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If I may post a contrasting experience to @yalgaar's... I am the newest newbie when it comes to options trading. After being a long stock investor for decades, I decided this year, after the crash, to figure out what options could do for me to provide a hedge. I did some free online courses, listened to a lot of podcasts, and then managed to lose thousands of dollars buying puts on a stock in an industry I am intimately familiar with, learning the valuable lesson (again, but with options this time) that the market doesn't care what a fair valuation is, and that it could stay irrational much longer than my options' expiration. I now realize this is a fairly typical entry for many a new options trader. I then sampled a few trade advisory services and then ended up here, intrigued of course by the returns, but also by @Kim's articles here and on Seeking Alpha. I joined SO in July. Since then I've done 7 trades: 6 official (BYND, UBER1, UBER2, LOW, BBY, BILI) and one unofficial (XLNX). Only one has been a loser (UBER2) My tips, all of which have been gleaned from advice from members here: 1) As everyone here seems to repeat Ad Nauseum, "Don't chase the entry!" For me, this means that if I can't get in within 2-3% of margin on official, I let it sit. From a post here I learned how to plot the strategy price so I can see it move during the day. I might place a day order for the first day, or even 1-2 days after the official notice, at the official price (or within 3% of margin if it looks like it will not go down), and then I just wait. If it doesn't get filled, I just walk away from the trade. As Kim has pointed out, the prices do sometimes go well below the official. 2) Once I get a fill, I immediately set a GTC close order because I'm on the other side of the world, and I can't be bothered to sit in front of the computer all night. For an earnings trade, if it doesn't get filled prior to the earnings announcement, I would plan on walking up before market close to close it, but I have not had to do that yet. My average GTC target has been around 10% return on risk, but I'm not stuck on that. Apart from SO, I'm playing with both VolHQ and ChartAffair, and I realize now that I'm going to need OptionNet to visualize potential trades better. I use IB but their option "Performance" visuals are lacking. But that is all I plan on getting. I am now reading books by Wolfinger and Augen, and I'm fully aware that this journey is going to take years. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. My results thus far: for the 6 winning trades I have averaged around 10% (unsurprising I guess given my target, but very surprising to me given that the average time in market was around 3 days per trade), and I lost 0.5% on the one loser. I'm glad to report that my first 2 months have more than paid for my subs! More importantly, I've learned A LOT in just a few weeks, and the curve remains very steep, but here I feel there's a culture of mentorship, something I'm going to need.

I don't mean to sound indifferent as I remember feeling like this too. I remember getting so excited about the official SO performance and I was day dreaming about all that money I was going to make. Each time I saw Yowster and other make profits when I was losing money felt like a knife being jammed into my heart. It sucked. I get it. Based on my own journey - the sooner you stop trying to duplicate the official trades and admit to yourself that you cannot duplicate them the better. Unsubscribe from the SO alerts and just follow the unofficial trades and the trade discussion group to see what people are looking at (many times you find these trades before the official ones giving you a chance to get in early). Are Kim and Yowster trying to pull a fast one on us? No - but you also cannot replicate their trades exactly because some of these trades have low liquidity. As soon as any market maker sees 100s of orders coming in at the same strike they are going to raise the price of the options. This means you will always get filled on the losing trades and maybe get filled on some % of the winning trades. This can easily flip a strategy that makes 50% a year to one that makes 0% per year. So - once you admit that to yourself you have two options: 1) Give up. Move onto the next guru who claims they can make you a millionaire. 2) Figure out how you can make this strategy work. Whenever you miss a trade you can complain which won't change anything or instead ask Yowster what exactly he was looking for when he entered. Learn from him so you can spot your own trades and maybe get in before everyone else. I went from complaining about SO and quitting here to just closing out several calendar trades for 30% each. None of them were official trades or even mentioned on the board here. Just used the information Yowster teaches us and VOLHQ to find my own setups.

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.

From memory I did a quick study on the cost of Tastyworks vs IB. I remember there was very little difference so I stayed with IB as I have got used to their mobile app which I use to make all my trades. With IB I can even do trades when I am having coffee or in the car with my wife driving, or before a round of golf!!!. I found Tasty works a bit different and it took me a while to get used to. There were videos to help. I did have a problem trying to work with two companies as I forgot the odd time that I had a trade to close on Tastyworks which cost me dearly on a couple of occasions so I lost enthusiasm. I am happy with IB as you can see. To each their own. Willing to change if there was a big cost difference though. Been in Europe there are no really low cost providers that I have found yet.