Leaderboard

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.

As has become my end of year tradition, I’ve broken down the Steady Options 2023 trade performance by trade type. Numbers were taken directly from the data in the Performance screen. Here’s are this year’s stats along with some comments from my perspective. Where applicable, I added totals from prior years for comparison. 2023 was a year where market volatility was declining for most of the year (as opposed to 2022 where the VIX stayed above 20 for almost the entire year). There were a couple of periods where VIX got into the 20’s, but for most of the year it declined, getting to ~12 by the end of the year – a level not seen since pre-COVID times. This meant RV’s for both calendars and straddles were lower, so we were able to use both of these trades. Pre-Earnings Calendars 65 Trades – 55 win, 9 loss,1 break-even (85% win) – Average Gain +9.56% 2022: 11 trades (64% win) – Average Loss -9.55% 2021: 110 trades (79% win) – Average Gain +12.82% 2020: 33 trades (85% win) – Average Gain +21.97% 2019: 54 trades (65% win) – Average Gain +9.27% 2018: 40 trades (78% win) – Average Gain +9.61% 2017: 31 trades (84% win) – Average Gain +13.81% 2016: 44 trades (80% win) - Average Gain +15.07% 2015: 51 trades (80% win) – Average Gain +12.67% 2014: 48 trades (71% win) – Average Gain +13.80% 2013: 24 trades (88% win) – Average Gain +20.60% Comments: We were able to do a lot of calendar trades again (our 2nd highest yearly total) due to the falling market volatility making more trades look attractive with less downside risk. Very good overall winning percentage. Average gain per trade was down a bit by calendar standards from prior years, but still good. I believe this was due to willingness to take some smaller gains when stock price moved away from strikes and having some shorter-duration trades. Earnings calendars continue to be a core SO strategy. Straddles/Strangles 166 Trades - 104 win, 59 loss, 3 break-even (64% win) – Average Gain +1.65% Breaking down further by hedged and non-hedged: Non-Hedged – 82 win, 49 loss, 3 break-even (62% win), average gain +1.79% Hedged – 22 win, 10 loss (69% win), average gain +1.03% 2022: 148 trades (71% win) – Average Gain +4.89% 2021: 129 trades (68% win) – Average Gain +3.27% 2020: 118 trades (67% win) – Average Gain +2.80% 2019: 106 trades (68% win) – Average Gain +3.58% 2018: 72 trades (83% win) – Average Gain +5.40% 2017: 77 trades (79% win) – Average Gain +5.02% 2016: 18 trades (72% win) – Average Gain +5.19% 2015: 44 trades (68% win) – Average Gain +2.61% 2014: 74 trades (62% win) – Average Gain +2.54% 2013: 104 trades (57% win) – Average Gain +1.35% Comments: Highest ever number of straddle/strangle trades. Our number of straddle trades, in general, has been ramping up in recent years after the RV analysis tools became available. Overall winning percentage was down a bit, but roughly two-thirds of trades showed a profit of some degree. Average gain per trade was lower than prior years. Years where VIX was in decline for large portions of the year have typically showed smaller average gains. This is because although we find many trades where RV levels look good, we see less large stock price moves and/or RV spikes which means less larger gains. For example, last year when VIX was 20+ for most of the year we had ~40% of trades hit the 10% gain target but this year only ~20% of trades hit that target. From a downside risk perspective, we kept most losses under 10% and no losses were 20% or more. The smaller number of trades hitting 10%+ gains is what hurt the average this year. Very low risk trades as it takes RV dropping much more than their prior cycle tendencies to be significant losers. We haven’t had a trade lose more than 20% in multiple years. RIC trades 34 Trades - 24 win, 10 loss (71% win) – Average Gain +5.47% Comments: We did quite of few of these non-earnings trades on high liquidity stocks this year, and had a very good win rate and average gain per trade. We started by using hedged RICs where we opened a RIC and calendar hedge at the same time. But, after noticing that overall gains coming from the calendar in the minimal stock price move scenario often took until expiration Friday to materialize, we switched to opening only the RIC (although pushing it out a week) which allowed us to hit the 10% gain target on a lesser stock price move. We only added a calendar hedge after about a week if the stock price didn’t move – interestingly, most trades hit the gain target prior to having to add the calendar hedge. We plan on continuing to use this trade going forward. Other Trades SPY Iron Condors: 4 win, 4 loss (50% win) – Average Loss -6.81%. This trade was difficult when VIX was low because IC wings had to be closer to ATM compared to higher VIX times, so it was easier to breach those strikes. We may use this trade again, but likely target entry for times when VIX is higher. Hedged ratios and BWBs: 3 win, 1 loss (75% win) – Average Gain +3.75%. Will likely do more of these now that TrusyJules is contributing official trades as he has a lot of experience with these trades. S&P500 addition date trade: 1 trade which produced a 26.60% gain. This trade, which plays for stock price decline (or at least staying flat) after the S&P500 addition date back-tested very well and our first official trade produced a nice gain. We will likely do trades like this with future S&P500 stock additions. Summary 2023 Steady Options model portfolio was up around +114% for the year. This result was pretty typical for most years – which is nice to say that trades based on SO techniques had such a high return as “typical”. Straddles were smaller winners this year, but the same declining market volatility that caused this also enabled us to open more calendar trades. When one type of trade doesn’t do as well due to market conditions, another type of trade does better so you look to the result of having multiple trade types working in conjunction. As always, I’d like to highlight and thank the SO community. We continue to have a group of very smart people that seems to grow each year who share their ideas and knowledge – this is what makes SO great. Looking forward to 2024. 2022 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2021 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2020 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2019 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2018 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2017 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2016 Year End Performance by Trade Type 2015 Year End Performance by Trade Type

