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So what do you do when your most successful strategies suddenly become much riskier? The answer: you are looking for new opportunities. Our long time contributor @Yowstercame with the following idea: For those of you not familiar with RIC (Reverse Iron Condor) - it is a limited risk, limited profit trading strategy that is designed to earn a profit when the underlying stock price makes a sharp move in either direction. The RIC Spread is where you buy an Iron Condor Spread from someone who is betting on the underlying stock staying stagnant. This is not a new strategy for us - we have traded it successfully back in 2012, but the current version is slightly different and more suited for the current environment. Our first RIC was opened on November 27, 2018: This is how P/L chart looked like: Fast forward to Dec.4 - NVDA moved to $170+, and the trade has been closed for 81.4% gain. It is worth to mention that such high gain is not typical for this strategy. Normally, we aim for 15-20% gains. But sometimes stocks gap in the right direction, and you can get much higher gains. As @Yowstermentioned in the strategy description on the forum: Reverse Iron Condor (RIC) trades can be used during periods of elevated market volatility to take advantage of stock price movement that is more common during these timeframes. A RIC trade is buying OTM put and call debit spreads. RICs are vega positive trades, meaning they are helped by rising IV and hurt by falling IV. However, the degree by which IV changes affect the RIC are much less compared to hedged/unhedged straddles – this is simply because they have equal number of long and short legs using the same expiration and the strikes are relatively close to one another. Therefore, using RICs instead of straddles during elevated market volatility has 2 main advantages: Better handle the scenario of IV significantly falling back down closer to normal levels – Straddle RV can decline 10% or more in one day that has the VIX drop significantly, and 30% or more during a multi-day significant VIX decline. It will take a lot of gamma gains due to stock price movement to overcome that drop, and if it’s a hedged straddle its more likely that short strangle losses will exceed long straddles gain when this happens. RICs can still get hurt by IV decline (especially if the stock price winds up being near the midpoint) but if you get some stock price movement away from the midpoint the RIC will be in better shape. Easier to make good gains despite IV decline – if the significant IV decline comes with a larger stock price move (fairly common when IV spikes downward) then the RIC can still have a very nice profit if the stock price movement takes the stock price near one of the wings. The biggest negative of RICs compared to hedged straddles is that you’ll need the stock price to move to make a profit. Hedged straddles can make gains due to short strangle credits when the stock price doesn’t move, and this is why hedged straddles are great trades to initiate during low volatility times because its less likely that any market wide volatility decline will significantly hurt the trade (and any IV rise will help it). Since starting trading RIC strategy in late November 2018, we closed 12 winners out of 12 trades: BABA +20.3% FB +20.0% GS +15.4% AXP +10.2% GS +5.7% GS +19.9% MSFT +19.7% FB +20.5% MSFT +15.9% GS +17.9% NVDA +38.4% NVDA +81.4% Of course, the strategy is not without risks - you need the stock to move in order to make a gain. However, in the current environment, if you select the stocks that have tendency to move, you improve the probabilities significantly. When the market conditions change, you need to be flexible and trade what is working. And this is exactly what we do at SteadyOptions. Related articles: Reverse Iron Condor Strategy Straddle, Strangle Or Reverse Iron Condor (RIC)? How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy

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.