Trading Blog

2017 marks our sixth year as a public service. It was an excellent and exciting year. We closed 113 winners out of 138 trades. Our model portfolio produced 169.1% compounded gain on the whole account based on 10% allocation. The winning ratio was 81.9%. 2017 was our first year ever without a single monthly decline. 

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. 

Today might just have the smallest gap between Wall Street and Main Street we’ve ever experience.  We’ve come a long way when it comes to common retail traders access, affordability of trade commissions, options trading education, research and analysis services, and, finally, some progress in accessibility of technology for options traders.

Over the last decade there has been a substantial rise in proclamations such as “investment advisors are useless,” “manage your own assets,” “don’t pay for financial advice,” and other similar sentiments. 

Options traders spend a lot of time trying to figure out the perfect moment to open a trade; but little attention is devoted to the other side of the transaction. When should you close? This applies equally to long and short positions. However, one aspect of short timing concerns expiration Friday.

Trading in high-vol environments requires a different approach from low-vol markets. Here are 8 strategies to improve your trading and help you to survive in high volatility markets. They are very different from strategies in low volatility environment.

Selling Options Premium refers to certain set of strategies that involve net selling of options, as opposed to buying premium where you are net buyer of options. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about Selling Options Premium. This article will explain the basic concepts and debunk some of the myths.

In February of 2017, I wrote an article about combining together the concepts of momentum and put selling. You can find that article here as prerequisite reading. With this post, we'll look at how the strategy presented has done since then, along with some additional implementation ideas.

Entry and exit timing is crucial to successful options trading, without doubt. However, one form of risk not often acknowledged is the risk of taking too many actions, too soon, and for the wrong reasons.

This is why you have a Trade Machine membership. We can ride the evergreen patterns, and we have, for years. But when the market shifts, we need a minimum amount of data to adjust, and succeed -- now we will. This is our time.

On November 1, 2018, a money manager named James Cordier from OptionSellers.com published an article on Seeking Alpha named Option Selling Opportunities So Good They're Scary. To me, this title alone would be enough to completely discredit the author and not trust him with my hard earned money.

Meb Faber recently polled his twitter followers, and found that only about 25% have a written investment plan. Your investment plan should be based on your willingness (risk tolerance) and need (required rate of return to meet your long term goals) to take risk.