Thanks Kim and SBatch for inviting me to be a mentor! For those who might not know or remember me, I was on the Steady Options forum for a few years before I changed my trading this year to be a bit slower and got involved with Steady Vol. I've been trading options for a decade or so, but I only started seeing real success once I came here. This is no question the smartest community of traders I've ever come across. I've really enjoyed getting into the Steady Vol strategy and volatility trading in general, and I'm looking forward to helping others learn about them!

Thank you @Yowster for the excellent summary as usual! We continue delivering the most consistent and stable performance 12 years in a row! It's nice to call a 114% return "typical". And the beauty of our trading philosophy is having different strategies in our model portfolio that compliment each other. As I mentioned in one of the discussion topics, our performance reporting is very conservative. We rarely have more than 5 trades open at the same time, but with 5 trades open, you are basically only 50% invested. If you made 10% on the invested capital, we would report as 5% return on the total account. No service is doing it, but this is the only correct way to do it. But it also means that members can invest more than 10% per trade on trades that are more conservative and more liquid. Also there are tons of unofficial trades that don't make it to the official portfolio due to their size.being too large for 10k portfolio. If we reported performance like most other services do (return on investment and not on the whole portfolio), our reported performance would be 300%+. More details: How We Calculate Returns? Thank you again to everyone for their support, and of course special thanks to our contributors @Yowster @krisbee @TrustyJules @cwelsh @Jesse and @SBatch We would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and healthy and prosperous 2024!

Thanks, @Kim, although I have to admit I didn't expect it - I've been less active than normal for personal reasons, for the past few months.

Member of the month award for August goes to our long time mentor @rasar for his continuous contribution to the forum discussions.

I'm pleased to announce that our long term mentor and SteadyVol contributor @SBatch will become a SteadyOptions contributor and start posting his TLT strategy for our official model portfolio. SteadyOptions has now FIVE official contributors: @Kim @Yowster @krisbee @TrustyJules and @SBatch I recommend following all of us, it will save you time to follow each trade individually. We become better and better over the years!

Member of the month award for September goes to @Romuald for his continuous contribution to the forum discussions and especially RIC trading ideas.

Please welcome our new mentor @Peeyotch He will be responsible for mentoring on the SteadyVol forum.

If anyone is following the unofficial Iron Condor, I bought back the call spread for .20. 01/18/2024 13:13:30 01/18/2024 13:13:30 Sell Close Buy Close 20 20 TLT 03/15/2024 102.00 Call TLT 03/15/2024 100.00 Call Net Debit 0.20 DAY Sold @ 0.28 Bought @ 0.48

Thanks @Kim and thanks to all members and participants at SteadyOptions. I’ve tried many options platforms discussions, since 4 years I’m trading options now, but this one is clearly the most serious and the most clever. Keep going guys!

Member of the month award for July goes to @Romuald for his continuous contribution to the forum discussions.

I'm pleased to announce that our long term mentor @TrustyJules will become a contributor and start posting official trades. He is likely to start with his famous SPY IC "boring trade", but might add other strategies over time. SteadyOptions has now four official contributors: @Kim @Yowster @krisbee and @TrustyJules I recommend following all of us, it will save you time to follow each trade individually. We become better and better over the years!

Member of the month award for November goes to @tooriginal for his continuous contribution of trading ideas and analysis.

This trading system is generally very forgiving of timing. If vol isn’t moving much, the pricing of the position (especially if it is brand new) is not likely to move much either. Even if vol does move, you can watch it for when it comes back into the area where the trade was placed and you can probably get in for a similar price. This contrasts with Steady Options where a quick trigger finger or proactive standing orders are often needed to get into advantageous trades. Those are not necessary here. Skipping a trade is really only called for when there is not enough profit potential left in the trade when you are trying to get in.

There is a definitive correlation between crude oil prices and the 10 year Treasury yield, led slightly by crude. That's the edge. The option trades around this are endless. It makes sense, higher crude price, higher inflation, higher yields. 1 year chart: Sure looks like the 10 year yield is about to move higher very soon. 5 year chart: Absolutely remarkable. Directional trades can be huge winners here. Crude leads the 10 year yield (therefore their prices are inversely correlated).

A few weeks ago we introduced a new strategy to our members. While a double diagonal spread is a well known strategy, we are trading it with a tweak. The double diagonal strategy is part of SteadyOptions service, along with straddles, strangles, calendars etc. One of our members have mentioned that "I realize they are lower risk in the sense that they can be open longer without big losses, but feels to me like playing not to lose." Here is a response from our contributor @Yowster who introduced the strategy: Well... Lay me outline reasons why I like them (and I've been doing a ton more of them in personal trades in addition to the official ones, and are tracking even more of them). They are extremely low risk, of all the trades I've had on or tracked only one (a DE personal trade) was down by 10% or more at any given time provided I exit prior to T-0, and I wound up able to close that one for a small gain. I've had many make gains of 15% or more (NVDA, SQ, PANW were recent trades I closed within the past few days that fall into this category). Of the trades I've placed since January (about 25 of them), roughly 75% of them have been winning trades with an average gain across winners and losers of ~5% (and there were a few large winners like BA and MRNA that I only tracked and didn't have on). I compare the results to straddle trades since they have similar profit targets, although holding periods can be longer. Compare a 75% win rate with ~5% average gain to our historical straddle results found here and these DD returns are very good. One of the common things heard from many members over the years is that the shorter duration straddle trades are difficult to manage when they can't be watching the market all the time. DD's don't fall into this category as they can be open for longer periods of time, you can easily have GTC orders to close at profit targets and you don't have to worry about avoiding larger losses when RV suddenly spikes downward - so DDs are very good trades for people who can't be watching the market all the time. Regarding the "playing not to lose" comment. Managing downside risk as much as possible is one of my primary goals with SO trades, as larger percentage losses can have a large negative impact on portfolio performance. I look at DDs simply like this - I can have roughly 75% of trades be profitable (some smaller gains, but quite a few over 10% and some getting to 20%), but have almost all losses limited to below 10% (most losers below 5%) and that math works out very well over the longer term. Currently, we have 4 DDs open as official trades and this will be the most you are likely to see at any given time - thereby leaving plenty of slots for other trade types. Members have different risk tolerances so not every trade type we use is a good match for all members. But for people who can't be monitoring the market all the time and for some trades where you'd like a higher capital allocation because of the lower downside risk, DDs can be a good match this category. As one of our members mentioned: "Regarding the "playing not to lose" comment. Managing downside risk as much as possible is one of my primary goals with SO trades, as larger percentage losses can have a large negative impact on portfolio performance. I look at DDs simply like this - I can have roughly 75% of trades be profitable (some smaller gains, but quite a few over 10% and some getting to 20%), but have almost all losses limited to below 10% (most losers below 5%) and that math works out very well over the longer term. Many option forums or traders will report a win percentage, total percentage over a few years. However, I will say that over long periods of time, the unlikely occurrence of a higher risk/higher return strategy of will greatly reduce a portfolio. The cost of the extra options easily is worth the alleviation of risk. If you look at their historical performance. This was once of there better performing trades over time. So thank you Yowster. I also like that some trades are large enough stocks that you can exceed the recommended allocation without significantly effecting the float with a larger trade, as a straddle/strangle under a dollar needs is less desirable for me. I completely respect this strategy is for a 100k portfolio. I may be trading occasionally more, but that's a different topic that has been discussed I believe." My 2 cents: To put things in perspective, we closed 9 DDs so far with average return of 5.1% and average holding period of 9 days. Only 2 losers, both 2-3%, and none of the trades was down more than 5% at any given time. Even when the stock doesn't move, the losses are minimal. If someone believes that 5% is not a good return for options trades, I suggest reading Is 5% A Good Return For Options Trades? Yes, some options gurus will tell you that you should aim for at least 100% gain in each option trade, otherwise it is not worth the risk. What they don't tell you is the risk you will be taking. So I would say that on risk adjusted basis, those results almost too good to be true. They are also pretty easy to open, and because the holding periods are longer than straddles, members have more time to enter. Closing can be done with GTC order, and many times members get better results - just check the previous DD discussion topics. Commissions impact is negligible - in today's environment, many brokers have zero commissions, and even for people who pay 0.30-0.50 per contract (which is high by the current standards), the commissions impact is less than 0.5% per trade. As for the statement "playing not to lose" - guilty as charged. Limiting losses is our main goal at SteadyOptions. And if you look at our track record, in the last 12 years we were able to produce triple digit gains while keeping the drawdowns very small. I can only salute @Yowster for constantly coming with new variations of well known strategies in every market environment. Another consideration is trade allocation. Lets say you are willing to risk 2% of the account per trade. If you know that the maximum risk is not likely to be more than 10-15%, you can easily allocate 10-12% per trade. But if your risk is 100%, your allocation should not exceed 2% per trade. So your overall performance will not necessarily be better with high risk high reward trades, but with much higher risk. So yes, we are playing not to lose. Keeping your losers small is one of the key elements in trading. Subscribe to SteadyOptions now and experience the full power of options trading at your fingertips. Click the button below to get started! Join SteadyOptions Now!

