Trading Blog

Steady Options has now been trading the Leveraged Anchor strategy for two years, and, somewhat to my surprise, 2020 went even better than 2019. On the year, Leveraged Anchor was up 31.7%, while the total return of the S&P 500 was 18.4%.

Steady Momentum Put Write (SMPW) is one of the available subscription services at Steady Options. We launched the strategy in early 2019, so we now have two years of performance to evaluate on both an absolute basis and relative to the strategy’s benchmark, PUTW (WisdomTree CBOE S&P 500 PutWrite Strategy Fund). 

2020 marks our 9th year as a public trading service. It was an excellent year for us. We closed 130 winners out of 194 trades. Our model portfolio produced 117.1% compounded gain on the whole account based on 10% allocation per trade. We had only three losing months in 2020. 

Our readers know that our returns have been tracked by Pro-Trading-Profits, an independent third party website that tracks performance of hundreds investment newsletters. They provided an excellent explanation how to analyze and compare performance of different trading systems. 

In part I I illustrated how the preferential tax treatment of 1256 contracts could improve after tax returns of a PutWrite strategy over a long period of time. In this article, I’ll continue the illustration by switching from a PutWrite to an ETF BuyWrite (covered calls) strategy while holding pre-tax expected returns constant at 8%.

Cash settled index options like SPX, XSP, RUT and a few others receive special federal tax treatment where 60% of the gains are reported as a Long Term Capital Gain (LTCG) even if the contract was held for less than a year.

In this article I’ll be using the ORATS Wheel backtesting tool to compare the performance since 2007 of SPY short puts versus short put spreads. I’ll look at both risk and returns, and different ways of determining position size to adjust for the differences in risk between the two trades.

If you want to build your wealth, you have to make sure that you invest your money. If you put money into a savings account and don’t earn any interest from it, this won’t work for you in the long term. Your money will lose value because of inflation, and this is the last thing that you need. So when do you invest?

I almost hate to keep saying it, but the Diversified Leveraged Anchor strategy keeps exceeding expectations and performing as designed. To remind our readers, Diversified Leveraged Anchor was created in April 2020 attempting to further increase performance, reduce risk, and to reduce volatility. 

Paying off a home mortgage early is a popular financial goal. Most people feel a level financial peace when their home is paid off that is beneficial in many ways. The most common approach to paying off the mortgage early is directly making additional principal payments to the lender on a regular basis.

As a community of option traders, we all can relate to the occasional challenges of order execution. Best practices for avoiding errors as well as techniques for better potential execution will be the focus of this article.  Like countless others in the Steady Options community, I personally have traded thousands of option contracts over the last decade.

For any first-time investor, one of the most important questions to ask is “why are you doing this?”. Getting into investment can be thrilling and open up new worlds for you, but it can also be draining both physically and emotionally, with long days and sudden market moves always a genuine risk.