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Thank you for the replies. Before I heard of SO I followed another service that I have come to learn essentially trades the same as TT. The last few weeks have been tough with even far OTM calls being underwater even though I sold them at really high IV. Obviously everything on the put side has been more difficult to manage but luckily I took a lot of positions off before last Monday. I terms of management, I typically roll up/down the non-tested side to the original delta till I have a Straddle/Fly. I have not gone inverted adjusting straddles but I have rolled them out if I received a credit. Thank you Kim for sharing that link. I have actually looked at that before and have been slowing down selling less strangles through earnings. The biggest lesson for me was GMCR - I sold a way OTM and expected move strangle, and every but can guess how that ended...basically 4% of my account. I ended up rolling the put out to December because I couldn't bare the thought of a loss like that but have been pretty uncomfortable being long GMCR, not to mention the margin requirement. Not exactly a stock I want to be long. I'm slowly repairing my account now and shifting the large majority of my portfolio over to SO and SC strategies. I have also drastically cut down on selling options through earnings. After only 3 earnings cycles I became pretty skeptical about the "expected move" being derived from options prices, as Kim points out in his post. The take away I'm arriving it is that its the unexpected that matters at earnings and that the unexpected can really hurt you. Thanks again.

I have a love/hate relationship with straddles.. I love them on days like monday or yesterday when the market had settled down and then got jumpy again. In an already jumpy market they scare me because they can lose money vrey fast. It takes a lot of positive delta to overcome the loss in premium when the markey is rising. I am in the same camp as Kim in that I would rather have a play that also has some earnings premium built into it. Some of the recent earnings candidates like JOY and FNSR experienced nice gamma gains... Right now LULU has potential... my 2 cents Scott

Absolutely! The main goal of paper trading is to learn the strategies and the platform, so any mistakes that you make while placing trades don't cost you money.