SteadyOptions Trading Blog

Many options analyses focus on profit, loss and breakeven. These show what occurs on expiration day, assuming the option remains open to that point. But this is not realistic. Most options are closed or exercised before expiration, is calculation of how probable a payoff is going to be, how likely the loss, or the exact neutral outcome (breakeven), are all unrealistic.

Are you ready to break out on your own? Have you been trading for a company for years making tons of money for yourself and others? Are you ready to take home a bigger piece of the pie? If you answered “yes” to these questions then you have the skills necessary to take your passion for trading to the next level.

QUESTION: Thank you for taking the time to participate in a Q & A session with Steady Option. Let’s start with an introduction and a little bit of background on who you are and how you got here.

TLT is the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF that seeks to track the investment results of an index composed of U.S. Treasury bonds with remaining maturities greater than twenty years. Even though US Treasuries typically act as a diversifying asset class to mainstream equities, many investors with long time horizons may not be interested in holding TLT in their portfolio because it would lower expected returns.

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.