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I'd like to chime in as well. I've been reallocating funds from my recent retirement and for my wife's pending retirement. The amount of money in just the US that is in retirement savings is astronomical, thus a huge variety of carpetbaggers come out of the woodwork with numerous stories about whatever they are selling is going to make you secure into the 24th century. I want to amplify @Kim and @gf58, educate yourself, and be circumspect about where you get the information. Nothing is really 100% secure. It sounds like you are on your initial search to learn, it's okay to let your funds sit and earn nothing while you educate yourself, that's a lot better than losing them altogether.

I want to start a thread for all the linux users who have been struggling to get TOS and other trading platforms to run smooth in their computers. This topic came out from other thread and since it was not relevant to that one I decided to start a new one. As @Ringandpinion pointed out the problem arises from the Java platform and its use of the graphics card in linux where by default Java apps use the main cpu to render the interface and it is not hardware accelerated. So that left me thinking and I did my research on Google to try and find a solution for this matter, that research led me to the following two links: 1. Link1 2. Link2 The instructions are kind of old but they do work in the newer versions of Java, TOS and Linux. I also find that you don't have to edit the launcher file for TOS there is a file called "thinkorswim.vmoptions" You just need to append the options to that file as follows: -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false I also tried this options with TastyWorks, for that edit the file named tastyworks.cfg which is normally in the following route /usr/lib/tastyworks/tastyworks.cfg but it may be in other route. ... [JavaOptions] ... -Ddxscheme.wide=true -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false [ArgOptions] I have tested this setup in KDE and Xfce and it works better with Xfce so I guess for gnome would be the same, also as the original threads mark this could also be used to tune TWS as it is also based in Java but since I don't have an account with IB I didn't tested on that platform. Finally, I'm able to have both TOS and TW open at the same time and every thing run smooth even on a machine with 8 Gb of RAM. Hope this becomes useful for the rest of my fellow linux traders, if you find other tuning options pleas drop my a line. Wish you luck and happy trading and happy linuxing.

To add to the discussion, you might also want to look into Harry Brown's permanent portfolio. I implement a variation of it for my retirement funds (default funds in Australia tend to jam very high percentages of you money into the chronically underperforming Australian market). The nuts and bolts of a good portfolio are investment in uncorrelated assets, the selection of which at least one should perform well during each economic state, and rebalancing every quarter or so to lock in gains. There is a good write up of the implementation at https://investresolve.com/permanent-portfolio-shakedown-part-1/ and https://investresolve.com/permanent-portfolio-shakedown-part-2/ and I found getting to grips with it gives you a good basis for understanding the desirable elements of any long term investment portfolio such as diversification and rebalancing. It also gives some perspective as to why most retirement portfolios are things like 60/40 or 70/30 and what the difference is.

Do you have a 401(k) with work or an Individual Retirement Account (IRA)? Those can be good places for long term investments, before using an individual brokerage account, but it depends on your specific situation. Otherwise, yes, a brokerage account with your preferred broker (TD Ameritrade, or whoever else) is a perfectly fine way to buy and hold long term investments like SPY. I'm not familiar with any of these funds except UPRO. But I took a quick look, and it looks like several of them (including UPRO) are 3x leveraged funds. Doing passive long-term investing with leveraged funds is generally speaking a really bad idea. These types of fund are meant to be short-term trading vehicles, not long-term investment vehicles. I'm not sure I understand the question, here. Do you need to worry about losing money? All of these funds can definitely lose a lot of money, if that's what you mean. That's true of any investment, but it's extremely true of leveraged funds like some of the ones you've listed.

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.