SteadyOptions Trading Blog

"Every once in a while you must go to cash, take a break, take a vacation. Don't try to play the market all the time. It can't be done, too tough on the emotions." - Jesse Livermore

One way to learn from your past mistakes is having to go through the painful and challenging experience of explaining them. Another way is to listen to others who might have lived through some disgruntling trades. Joseph Trevisani goes deep into the rationale he followed during the volatile EUR/JPY days of 2007 in this article.

The covered straddle is a perfect strategy for those all too common sideways-moving trends. When a company’s stock is in consolidation, how can you make trades? No directional trend exists, so most traders simply wait out this period.

Recently, an Anchor subscriber asked, “Why don’t we roll the long calls in the Leveraged Anchor portfolio after a large gain and take cash off the table?”  This question has a multi-part answer, from taxation to how the delta on a position works.

Our members know that buying pre earnings straddles is one of our most consistent and profitable strategies. Yet some options "gurus" continue conducting studies, trying to prove that the strategy doesn't work. Today we will show how to do the backtesting properly, using the CML TradeMachine, the best backtester in the industry.

In my last article I showed you what you can expect selling short strangles and straddles and how much leverage is appropriate. Today I want to show you how to build a well diversified short strangle/straddle portfolio and how to trade it through difficult times.

I have seen a lot of discussions on Twitter lately about the issue if selling naked strangles or straddles is a great strategy or a recipe for disaster. If you have read my books or if you are following my sample portfolio, you know that I'm a huge fan of selling short strangles and straddles.

“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket.” Kin Hubbard. In this article I will discuss the reasoning behind buying back the short options and not waiting till expiration. Two of my basic trading tenets are related:   

"Real trading system returns are too irregular in the short term for consistent weekly returns every time and the only 'trader' that every had regular monthly returns was Bernie Madoff" - Steve Burns. So true. This is why "trading options for income" promoted by some options "gurus" is so misleading.

We recently received a question from one of our members: "Is value allocation a contrarian strategy that identifies stocks that are considered "cheap" relative to historical prices?  How is value measured, and how would this strategy mitigate a pool of stocks like Blackberry in 2010 that was trading at metrics less than historical trailing averages?"

Selling short (naked) strangles is heavily promoted by some options "gurus". Is it a good strategy? It might have an unlimited (theoretical) risk, but what about the return? Is the return worth the risk? We decided to do some math, based on real prices, not some theoretical "studies".

Nassim Taleb tells a great story about Thanksgiving turkey’s in his 2007 book, The Black Swan. "Consider a turkey that is fed every day…Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say.