225 collars, closed with real money.
Every collar opened and closed in two personal brokerage accounts traded by Stillwater co-founder Don Taylor, rebuilt from the full transaction history, Feb 2025 to Sep 2026. Winners and losers alike, after commissions and fees: together they returned 21% a year on the capital used.
Every collar, one dot each
Only 33% of collars made money, and that is the point of the structure: the put turns most bad trades into small ones, so the good trades carry the result. The put floor was used 107 times; 180 strikes were rolled along the way.
225 closed collars. Losses cluster just below zero; gains run much further.
- Average winning collar
- +13%
- Average losing collar
- −5.8%
- Typical holding period
- 20 days
Where the floor and the cap showed up
Three of the best collars, where the stock ran and the collar kept most of it, and three where the stock fell hard and the put held. The dashed bar is the stock over the same dates; the solid bar is the collar.
- Stock
- +113%
- Collar
- +72%
- Stock
- +72%
- Collar
- +71%
- Stock
- +65%
- Collar
- +41%
- Stock
- −32%
- Collar
- −1.3%
- Stock
- −31%
- Collar
- −0.6%
- Stock
- −35%
- Collar
- −7.8%
The same trader, with and without the collar
Every stock holding in the same accounts over the same period, grouped by how it was protected. The full collar is the only approach that clearly paid.
| Holding | Closed | A year, on capital |
|---|---|---|
| Collar: stock, put and call | 225 | +21% |
| Stock with a put only | 67 | +3.7% |
| Stock with a call only | 20 | −2.4% |
| Stock with no options | 225 | −12% |
How these numbers are calculated
One collar is one holding. It starts with the first share bought and ends when the last share is sold. Every put and call opened against it counts toward it, including strikes rolled along the way and options closed after the shares were sold. A holding counts as a collar when it carried both a put bought and a call sold.
Returns come from cash, not quotes. The result is every purchase, sale, option premium, dividend, commission and fee in the holding, taken from the broker’s own records. Return is that result divided by the most cash the holding ever had tied up.
The annual figure is not compounded. It is total profit divided by capital-years: each holding’s capital times the fraction of a year it was held. Short holdings are not annualized one by one, which would overstate them.
What is left out. Holdings still open, holdings with an option leg still open, and holdings that began before the history starts (Sep 2024). Examples show the stock’s own move from split-adjusted closing prices over the same dates; an example is dropped if those prices disagree with the price actually paid.
Figures updated Sep 2026. These are one person’s results and include trades made before Stillwater existed and trades it did not recommend.