date.

That's the part people miss about getting assigned. The stock arriving isn't the end of a trade that failed, it's the opening of the next one. More shares means more contracts I can write against them, and the premium I collect doesn't know or care what I paid for the stock underneath it.

It does mean I'm writing calls at strikes below where I bought this week's block, which caps those particular shares below my cost if the stock rallies hard. I've decided that's an acceptable trade for the income while the price is here, but I'd rather state it plainly than pretend the decision is free.

What would change my mind

Not the price on its own, and not another red week. It would be the premium drying up. The reason I'm comfortable owning a stock that just fell 14% is that the options on it still pay me properly to wait, and that's a function of volatility rather than direction. If implied volatility on MARA collapsed while the stock stayed down here, the whole proposition would change, because then I'd simply be holding a falling stock with no income to show for the patience. That's a different position entirely and I wouldn't want it.

So far the opposite is true. The volatility that makes this uncomfortable is the same volatility that pays for it.

Two things I'd like other views on.

When you sell a cash-secured put, do you pick the strike from the delta, from the chart, or from the price you'd genuinely be happy to own it at? I've used all three and they give you different answers more often than you'd expect, and this week the delta and the chart disagreed with each other well before the stock did.

And the harder one. After an assignment leaves you under water, do you write calls above your cost and collect almost nothing, or below your cost and risk capping the recovery? I've gone below this week and I'm not fully settled on it.

#MARA #wheelstrategy #cashsecuredputs #assignment #options

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