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I wanted to share with you a feedback from a member who cancelled his membership and provided me the following feedback: "Hi Kim, I was very interested in your strategies when I saw the 2011 performance (13.6% average gain). Looking at the 2012 performance I'm not so sure about it (3% average gain). Then once I signed up I watched 7 out of 8 trades lose money. With the high transaction costs of trading options, the 3% average gain doesn't give me much room to cover fees and also fight the bid/ask spreads. I'm going to keep my eye on the performance for a couple more months and then will decide if I want to join back in." Here is my response: Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately, people concentrate too much on a short term performance. You mentioned 7 out of 8 losers, but the one winner was 15% and sum of the 7 losers 26%. If you go back and include just one more trade, 2 winners out of 9 trades will give you a positive return because the winners are usually much larger than the losers. 3% average gain still give you 40% ROI. If you followed the discussions on the forum, you would see me mentioning more than once that those trades don't perform as well in a low IV environment. However, even in this environment, the cumulative gain in 2011 is $2,380, based on 1,000 allocation per trade. With IB, you would make around $1,500 net gain while allocating only $1,000 per trade. But if you are patient, you can get results similar to July-August 2011 when IV spikes. Meanwhile we are making nice profits on ICs and calendars. Unlike other services which offer you just few ICs or credit spreads, I offer a total portfolio approach, where different trades balance each other. What confuses many people is the fact that my performance reporting is extremely conservative. The results of the model portfolio are cashed adjusted and based on 10% allocation. As far as I know, I'm among very few in this industry doing that. The $2,380 gain on $1,000 allocation would be reported by most services as 238% gain. 2011 results would be reported as 1,237% gain. Setting realistic expectations is very important. If I could consistently make 13.6% per trade, with 15 trades per month and 10% allocation I would be making 20% per month or 240% per year. With those returns, I would be probably retired on Bahamas by now (in fact, I could probably buy the Bahamas). If I can get 4-5% net return per month in this low IV environment (while having about half of the portfolio in cash), I'm not complaining.