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Thanks all. I had some own goals through poor execution of the officials, missed some officials through not being able to get in but also got headwinds from some better prices on the officials and earnings ratios/VXX Fades. I count those as part of it because the value of SO is so much more than just the official trades, its also the unofficial ideas and most of all the feedback from other traders in the forum. I think that countless others hit the nail on the head that the best way to implement the SO strategies is to learn them like the back of your hand and execute them on your own. So perhaps its not a big surprise that some of my best winners have been ones I've done on my own. So @Kim I've probably done slightly worse than that on the officials but the learning I've gained from them/forum discussions has enabled me to add in some great additional trades....and because I'm only looking towards my own positioning that has allowed me to approach some less liquid situations which has expanded my universe of opportunities further. Great work @porgie! 10% for a month is fantastic by any measure. I find it very very helpful mentally to go through the numbers on a weekly/bi-weekly basis. I've said elsewhere that the key for me is on focusing on executing the plan as well as I can and letting the plan/edge in the plan take care of the result. Regular reviews give me the confidence to do this. It also helps give a bit of a learning plan of what I want to focus on next. It looks like you've identified areas that you're more comfortable going out on your own. I'm much the same, I haven't had much success with earnings straddles...my official ones are fine but my self generated ones are not so good. Drawing from my experience with some of the less liquid ratios + other unrelated discussions, I suspect that the gap for me on earnings straddles is due to poor entries...my hunch is that because the avg gain on a successful straddle is much lower than other strategies, a good entry price is much much more important for consistent success. The learning opportunity will be different with everyone but until you review your numbers you cant begin to know where to focus your attention. I don't know how the education system works elsewhere but in Australia its not uncommon for kids from fancier schools really stumble in their first year of uni. High school can be an environment where their devoted teachers are structuring the lessons for small class sizes to teach them exactly what they need to know to get a great result on the end of year exam. Uni on the other hand features massive classes where the unpaid tutors arent exactly motivated to throw a life preserver to an individual student who's falling behind. Its a bit of a culture shock as all of a sudden you realise that -syllabus aside- you've got to take charge of your own learning, assess your own abilities and develop a study plan specifically for you...no one else is going to save you from drowning if youre not prepared to try to tread water yourself. I couldnt ask for a better set of resources to learn from than those available at Steady Options...but if you only put in the contact hours and dont do any study outside of class then you're not really getting your full money's worth. Analogy aside: I couldnt recommend more strongly that members review their own numbers and set your own study plan based on this. @zxcv64 unfortunately my approach wasn't all that exciting. I pulled some 5 second data from TWS via the API and worked up a bid/ask of the spread across a couple of sessions to get a feel for what the true mid might look like. I noticed that certain low liquidity legs have some really strange behaviour...The ask might be 1.95 and then all of a sudden the MM with blow the ask out to -say- 4.00 and then lower it back down to 1.95 by a cent per second...and this could be happening to multiple legs at the same time in the spread (occasionally cancelling out the apparent movement). I also noticed that putting in an ask at the right level would cause them to immediately update their ask their real level/skip the countdown. I have no idea why this occurs but it it took some of the unknown out of it...or at least made me a little less trusting of the true/ONE generated mid particularly with low liquidity chains. I noticed that these random spikes could throw the real mid off by 10-20% in one session...so although the mid might look stable in ONE the real price might change as soon as you put an order in. The best solution just seemed to be to throw an order for a single combo in several dollars below the mid/down at insult prices and then patiently step you way up..once you get a hit/establish the actual market mid you can then scale in from there. Not rocket science but its an improvement I never would have captured if I hadn't been launching my own trades and making myself focus on one thing at a time.