To The Moon

Mathematical Money | August 30, 2026

Bitcoin had a good week. It pushed above $81,000 before easing back, closed Friday around $80,000, and spot ETFs have now taken inflows for nine sessions straight — roughly $3 billion over the streak. The whole crypto market is sitting near its weekly highs.

MARA did not have a good week.

It was $11.34 last Friday. It closed this Friday at $10.67. So the coin is up and the miner is down, which is not how the marketing brochure says this is supposed to work.

If you hold miners you've felt this before. The leverage everyone talks about cuts both ways, and lately it's been cutting the wrong way more often than the right one.

Anyway. On Friday I bought 7,000 more shares.

Not by choice, exactly

I'd sold 70 put contracts at the $11 strike expiring August 28. Thirty on the Monday, thirty on the Wednesday, ten more on the Friday itself. Collected $1,460 in premium across the lot.

MARA closed below $11. So they were assigned, and I bought 7,000 shares at $11 whether I felt like it on the day or not.

Where that leaves me:

Before: 33,546 shares at an average of $11.43

After: 40,546 shares at an average of $11.35

MARA on Friday: $10.67

Counting the premium I collected, my effective purchase price on those 7,000 was about $10.79. The stock is at $10.67. So I'm twelve cents underwater on the new shares, and the whole MARA line is about $27,600 in the red.

This is the actual deal

I want to be clear about this because it's the part that gets glossed over in every "sell puts for income" post you'll ever read.

When you sell a put, you are not collecting free money. You are being paid to make a promise. The promise is that you will buy this stock, at this price, on this date, and your opinion on the day is not part of the arrangement.

Most of the time the stock stays above the strike, the promise expires, and you keep the premium. That's the boring outcome and it's most of them.

Then sometimes the stock closes eleven cents under your strike on a Friday afternoon and you own 7,000 shares on Monday morning.

That's not the strategy going wrong. That's the strategy working exactly as written. If you're not genuinely happy to own the thing at that price, you shouldn't have sold the put — and plenty of people selling puts right now have never thought about which side of that line they're on.

Where I stand on it

I'm fine with it, with one honest caveat.

I'm fine with it because I want MARA exposure and $10.79 is a better entry than most of my existing basis. That's the whole point of the wheel — you either keep the premium or you buy the thing cheaper than you would have.

The caveat is that MARA is already well over half my book, and Friday made that worse rather than better. I've been writing about that concentration for weeks and then increased it by 7,000 shares. Both things are true and I'm not going to pretend the second one was clever.

From here it's the same loop. I'll write calls against the new shares, collect premium on them, and if MARA recovers through those strikes I get called away and the position shrinks. That's the slow way out of a position that's too big — not dumping shares, just letting the wheel grind it down.

If BTC keeps climbing and the miners eventually follow, this looks like a good week's work. If the miners keep lagging the coin the way they have been, it's 7,000 more shares of a problem I already had.

I don't know which. I've just made sure I get paid either way.

The rest of it

I've published the full August scorecard on my newsletter — every trade of the month, what the whole book made, and the two rules I broke doing it. Including the roughly $28,000 I overspent on long-dated calls against my own funding rule, which was uncomfortable to add up.

Free and weekly, at mathematicalmoney.substack.com.

Back here as usual. Anyone else getting assigned into miners at these levels, or are you staying in the coin and skipping the equities? Curious which way people are leaning. Drop it in the comments.

Stop guessing. Start calculating.

Live to fight another day. 🤙