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Hi guys, I am now a SO member since February 2015. What you need to know is that I am still a newbie at options trading. I finally went through all my trades and compared them against the performance posted I jused the exact same calculation as Kim. My results though are far away from Kims but I made money with his newsletter and thats after deducting the fees of his service. I enjoyed the time so far and I still have to learn a lot to master everything. I will keep updating my results so you guys get also a feeling of possible mistake one can make. I probably covered quite some mistakes Please note it's mainly my fault that I don't have the performance as good as SO. I already sent a comparison for March which was incomplete and not all trades were included. Here are my honest final results. Whats your expirience? How do you master the steep learning curve?

These are really options trades based on the last few days prior to expiration. I'd recommend reading "Trading Options at Expiration" by Jeff Augen where he goes into a lot of detail around this type of trading, and also dives deep into the options pricing behavior the last few days. In your examples, they were right after earnings, but they can really be any time just prior to expiration. A lot of his trade examples are using unbalanced ratio spreads where you are short more options than you are long, so lots of margin required. But it does get you thinking about some other strategies such as 1x3x2 spreads where you cover the extra shorts with further OTM strikes. But most of these trades boil down to a gamble of minimal price movement.