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Hi, In my humble opinion, trade alerts are the least valuable thing in any newsletter. Price move, liquidity in options are not so great, you are stuck in a meeting and by the time you get back to your desk, the price has moved on. For a slightly off-the-topic but relevant topic about edge and learning about trading, When I started trading, I thought the holy grail is to find an edge through some kind of statistical anomaly in complicated products or identifying the next Google. In another words, I cared a lot about trade entry. I had a huge ego and I worked with similarly full-of-themselves co-workers who had graduated from MIT to build machine-learning tools and backtesters to find the perfect conditions to enter a trade. We reasoned, "if we only if we could build the perfect correlation model between Southwest stock and Crude oil, or if the option skew is off by 0.50% in a OTM option strike in a really long-dated month, we could arbitrage this and make millions," Now the older I get, the dumber I realize that I am and I only hope to accelerate this learning of realizing how dumb I'm. I realize that I don't have the speed as the nimble high frequency trading companies who co-located their trading servers right to the exchange, my account is an speck of sand compared to the hedge fund/prop desks on Wall Street who can move mountains and my brain is a pea in comparison to the combination of econometrics/statistical analysis performed by those with Astrophysics PhD quants. I know nothing about the market and when I make a feeble attempt to guess where it's going, it's as good as a monkey's. So to protect myself from myself, I consider risk management and what-to-do after you enter a trade to be the most important. I follow about half of Kim's trades and honestly, he has had some bad trades (sorry Kim, but no one is immune to statistics). But honestly his good trades/performance doesn't interest me, a monkey can guess correctly some of the time how a stock is range-bound and put on a iron condor and it'll get profitable most of the time. But the one time when it fails, it can wipe you out of the market for good. So honestly, I perk up when I see how Kim reacts to his bad trades, like the AAPL August calendar or the August RUT iron condor. There's no fun in watching someone pick up pennies in front of a slow moving steam-roller but it's more fun to see how they react when they are about to get run over - they get squashed completely or they manage a daring escape; either way, it'll be a poignant lesson for me as a bystander. More concretely, what I learned from SO is: trade adjustment, what to do when the stock moves against you; how to adjust your trade to still keep a favorable risk-reward ratio; overall portfolio management, how to balance your vega, delta positive trades against your negative one's to keep the whole porfolio as neutral as possible; thinking about risk, not to get hung up or married to a single position and learn to when to fold them and keep a steady routine of trade identification, trade management, trade exit and calm regardless of wild portfolio swings Best, PC

There have been quite a few posts recently about when to use the straddle/strangle pre-earnings strategy and when to use the double calendars. Kim has indicated that he prefers the DCs when back testings shows that the weekly straddle/strangle under-performs the monthlies - and also the DCs only make sense for higher priced stocks (because otherwise the commissions make up too high a percentage of the trade cost). I believe the pro's and con's of each are: The straddle/strangle benefits from IV increase prior to earnings that will hopefully outpace theta time decay. They also benefit from larger stock price moves. Working against the straddle/strangles are no price movement in the stock prior to earnings and IV increases not off-setting theta (or IV dropping in general). DC's benefit from the weekly options losing their value quicker than the monthlies. They should also benefit to some degree as IV increases. The main thing working against the DC's are large price moves in the underlying stock (although its less of a negative when compared to non-earnings calendar spreads). DC's could also suffer if the weeklies start to out-perform the monthlies by a larger degree. This got me thinking of a strategy to take the best of both approaches, and the thing that came to mind was a double-diagonal. I haven't done any back-testing, but it may be worth it to paper trade this approach to see how it compares with the DC. For example, PCLN is a high-priced stock coming up on earnings next week, and in Kim's trade discussion topic he's leaning towards a DC (although I'm not sure what strikes he's looking at). But for the sake of this example with PCLN around $890, lets assume that we'd do a DC with 880 puts and 900 calls where we are long the August monthlies and short the August week 2's. The double-diagonal to compare this against would be that we are still long the monthly 880p and 900c, but for the short legs we go one more strike OTM and sell the week2 875p and 905c. My thinking is that we'd still benefit from the monthlies out-performing the weeklies (although maybe by a slightly lesser degree) but we'd also benefit more from larger price swings in the stock prior to earnings. This would also offer some protection against the worst-case DC scenario where earnings are announced prior to the published date and accompanied by a very large stock move (admittedly rare, but it does happen) - in this case the DCs would lose almost all of their value, but the double-diagonal would not have as big of a loss.

No, we don't. As a matter of fact we don't need ANY examples. We need a STRATEGY. Sending out the alerts BEFORE you trade is easy and simple and nobody can argue with timestamped alerts and trade-confirmations! One less recurring set of complaints you have to deal with! A perfect win-win! What do you think?