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Like many other new members, I went through a frustrating time on Steady Options. I almost gave up on it very early on, but luckily, I hung around. Having been here a while now, I’ve seen other newbies come full of enthusiasm and leave full of disappointment, walking the same frustration-filled path that I left behind. I’ve examined my own journey, and can break it down into various stages. So, here they are. Other peoples’ journey may be very different, but I hope that my pathway may shed some light, or give some hope to others who find themselves shouting at the cat for no reason, like I once did. 1) Initial Enthusiasm I joined full of hope and excitement, lured by the mouth-watering annual returns, thinking “If I can make even half of those returns, then I’ll be a happy-chappy”. Motivation Level : 10/10 2) Frustration with Fills Okay, I’ve been a member for a few weeks, and have tried to enter a few trades, but each time, I cannot even get close to the official entry price. I give up on many trades and enter others at the wrong price, resulting in more losers than winners. Motivation Level : 7/10 3) Frustration turns to Fury (well almost) It’s now many trades later and the fills are not getting any easier. It’s getting annoying seeing others open trade after trade and close it two days later at a profit, whilst my GTC order to buy is sitting idle on some exchange gathering dust. I’m a mild-manner guy, who wishes no ill-will on anyone, and thought I didn’t have a dark side, but the ugly monster of jealousy is tapping me on the shoulder and saying “Damn, there’s another guy who’s just closed the GOOG calendar for 30% ….AND….he’s gone in and out twice already this cycle, whilst you can’t even get in once?”. I'm anything BUT a happy-chappy. Motivation Level : 3/10 4) “I’ve had enough” Months have rolled on, my SO portfolio is not showing any gains whilst the official portfolio is showing a healthy number. I don’t even bother trying to enter any SO trades now, and hardly logon to the forums. I’m bitter and just waiting for my membership to expire. Motivation Level : 1/10 5) The last Attempt Over a year has gone by, and the anger and frustration has turned to “Let me give this lousy service one last chance, before my membership expires”. I register with one of the two charting services (ChartAffair/VolatiltyHQ), and spend the whole weekend reading up on old trades, and asking myself “Why did Kim enter this calendar at this price? How does he know that it should be a 1-week or a 3-week calendar?” I look at the RV charts and start to see that the official trades are entered at very low RV’s and every time I over-pay, I’m reducing my chances of profitability. I’m seeing patterns in the calendar RV charts – a ramp up as we get to earnings, a zig-zag pattern that allows others (who I envied) to go in-and-out of trades multiple times. Same for the RV charts for straddles. I’m starting to see why Yowster thinks something is a good buy or not. My head is filled with little “ah-ha” moments and learnings, and the next few days I watch live prices and then I do the un-thinkable – I open my own calendar trade on PANW for 0.89. The very next day, Kim opens the same Put calendar for 1.05 – Bingo! I feel a sense of un-controllable excitement, not just cos I received validation that my trade was correct, but that I actually got a better price than the official. (https://steadyoptions.com/forums/forum/topic/4106-trades-panw-november-2017-calendar/?tab=comments#comment-87397) Motivation Level : 7/10 6) Creating my own Trades I spend Nov and Dec ’17 coming up with tons of my own trades – calendars and straddles. I'm not really too sure of what I'm doing, so some are winners and many are losers. I’ve started doing something else – I’m now keeping a proper journal. Every trade is logged together with the rationale behind it. If it goes wrong, I try to understand why. I’m trading full-time and this has become all-consuming, but I am enjoying it. My knowledge and skill level is rapidly increasing. For the first time, I make a profit for the month (12.9% for Nov ’17). I’m on a high. I still try to enter official trades, but don’t get upset if I miss many. I do this for a few months, averaging around 6% monthly profit overall. I also increase my portfolio size. Motivation Level : 8/10 7) Consistency at Last Two years later, and I have traded several earnings cycles, done literally hundreds of my own trades, and I rarely take the official SO trades. Fills are not a problem, as I’m normally in the trade already, and I’m also trading stocks which are not on the SO list. Profits are decent, but I get some big losses, and the occasional losing month. I don’t like those, so I ramp-up the commitment. I decide to REALLY focus on this from 01-Jan-20. And then a dark-cloud-with-a-silver-lining comes along – COVID lockdowns. They suit me just fine: 7-8 hours a day – just me, the PC screen, charts, Excel sheets, Word documents detailing my ups/downs, cups of Earl Grey tea…..trade after trade. Total immersion. I love it. The wife has become a trading-widow. The cat is happy to be around me, cos I am no longer shouting. My profits rise to new levels, the March crash comes and goes without a dent to the bottom line. As we head towards the end of the year, I can finally say to myself that I have matured into a proficient SO trader – my risk management has improved enormously, my position sizing is as it should be, and my ability to distinguish between good/not-so-good trades has improved. I still screw up, but I keep a list of the mistakes I’ve made each month, and it’s satisfying to watch that list become smaller as the months roll on. I have finally found consistency – I’ve made a profit every single month this year. And my SO portfolio is far more profitable than my other ones. But the learning never stops – every week I read some post on the forum and think “Oh, wow, I didn’t think of that.” I’m no longer a SO member for the trades, but for the ideas and the discussions on the forum. They are gold. And I’ve learnt skills that I’ve been lacking for a long time – patience (no more “FOMO”), discipline (sticking to the rules, no doubling-down etc), no emotional trading (no revenge trades, not getting upset when a trade loses etc) The next stages are to get to grips with different trade types, like ratios. Motivation Level : 10/10 I’ve written this not with the view of “Hey, look at me”, but in the spirit of “If a dunce like me can become a competent trader, then anyone can”. If you’re a frustrated newbie, then rest assured that many of us have been there, many others are still in that place, but with determination and dedication, it’s possible to come out of the pain barrier, and see the sunshine on the other side. Happy trading.

Hi @Hielke, yourself and another member has asked for this. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that my trading journal is nothing fancy or unique - it's just some Excel and Word documents. But they have been extremely vital to my development. What I think we can do in a few days is to start a new thread dedicated to journalling - where everyone can chip in with what sort of information they like to maintain, what they find useful, etc etc. We don't have such a thread on SO, and I think it would be useful. Totally agreed. For me personally, once Covid goes away, I will be doing a lot of travelling so will not be able to do this full-time, but this is exactly the sort of returns I would be looking for. I am not in any way implying that one should give up their day jobs, but it's very possible to make a decent full-time living from trading these strategies given a $100K portfolio. Just to re-iterate that the transformation and growth occurs when we create our own trades. When we just follow someone else's trade, then physiologically, we are not as emotionally invested in it. If it goes wrong, we're upset at losing money of course, but we have the convenience of mentally blaming someone else for it. When we enter our own trade, then we hold ourselves more accountable and we have to look internally to explain why it didn't work out. Similarly, a successful outcome is even more sweeter.

😁 That feeling when..... Its like a Promethean spark that changes everything.....you suddenly get the confidence to progress to stage 6: doing your own trades => which gets you out of the mugs game of trying to chase alerts => which -after a few more missteps- eventually gets you onto the path to consistency. NB. Alerts are great for learning exactly as you've laid out; by serving as material to understand why did Kim/Yowster do X now and why did they take profit now and....but they're not copy+paste=Learjet Thanks for sharing @zxcv64

This is a fascinating thread, I find that I'm interested in everybody's story of how they came to be here, now, in this conversation. I don't know about how many others feel the same as I but I would really enjoy, just from a human curiosity point of view to hear the stories of any others that wanted to say how they got here. Individual, retail traders get very little (trading) workplace input because most of us are alone at our computers, these kind of threads add some of the missing "coworker" input that one takes for granted in today's society. It is also kind of a "sanity check".

I completely agree. And obviously different people have different goals, different perspectives and different priorities. If someone spends some time learnings the strategies, becomes proficient and makes 50-80% on a $100k portfolio (which is completely doable, many veteran members make more), that's an extra $50-80k a year. For some people it might not be worth the effort, for others it can be a second salary (many people in the US don't make that much as a first salary, not to mention many developing countries). btw, many trading ideas shared by members are scalable far beyond the $100k limit we recommend, and this is where treating it as a trading community and not an alert service can be really useful. Many members told me that a single trading idea shared by another member covered their subscription fee for 5-10 years..

This is a great post that illustrates both the journey one goes through with SteadyOptions and why that journey may not be for everyone. I was an SO member for a year-plus. Learned a ton, had some winners, had some losers, but ultimately decided that the style of trading was just not for me. As you can see here, it's really a second job. It never made sense for me to put in that much time for something that would be 10-20% of my overall investment portfolio. But, it made me a better investor. As you can see by the fact that I'm posting, here, I still like reading Kim's emails. Dan

@zxcv64 this post definitely qualifies as "post of the month". Maybe even of the year. Thank you so much for sharing your experience!