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Hi all, I see there are multiples questions about the website, i figure i will create a dedicated thread to answer all of them. Link to the website : https://www.volatilityhq.com/payments/confirm/1/?coupon_code=SO502506 (you need to create an account first). For members of this forum, there is a 50% forever coupon is SO502506 and must be redeemed by Jun 30 2025. The 50% discount will be applied for as long as you keep your subscription (please make sure to update your credit card if it expires). FAQ: How can i contact you for support questions ? How much do you charge ? Why are you not using paypal ? How can i cancel the subscription ? Is there a documentation ? I'm not clear how to interpret the charts. Why is the website not free anymore ? I would like to see X feature to be implemented ? Can you do it ? Where are you getting your data ? Can i share a screenshot of the charts from https://www.volatilityhq.com on SteadyOptions forum ? Do you charge sales tax ?

SteadyOptions has a wealth of information, spread over tens of thousands of posts. Some of the posts can be very useful and inspiring, but they are lost in the big sea. I would like to dedicate a separate topic to the most useful and inspiring quotes from our members. It could be related to overall trading philosophy, a specific strategy, or some "hot topic", like "why you should not fear assignment". I will be posting them "as is" without any changes or comments. A trigger to this idea was a recent post by @rasarthat I would like to use as an opening post: I have found this one piece of advice very relevant, and truly liberating. It was difficult, initially, to avoid comparing my performance against other members'. It was sometimes depressing to make "only" 5% on a trade, when others boasted of 15% and 20%. However, whenever I looked back on past trades, I couldn't remember anyone else's trades; I could only look at my own winners and losers. That same 5% suddenly looked really nice compared to another trade a day later, where I lost 30%. And finally, when computing my gains and losses for the year, it was the same thing. The only thing that mattered how much I made (or lost 😐), not any other member, nor even the SO official portfolio.

Gains are what ultimately drives profit, but keeping the losses at manageable levels is very important too. Keeping those losses at the manageable levels really factors in 2 things: The RV and historical performance analysis identifies trade candidates where larger losses are the exception - and it will take RV drops significantly higher than averages to cause the outsized loss (which unfortunately does happen from time to time). Risk vs Reward - the SO trades are structured so that they can easily make as much (or more) than they can lose, so its easier to recoup losses from losing trades. Trade structures where you risk $5 to make a max of $1 are those than can kill you when the stocks do the wrong thing and get you closer to that max loss level, so you need multiple winning trades to recover from one loser. @Yowster

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

I have been with the community for last 6 months, and I have learned that instead of complaining about the existing SO process or methods, it is best to focus on various things to learn, and believe me, there is endless thing to learn here.. fun part is that it is never ending. I suggest that you start small, pick few SO repeats, read every thread of past 3-4 cycles of that trades (calendar) of each, create a date wise upcoming calendar for yourself and place these stocks on these dates, slowly you can start predicting what will come next in few days. It has started working out for me, and it looks like it is working out for a lot of people. To give recent examples, I was able to open my positions before SO’s alert on MU, TSM and FSD. Once you can predict successfully, use SO alerts and community contributions as validations and further guidance. Also, entering into a position is only a very small item, the vast experience of SO will be at your help on deciding how to close, when to close, what worked , what did not work, how and when to roll etc. My advice might sound bitter and boring at first, I think that’s the right thing to do, there is no alternative to hardwork. Paid or unpaid, no subscription can serve you gold plated ready made food. @White_Oak

This right here is the value of this community. We aren’t really buying an alert service to use. We are buying a community that also has an alert service to show us a dozen examples a month of how to put it into action. That is much more valuable to me — to empower me to be independent rather than ‘hook’ me on a service that keeps me continually dependent on someone else. @nrexpress

Here is @cwelsh shares his experience of trading big volume in a fund: Open interest and volume, almost completely, are completely irrelevant. This has been the single biggest surprise. I have traded hundreds of contracts where I was the ONLY volume with zero issues. The bigger deal is the spread. If there is a two cent spread, I typically can get my order easily filled. If there's a $4.00 spread (e.g. PCLN), I get creamed. The PCLN trade took HOURS to get filled, and was filled 1-2 contracts at a time, sometimes as many as 5. Getting out was a nightmare and I had to leg out individually at bad prices. By and large now I'm planning on avoiding the big spreads. That's unfortunate because those spreads allow smaller traders (5 contracts or less) to snipe away and get great fills; Option pricing systems are NOT efficient or fair. There is no "queue." In other words if I put an order in for 100 contracts of the $50 straddle on stock ABC at $1.00 and five minutes later you do the same thing at $1.00 you might get filled first. There is no FIFO or LIFO system. This means its also possible that I have an order for $1.00 and you do for $0.99 and the price moves and you get a fill but I don't -- even though I offered more. This happens on HIGH volume options because there essentially is just a screen the market makers look at, and if my order is buried, they can miss it. I have seen this happen when I had multiple orders in trying to push the price down. E.g. I wanted a $1.00 fill for 900 contracts, so I put in orders at $1.00 at $0.99 and $0.98 -- for 900 contracts each (with a cancel order in for as soon as I get 100 contracts filled). My theory was to drive the price down, or make it look like there was demand to push the price down so I could get the strike I wanted. Imagine my surprise when the $0.99 got filled, but not the $1.00. This also means it makes sense on higher volume stocks to "refresh" your order by resubmitting it. There have been dozens of times I've had an order sitting for an hour, I cancel and replace and its instantly filled at the same price. "Smart" routing is sometimes not that smart too. This is because when I submit my $1.00 order, it might be routed to the CBOE because CBOE has the best price at $1.03 currently. But over the next five minutes another exchange might become the best priced one -- my order won't necessarily be moved to the better exchange because it's already on one. Another reason to resubmit. Lastly, Smart routing, DESPITE what you've been told, does not cross exchange map. In other words, if you have an order for $1.00 on a straddle and there is one exchange that has the put for $0.50 and the call for $0.51 and a separate exchange that has the put for $0.51 and the call for $0.50, the software will NOT split your order between the two exchanges so as to pick off the better priced option off each. This is another reason you can have a straddle priced at the natural price, but not get a fill -- the natural price is not from one exchange, rather multiples.