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Well thank you all for the kind words - I shall do my best to be helpful. I see @craigsmith posted some of his background. First of all I am Dutch, I live in Belgium, I have a French education and grew up in Brazil and in my professional life not a small part of my clients are American. I have been investing since very early days as my parents encouraged me to manage the small portfolio of stocks I inherited as far back as when I was 15. For those unaware of this bit of history the first options exchange in Europe was opened in Amsterdam under the then name European Options Exchange shamelessly copying much of the good work of the CBOE. I got quite interested in this and my first trade involved the purchase of a LEAP on the Amsterdam index and writing short options against it. LEAPS were (and are) undervalued compared to shorter term options and the thought was to recover the full purchase price and then some over the course of the process. This was in 1980ies in a bull period and I found rather sooner than later that the cash lay-out required to buy-back the short option and sell a higher option eliminated my liquidity rather more quickly than I expected. Selling deep ITM shorter options would not give the necessary return so my first trade was a (modest fortunately!) bust. I read more on options - but frankly for a long while I found all the so called strategies to be unsatisfactory as they were to my mind all variants of a long (or short/neutral) punt. Nothing wrong with those but to my mind it didnt make use of what options offered in terms of mechanism. Certainly I wasnt doing this full time and with the usual job, wife, children, house obligations I lacked resources for trading anyhow. In the meanwhile I managed a family trust but that did not lend itself to options trading. I came back to serious options trading when I had more capital and time to devote to it. Like most on here I looked a long time in both books and OL resources finding absolutely nothing that told me something new - its all very well to know about butterflies or condors - what you need is something where as the small guy you can make use of things that larger parties cannot adequately make use of. A few years ago I came across Jeff Augen's books which were quite an eye opener - for the first time it gelled in my mind how to use that odd derived value volatility for something more interesting than just option (mis) pricing. Looking into volatility traders turned out to be an (initial) disappointment - they certainly talked very complicated language but I got the distinct impression that most were types that claim to have a winning strategy to play Baccarat, just gamblers with a big mouth. Through SeekingAlpha and another site I came across SO and was immediately interested - however i had been disappointed before so for a long while I watched from afar and read the many publicly available articles on SO. Then there was a rather nasty public spat in which Kim got drawn in by a disagreeable fellow on the other site - Kim's responses impressed me by their cool and reasonable manner. This gave a whole new credibility to the 'claims' on the SO site and I decided to join, so whilst its true that I have been here less than a year - I lurked for a long while before. What I picked up on SO has really helped me and i am now trading very frequently and much more structurally successful - the CA part of the offering was new to me but after paper trading in a first stage, I have been diligently following on here ever since. SO made me trade better and hopefully I can assist some of you to get better too.

Please welcome our new mentor @TrustyJules He has been with us for less than a year, but I think many of us learned to appreciate his experience and his contribution to the forum discussion. His posts are always very helpful and to the point. @TrustyJuleswill be responsible mostly for Creating Alpha forum, but of course will continue contributing to SO forum as well.

You are welcome. I always like to use the analogy of other professions. It takes 4 years to become an engineer and 7 years to become a doctor. No medical student would expect to do live operations during his first years in medical school, and no civil engineering student would expect to build bridges after 1-2 years in school. Yet many people expect it to be different in trading. I get many messages from potential members, some of them tell me that they are new to trading but expect to make 10%/month. I tell them upfront that SO would not be a good fit for them. Over the years I probably have lost hundreds potential members because I like to set realistic expectations. I won't lie to people and tell them what they want to hear.