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Let me give some perspective from my own personal experience. When I first joined SO in 2013, I was just a regular member just like everyone else. I had experience with directional options trades but wanted to learn about the non-directional trading. When I entred official trades, I didn't always get at or below the entry price but I tried to enter near the official price and sometimes waiting a day or more to enter. I tried to not pay more than 1% or 2% more for straddles as they have lower gain targets, I'd pay a little more at times for calendars since they have higher gain targets. I'd set my own exit targets, not waiting for the official trade notifications. But, from the very beginning, I tried to adapt the trades to other stocks for my own trades. And back then, it was more difficult because we didn't have the RV charting tools to make the analysis quicker and easier. Once I'd mastered the in's and out's of the trade setups and how IV changes played such a huge role, I began to come up with tweaks to the trades - that's how the entire hedged straddle setup originated right around the timeframe when weeklies became available for some stocks (I knew that in the vast majority of trades we didn't get huge stock price moves so the shorts would add to smaller gains and make small losers break-evens or small gains). Even now, although Kim and I discuss some trade ideas, we react to each other's trade posts like everyone else when we try to enter. I apply my same logic for entering Kim's trades that I did back in 2013, and I'm sure Kim does similar when I post new trades. @yalgaar - regarding your suggestions around opening trades, I mean no disrespect but I feel these ideas come from your goal of trying to match official trade performance, where the SO goal is to educate as to why the trade setups look good when we enter them. I spend a ton of time explaining setups and answering member's questions - happily doing so knowing that they ask because they want to learn. I need to spend my time looking for new trades and answering the questions, so I don't want to add extra rules and restrictions as to when I enter a trade. Since I've been at SO, in general, the disgruntled members usually are the ones that only follow the official trades and the happier members are the ones who try to use the knowledge to create their own trades. I realize that a lot of people don't have as much time to devote to trading, so its more difficult for some people to adapt SO trades to their own stocks. If you can only play the official trades, then don't go in and expect the same returns, but if an official trade has a 10% gain and your same trade winds up a loser then it's probably you who missed an opportunity to exit. I always use the analogy of when a analyst issues a stock upgrade/downgrade - does everyone get to buy/sell the stock at the same price as when the recommendation came out? Of course not and I don't think any investor would think so, so it always perplexed me as to why there is so much discussion about entering SO trades at exacly the same prices as the official (I never had that assumption when I tried to folllow and enter an official trade). Based on the discussions and unofficial trades forums, many people are actively working on applying SO techniques to their own trades - and that is ideal and makes me happy that the time I devote to answering setup/strategy questions is helping people with their own trades. For the official trade strategies, I'd encourage people to learn the stratagies and research their own setups because there are 2 main reasons that a good setup doesn't turn into an official trade: For the higher priced stocks, the allocation size is simple too big. I know that when we were doing a lot of the NEHS trades, people were using stocks like AMZN and got good results but the allocation size was orders or magnitude higher than an official trade. Same thing applies to some earnings hedged straddles for some higher priced stocks. Also trades like call ratios on AAPL and TSLA over the last month or so. Some stocks don't have enough volume/OI to work as an official trade, but for an individual investor can work well. I do these kind of trades a lot in my own personal trades (I don't mention them in unofficial trades because I know if I do then they can turn into a psuedo offical trade). If you are unsure about something, post your setup and question in the unoffical trades forum (or send personal messages) and many members try to answer your questions.