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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/30/2018 in Posts

  1. 3 points
    @CXMelga, what you propose is the basis of option selling. Selling naked strangles is a widely used technique - and one with a slightly bad rep. It works for months or even years and then one big move in the market leads to a blowout. You have no doubt read about the recent optionssellers.com debacle. Then there is the 'Karen the Supertrader' story. There is a myriad of Youtube videos and articles online on how to get a decent income selling options. Options Alpha is a subscription service based mainly around selling from what I remember. Newbies - myself very much included - when they find out about selling naked strangles and the easy money it provides, think they have found the holy grail. They start receiving premium regularly, and enjoy watching the value of their short calls/puts decline daily from the theta decay. Then comes the killer blow. A massive move down (or up) leads in increases in volatility and premium and the puts (or calls) you sold for 20 are now priced at 80. Do you close at this loss or do you hold on waiting for a reversion? Sure, in theory, we can have a stop-loss, but from experience most people who sell nakeds (myself very much included) have poor risk management in place. Also, having stop losses means that you will get stopped out a lot of the time when the underlying then reverses and you could have closed your position at a good profit, if you had only ignored your stop-loss and held on. This will severely impact your overall profit. But then not having a stop-loss means you risk that killer blow. Personally, I have been trading naked strangles for around 9 years. Solid profits year after year were followed by that one big crunch which would wipe out all of last years gains. The reason I did strangles is due to scalability - you can literally trade a multi-million $ account with these, without blinking an eye-lid. Now, there is nothing more undignified than grown men playing the "My 'portoflio' is humongous" game, and that's not the intention here, but I trade via my own Limited company (equivalent to the US version of 'Inc'), so I treat this like a business. I still have some strangles in my account, which I am trying to close out and most will be done and dusted within a couple of months. (For reference, I have had them for nearly two years - and kept rolling them as the SPX kept going up and up and up.) Once they are closed, I will no longer sell nakeds again. I've learnt that being able to sleep well at night is an important part of trading. If this is something you want to try, my tips would be : - do it on a leading index like SPX (immense liquidity; has almost daily expiring options (Mon/Wed/Fri) so you can be creative with reducing margin by buying near-dated longs against long-dated shorts, etc.) Use cash based, European style expiry indexes as opposed to ETFs or stocks so there is no dividend risk, no early assigned risk and no company-specific event risk. - NEVER use up more than 50% of your account margin. It's easy to over-leverage and double-down, thinking you're onto a sure thing. The market can, and will, take it's money back at a very short notice. And it won't feel guilty either. - Diversify - as well as different sectors, use different asset classes (equities, commodities, treasuries, etc). If you chose to focus on equities for now, you can still diversify to some extent by doing the following : selling at different time expires (eg. some shorts expiring next month, some in 3 months); selling at different short deltas (selling some shorts at say 10 delta or selling a much smaller quantity at say 30 delta); doing a mix of naked strangles and credit spreads, doing iron condors, ratio spreads etc. Happy trading.
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