We are pleased to inform our members that this trade will become part of our official model portfolio.

Don’t know how many times the point that SO isn’t an alert service has to be repeated. Yet I enter official trades at or better than official frequently, sometimes days after the official, and yes sometimes better pricing continues to get ‘better’, I know when to cut losses. Very often I will enter my own variant, sometimes works out better, sometimes not. For me the crux is that I’ve learnt more about how to trade independently without blowing the account here than anywhere else, with strategies that are intrinsically safe especially in difficult markets when my long positions suffer.. Most of us mere mortals have to start small, I appreciate that SO continues to use 1k trades as the starting trade size, doesn’t stop anyone from scaling. But it’s especially what I’ve learnt here that makes the service so valuable to me. SO is the most transparent service out there, hands down and it’s perpetually innovating strategies too. really I couldn’t ask for more. I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, here’s to a new year with more understanding and less conflict. @t'pee

@DVK426 In addition, we always have a trade on. Therefore, let’s say for example you missed the official exit at 3.85 and could only get 3.82. However, the official may have paid 3.60 to open the new trade and for example you’re able to get in for 3.57. This dynamic occurs as the front and back month move pretty closely with each other, so it essentially cancels itself out making fast timing not important.

Well, this is not related to options trading or investing, but I know there are many members here who like the game of chess. And if not, just look at it as an art collection. https://www.kim-chess-collection.com/

Thanks @Kim. I've felt that lately I have participated less in forum, It is good to be appreciated. I recently moved from my long time residence and the move pulled my attention away from trading for a while. But that is done and I have been able to focus on SO more.

Member of the month award for June goes to @Ringandpinion for his continuous contribution of trading ideas and analysis.

Getting started with Steady Options I found the forum sometimes hard to follow until I worked out various abbreviations. Sharing the list to help others. API Application Programming Interface ATM At The Money EOD End of Day IB Interactive Brokers IC Iron Condor IV Implied Volatility IMO In My Opinion ITM In the Money ONE OptionNET Explorer OTM Out Of The Money RIC Reverse Iron Condor RV Relative Value. RV = option strategy price / stock price, a percentage. SA Seeking Alpha SO Steady Options TOS Think or Swim TWS IB's Trader WorkStation. Runs on Windows, MAC, Linux. Any other abbreviations or corrections write a comment below and I'll update this list.

Happy to be MOM again. Just trying my best to keep to the conversation going. There are so many tickers-- the buffet threads have been great reminders of what I've been missing. Q4 of 2022 earnings were a difficult time. Q1 of '23 shaped out really well. Here's to a productive Q2 starting in July!