Hello, I'm new to OTF and ordinarily would have made an introduction before posting, but something happened to me today that kind of has me in a rush for some veteran trader assistance.

I'm new to options trading but figured I had a pretty good grasp on how profits are calculated. But yesterday I opened a position in my demo account and today the stock is (or was, it's moving around) up 30% from where I bought it yesterday. My admittedly simplistic understanding of buying call options is that as the underlying stock price increases in value one enjoys profits on the contract by roughly an order of magnitude for every 5% of positive movement, seeing as the price of the contract is 1/10 the price of the stock. It seemed my understanding was sound when I bought Netflix a few weeks back prior to earnings and enjoyed a huge return on it.

Yesterday I bought 2 CHTP March 14 4.00 Call for $360 ($1.80 apiece). Today the current bid when I went to sell to close is $2.45, yielding what feels like a pretty flimsy profit of just $146.

Can someone make some sense of this for me? I'm attaching a screenshot from my Optionshouse demo account with some notations:

democonfuse.jpg

Shouldn't this trade be worth much more? What am I missing? Is it because I bought March 14 options - is time decay that drastic? I had been feeling very good about my understanding of this kind of trading over the last three months - as I've read and tried to absorb as much as possible on this subject. I was even preparing to fund my first live options account later today and now I'm feeling very much like a guy who doesn't know what he's doing.

:confused2: