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You are right, the downside is very small (depending on the strike you buy), but the upside is limited as well - you need the stock to increase in value by the price of the put just to break even. So the stock can go up 20-30% and you are still up only 5-10%. As usual, there is a tradeoff to any strategy. It is true that synthetic stock requires less margin, but I would be very careful to base the position sizing on margin and not the stock value. For example, to buy AAPL stock, you will need $13,300. So lets say you have 13,300 portfolio and buy 100 shares, no leverage. Now lets say you buy a synthetic position that requires only $3,300 margin. If the stock declines to $100 (25%), your loss is $3,300 or 100% on margin. If you purchased 4 contracts in your $13,300 portfolio (which you could do based on margin), your account would be toast.

Thanks for reporting. It seems it’s the same issue as few weeks ago. The data is imported but the rv charts are not up to updated. I wasn’t able yet to understand the root cause (can’t reproduce outside the production environment), and there were no changes in my code that could explain that. I’m forcing the reimport to see if that fixes the issue for yesterday’s data.

I was playing around with Kurt's style of trades recently. The idea is to buy a stock you are keen on and then also buy a deep ITM long term married put so that you don't have to pay too much for the extrinsic portion of the put. Your risk is then limited to the amount you pay for the extrinsic which is typically 7%-10% of the cost of the stock and the put. The trade off is obviously that the put acts as a drag on any increase in the stock price. However, his key trick is then to sell various short term options (covered calls, ratios, etc) in order to pay off the extrinsic part of married put and get to a risk-free status. Or, and this specifically appealed, use the dividends to pay off the extrinsic value over time. Sounds good from a risk point of view but I wasn't convinced on the reward side of the equation. Here is the published track record. https://www.radioactivetrading.com/ptrackm.asp?pid=12

If I'm not mistaken, that monitor dock has been around a while. I use the Monitor Grid instead. The dock makes my screen a little too busy.

The award for December 2020 goes to @zxcv64 mostly for his My Seven Stages of being an SO Member post, which became one of our most popular posts ever, and a must read for all new members. Thank you @zxcv64 for sharing your invaluable experience!