Leaderboard

Our brains have evolved to be successful hunter gatherers, but terrible for trading, as our natural tendency of being loss averse and risk averse means that we tend to hold to losers and get rid of small winners. When I joined here I did an analysis of all the logged trades from the performance page to understand how each of the strategies behaved, typical drawdowns and profits, exceptional drawdowns and profits, etc. This gives my hunter gatherer brain the reassurance that there is an statistical edge, and in order not to ruin it, I need to be consistent in execution. This means sizing, not giving up on a strategy when there is a period of draught, not joining only after a period of logged steady wins, and respect the win and loss conditions of each strategy. Otherwise I risk doing something that will lose the statistical edge. That makes me accept losers and give room to grow to small winners. @Bullfighter

Over the years, I've seen a few disgruntled members where they've posted similar comments, but they all seem to share the same trait - they expect fills at the same price as the official trades AND be able to enter right around the same time as the official. It's the second part of that that is the real kicker and the reason we say to be patient with fills, especially with trades where T-0 is a few weeks away - and why we started tagging things with [BETTER PRICING] on both entry and exit to show how often that happens. I like to use another stock analogy for this matching of official pricing - when an analyst issues a stock upgrade causing the stock price to rise, is everyone going to be able to react to the upgrade and buy the stock at the same price? Of course not, and I don't think anyone would expect that to be the case, but with these option trades some people get very upset when the can't match prices. I understand that the amount of time members can spend on trading and trade analysis varies greatly. Many people have other jobs that require significant time away from trading (I was in that same boat for many years). But if your goal is to treat SO purely as an alert service then there is a much greater chance that you may be disappointed. As had been said many times by many members - those who get the most out of SO are those that learn the trades and make them their own by applying the techniques to their own personal trades. I thought it might be beneficial to say how I handle entry into official calendar trades. As Kim has mentioned, although we talk about some trades in advance, for the majority of both our official trades we enter them without specifically notifying each other in advance - so with the calendar trades I am in the same boat as everyone else: I find that I rarely enter calendar trades on the same days as the official. I do keep track of planned trades and target entry dates, so sometimes I'll already be in the trade prior to the official, but in most cases I enter later. Calendar entry is based on either RV well below average to enter early, or time based when the RV hits the inflection date for the slope of the RV rise starting to increase. Ideally you can find trades with both, but especially in times when we are seeing some bigger market move days, my preference is to enter when the daily RV increase is greatest (so the trade can show gains quicker). If I do enter early at RV well below average, I'm more prone to exit at an smaller gain and then look to re-enter if RV drops back down or when the RV chart is in the time period of bigger daily increase. @Yowster