Understanding and Managing Leverage    • 183
I’ve used for calculation. All OTM options will be marked with an IRL fol-
lowed by the percentage of the total portfolio used in the option purchase 
(not the percentage of the individual allocation but the total percentage 
amount of your investment capital). On my website, you’ll find an online 
leverage tool that allows you to calculate these numbers yourself.
Managing Leverage
A realized loss is, to me, serious business. There are times when an inves-
tor must take a realized loss—specifically when his or her view of the fair 
value or fair value range of a company changes materially enough that an 
investment position becomes unattractive. However, if you find yourself 
taking realized losses because of material changes in valuation too often, 
you should either figure out where you are going wrong in the valuation 
process or just put your money into a low-load mutual fund and spend 
your time doing something more productive.
The point is that taking a realized loss is not something you have to do 
too often if you are a good investor, and hopefully, when those losses are taken, 
they are small. As such, I believe that there are two ways to successfully manage 
leverage. First is to use leverage sparingly by investing in combinations of ITM 
options and stocks. ITM option prices mainly represent intrinsic value, and be-
cause the time-value component is that which represents a realized loss right out 
of the gate, buying ITM options means that you are minimizing realized losses.
The second method for managing leverage when you cannot resist 
taking a higher leverage position is spending as little as possible of your 
investment capital on it. This means that when you see that there is a com-
pany that has a material chance of being worth a lot more or a lot less than 
it is traded for at present but that material chance is still much less likely 
than other valuation scenarios, you should invest your capital in the idea 
sparingly. By making smaller investments with higher leverage, you will 
not realize a loss on too much of your capital at one time, and if you are 
right at least some of the time on these low-probability, high-potential-
reward bets, you will come out ahead in the end.
Of course, you also can use a combination of these two methods. For 
example, I have found it helpful to take the main part of a position using a