SteadyOptions Trading Blog

One of my basic tenets in teaching people how to trade options is that rules and guidelines should not be written in stone and that there are valid reasons for accepting or rejecting some of them. When I offer a rationale or explanation or suggest course of action, it is because I have found that this specific suggestion has worked best for me.

Iron Condors have gained a lot of popularity among professional money managers and retail investors. It is a market neutral strategy that allows you to profit when the underlying price moves sideways. Iron Condors usually have a limited risk and a high probability of success.

Large-cap, blue-chip companies are not exactly the hottest commodities on the current market. But one of them has been rewarding income investors for decades and will likely continue to do so. I’m talking about Procter & Gamble Co (NYSE:PG), a multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

AutoZone Inc (NYSE:AZO) has earnings due out tomorrow, 9-19-2017 before the market opens and we can look at a slightly advanced option trade that starts two calendar days after AZO earnings (9-21-2017) and lasts for the 19 calendar days to follow, that has been a winner for the last 3 years. 

How would a trader like you decide to do early exercise? Say you bought calls when they were trading in the 1.0 -> 2.5 range, now underlying has risen so that calls trade bid-ask at 4.0 / 4.8 and there is strong possibility of it going higher. Also assume in another case that they trade in the 6.0 to 7.0 range.

It’s no secret that selling far out of the money options, as opposed to buying them, is a trading strategy with a high probability of success. Low-delta options have a proclivity to expire worthless. The dramatic downward moves required to make low-delta options profitable don’t happen all of the time.

One of the requirements when developing a trading method is that traders have to fully describe how to start and settle trades. However, when they are forced to describe how to adjust and manage the size of their positions, few traders have a concrete answer.

There are some psychological dangers in the market that you should know about. It is important that you know how to deal with your emotions and what steps you must take to achieve your investment goals. Therefore, you must equip yourself with the right tools to be able to implement your operations in a profitable way in the long run.

'Volatility skew' is one of those topics that many traders ignore.  It's not something that was understood in the early days (1973 +), when options began trading on an exchange. According to Wikipedia: "equity options traded in American markets did not show a volatility smile before the crash of 1987, but began showing one afterward."

I've had three emails in the past month on people being assigned on positions and receiving margin calls, and generally not knowing what happened. I advise everyone to completely research and become familiar with the exercise/assignment aspect of option trading. If you don't you can find your entire account blown out over a weekend.

The trigger to this article was a discussion I had with someone on Reddit. There is a common misconception about calculating gains on trades that require margin, like credit spreads and short options (naked puts/calls, strangles or straddles). I believe it is important to explain how to do it properly.

It does not matter how good your trading system is - you will not win 100% of the time! A fact! The way you deal with this fact will go a long way toward determining how big a winner you become. In fact, after so many years spent in the financial arena, I have absolutely no doubts in my  mind that one of the most essential keys to winning is learning how to lose.