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Hi guys, This is the address to a website I just finished (well, let's say it is in beta): www.art-of.trading It is helpful for those in search of an additional source of RV charts (and thank you for all encouragements I got). What's this? You can use it to simply and quite quickly depict the 'usual' RV graphs on straddles and calendars, as well as the underlying’s relative movement and IV. Most parts of the website were plugged together by me (you will notice in the grainy front picture). It also has a page with a large table on upcoming earnings, the firm’s actual and historical IV and traded options volume in weeklies and monthlies. The goal was to plug all this information together in a more ‘trader-friendly’ way, better than on other known free website (the basic idea is to provide an answer to Kim's weekly Sunday mail about upcoming earnings trading candidates and the famous 'make sure they are liquid enough' sentence). Do we really need another website with RV charts? Well, honestly, I do not know. You will have to judge for yourself. I can only say that this is a fun project for me personally and I just could not help tackling this. Having spent some years in quant finance/institutional asset management and having fun doing quant stuff and building webpages I could not keep my fingers still and had come up with that website - despite what else might be there (and not even thinking in a particularly competitive way about it). It is very helpful for what we are doing. Technically not rocket science, although some parts still turned out taking more time than expected (I am still completely amazed, for example, about being taught all the legal implications of throwing a few figures on a website). What’s your incentive in this? Will you keep this free? What I like about this forum is that there are quite a few people who are really good - and who do not mind sharing their knowledge and their experience. I like this spirit and I want to support it. Now, having said that, here is the money side: be clear that you need to spend some good amounts on data, hosting and development (the ones I would just be too slow to all do myself). Properly licensing your data, for example, is unfortunately much more expensive for a thing like this than for private research purposes (and of course more expensive than if you would simply scrape your data, but experience shows you want to stay clean on that one). Proper data has the nice side effect that you always have good and consistent data and finally that there is someone you can call if something goes wrong (f.e. Zacks I use is known as a good provider of earnings data). So again, having said that, the answer is no, I will not be able to keep this for free. Costs and time should be covered. Be realistic, you will agree that anything else is simply not sustainable. Furthermore, being able to access up-to-date data on any company at any time has value. So you plugged this site together, and what now?? While many people say a quant background can actually be a disadvantage in trading, I will still love to do more interesting data driven stuff, possibly in collaboration and discussion. And the useful stuff will of course go on the website. So, I am open and thankful for suggestions and discussions. But I also want to add a cautioning word that in my experience it is often the very simple stuff which helps most. There can be an inherent danger to lose purpose when getting too carried away by shiny advanced methodologies and too much use of differential equation models. There is, however, a lot of basic stuff with seemingly little coverage here in the forum which could well value a look. For example, taking some simple company fundamentals like earnings growth, earnings volatility, even debt-to-equity, industry code, past surprises and plugging them into a simple regression to come up with a model to predict iv runup before earnings announcements. There is a good chance that this will lead to improvements with reasonable time spent on them. The coming weeks will be a test run, the site will be freely accessible (in fact there is nothing in place on the page which would allow to charge anything right now). I would love to get some feedback and of course bug reports if you find funny data or anything not working as expected. So that is it, enjoy.

This morning art-of.trading was not reachable for a short while due to a redirecting mistake on my part. All is working again. Please, as always, if you come across any issues, including a slow response, drop me a PM or post it here. Even though the website is monitored externally, it might take some time until I am aware of an issue. This is especially pronounced now since - as soon as time permits - I will start working on larger changes to the site which cannot all be prepared in the dev environment alone.

Well, for those who watch their studies and rely on them for their trading, here is one example. The parameters of the study: Use AAPL and GMCR as underlying. Buy a ATM straddle 20 days before earnings. Sell it just before the announcement. The results of the study, based on 48 cycles (2009-2014) AAPL P/L: -$2933 GMCR P/L: -$2070 Based on those results, they declared (once again) that buying a straddle before earnings is a losing strategy. First of all, dismissing the whole strategy based on two stocks is completely wrong. You could say that this strategy does not work for those two stocks. This would be a correct statement. Indeed, we do not use those two stocks for our straddles strategy. Second, from our experience, entering 20 days before earnings is usually not the best time. On average, the ideal time to enter is around 5-10 days before earnings. This when the stocks experience the largest IV spike. Third, the study does not account for gamma scalping. Which means that if the stock moves, you can adjust the strikes of the straddle or buy/sell stock against it. Many times the stock would move back and forward from the strike, allowing you to adjust several times. In addition, the study is probably based on end of day prices, and from our experience, the end of day price on the last day is usually near the day lows, and you have a chance to sell at higher prices earlier. As a side note, presenting the results as dollar P/L on one contract trade is meaningless. GMCR is trading around $150 today, and pre-earnings straddle cost is around $1,500. In 2009, the stock was around $30, and pre-earnings straddle cost was around $500. Would you agree that 10% gain (or loss) on $1,500 trade is different than 10% gain (or loss) on $500 trade? The only thing that matters is percentage P/L, not dollar P/L. Presenting dollar P/L could potentially severely skew the study. For example, what if most of the winners were when the stock was at $30-50 but most of the losers when the stock was around $100-150? Tom Sosnoff and Tony Battista conclude the "study" by saying that "if anybody tells you that you should be buying volatility into earnings, they really haven't done their homework. It really doesn't work". At SteadyOptions, buying pre-earnings straddles is one of our key strategies. Check out our performance page for full results. As you can see from our results, the strategy works very well for us. We don't do studies, we do live trading, and our results are based on hundreds real trades. Of course the devil is in the details. There are many moving parts to this strategy: When to enter? Which stocks to use? How to manage the position? When to take profits? And much more. So we will let tastytrade to do their "studies", and we will continue trading the strategy and make money from it. After all, as one of our members said, someone has to be on the other side of our trades. Actually, I would like to thank tastytrade for continuing providing us fresh supply of sellers for our strategy!