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Most members will know www.art-of.trading, an open website I run with the purpose of easy plotting RV charts. Now I have some bad news to convey. But there is some good news also. First the bad news: I will discontinue www.art-of.trading. After running it and offering its content for free for more than a year now I will not maintain the webservice longer in its current form. Daily updates will continue for now but the site will not be accessible anymore within some short period of time. Now here is the good news: There will be a replacement - a good one. Taking the essence of numerous discussions here on Steady Options and my personal take-aways and learnings from running art-of.trading I am up to offer an entirely new service for providing tools for trading the Steady Options way (in the same breath I should add a big thank you for all remarks and positive feedback I have gotten over the entire period. That is what made me take that route. On top I see that Steady Options continues to be a unique community on the web for trading options, with very good people and quality content - reason enough to stick around). I invite you to take a look at https://www.chartaffair.com Currently the site is working but open only to beta testers and not 'officially' released yet. Am still looking for some more beta testers. If you want to have early access I invite you to PM me for a free invitation code. Beta testers will get free access for some time once the site launches officially. Technically chartaffair.com is a more professional approach to running a webservice. And I have completely redesigned its code base. It uses a new data architecture, specifically targeted at handling and serving from large amounts of data. This together with fast hosting hardware and the use of new web technologies allows for two things: 1) Greatly increase available information You will find much more tables and graphs for each symbol with all information needed for trading the SO way: Historical implied move vs. actual move (as graphs and tables), credit needed for hedging straddle decay, actual performance of straddles around earnings. But also basic stuff like the next dividend ex-date or how long before the actual earnings announcement the announcement date gets confirmed (more details on specific features in later posts). Also, you will find practically any symbol now which comes at least with some traded options volume. 2) All information for a symbol aggregated on one single page Having all information in one place elminates the need to jump back and forth between different pages and websites, having to reenter the same symbol again and again (which I understood is an issue). A side bar allows for easy and fast navigation up and down on the page. All features came out of discussions and from my own experiences while trading. I believe they will be helpful. I will introduce some in greater detail in a couple of follow-up posts in this thread. On top of that there are a couple more pages to be added to this site. They are in planning and partly already in implementation. They will be added in the course of the next weeks/months. Chartaffair will be a paid service after the beta phase (it is not possible elsewise. But it will be worth it.) Now, if you found art-of.trading helpful over the course of last year, I invite you to sign up to chartaffair.com when the beta phase is completed. You will find it even more helpful.

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.

@Bullfighter and @mccoyb53 I came upon the system I mentioned while researching sector rotation strategies. The web is full of references to how sector rotation beats the S&P. The same set of papers are dragged out to support this ad nauseum. One by Mebane Faber always gets a mention (I like Mebane Faber), but there's a dozen others; Asness (I like Asness), etc. I worked for sometime to validate this using the Spyder sector ETFs . I could never show the sector rotation strategy exceeded S&P returns in the long term. Unless they consider occasional returns in excess of 0.1% as outperformance. I could show spurts of outperformance, followed by underperformance, to ultimately end in the same place as simply owning SPY over a 20 year period. But with the code for testing that (I use R), I started playing around with other things. And I stumbled onto a set of parameters in unrelated "financial toolkits" that provided a novel entry and exit trigger; and I built a variant rotation scheme that did outperform SPY in a robust manner. I've found no reference to my happenstance discovery in system strategies, so I'm holding that secret sauce close to the vest for now. I don't mean to be a tease about this. I brought it up to emphasize the best systems are often simple. But finding them can take years and proves devilishly hard. I spent several hundred hours on what now I run with a few dozen lines of code. Most of that for grabbing data, compiling output. The actual 'secret sauce' is less than 50 lines of code. BTW, this system is not scalable beyond a 7 figure account, which may explain why it lives under the radar. My systems building philosophy is strongly influenced by a famous math theorem that states: for any continuous curve (any financial time series will do, drawn as a line chart), there exists a polynomial of finite degree that will match the curve to arbitrary precision. This theorem establishes the downfall of 99% of back testing efforts. A historic timeseries is a fixed, continuous curve. So the theorem above guarantees that with enough indicators and parameter adjustments, you can build a system that matches that time series dot for dot. So most back testing efforts are often futile exercises of crafting the (metaphorical) polynomial that matches the data curve they're testing on. The more indicators you're using, the greater the probability you're just building the equivalent of a curve matching polynomial, which holds true only for that one, fixed time series. As soon as I'm using more than 4 inputs (which is two to many), I get that "uh-oh" feeling. Of course, a complicated system that works on an in-sample set and proves robust on out-of-sample, or on time series from other classes that weren't used to develop the back test, is legitimate. So simple is not a requirement. But the combination of simplicity with robustness is a beautiful thing. I find CMLViz has some properties like that, so I wanted to defend it a bit.

I use the gf58ometer available here:https://steadyoptions.com/forums/forum/topic/6710-gf58s-intraday-rv-monitor-for-interactive-brokers/. Recent mods to it have made it a lot better. You do need an active IB account though and you need to use the "Stable" version of IB TWS, the API on this version works best. Chartaffair has one too but I haven't used it. I think you can use this one without an IB account.