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In this article, I will try to help you understand Options Greeks and use them to your advantage. The Basics First, a quick reminder for those less familiar with the Options Greeks. The Delta is the rate of change of the price of the option with respect to its underlying price. The delta of an option ranges in value from 0 to 1 for calls (0 to -1 for puts) and reflects the increase or decrease in the price of the option in response to a 1 point movement of the underlying asset price. In dollar terms, the delta is from $0 to +$100 for calls ($0 to -$100 for puts). Delta can be viewed as a percentage probability an option will wind up in-the-money at expiration. Therefore, an at-the-money option would have a .50 Delta or 50% chance of being in-the-money at expiration. Deep-in-the-money options will have a much larger Delta or much higher probability of expiring in-the-money. The Theta is a measurement of the option's time decay. The theta measures the rate at which options lose their value, specifically the time value, as the expiration draws nearer. Generally expressed as a negative number, the theta of an option reflects the amount by which the option's value will decrease every day. When you buy options, the theta is your enemy. When you sell them, the theta is your friend. Option sellers use theta to their advantage, collecting time decay every day. The same is true of credit spreads, which are really selling strategies. Calendar spreads involve buying a longer-dated option and selling a nearer-dated option, taking advantage of the fact that options expire faster as they approach expiration. The Vega is a measure of the impact of changes in the Implied Volatility on the option price. Specifically, the vega of an option expresses the change in the price of the option for every 1% change in the Implied Volatility. Options tend to be more expensive when volatility is higher. When you buy options, the vega is your friend. When you sell them, the vega is your enemy. Short premium positions like Iron Condors or Butterflies will be negatively impacted by an increase in implied volatility, which generally occurs with downside market moves. When entering Iron Condors or Butterflies, it makes sense to start with a slightly short delta bias. If the market stays flat or goes up, the short premium will come in and our position benefits. However, if the market goes down, the short vega position will go against us - this is where the short delta hedge will help. The Gamma is a measure of the rate of change of its delta. The gamma of an option is expressed as a percentage and reflects the change in the delta in response to a one point movement of the underlying stock price. When you buy options, the gamma is your friend. When you sell them, the gamma is your enemy. Selling options with close expiration will give you higher positive theta per day but higher negative gamma. That means that a sharp move of the underlying will cause much higher loss. So if the underlying doesn't move, then theta will kick off and you will just earn money with every passing day. But if it does move, the loss will become very large very quickly. You should never ignore negative gamma. Example Lets analyze the Greeks using one of our recent trades as an example: Buy to open 4 ORCL July 17 2015 44 put Buy to open 4 ORCL July 17 2015 44 call Price: $2.66 debit This trade is called a straddle option strategy. It is a neutral strategy in options trading that involves the simultaneously buying of a put and a call on the same underlying, strike and expiration. A straddle is vega positive, gamma positive and theta negative trade. That means that all other factors equal, the straddle will lose money every day due to the time decay, and the loss will accelerate as we get closer to expiration. With the stock sitting at $44, the trade is almost delta neutral. Lets see how other Greeks impact this trade. The theta is your worst enemy as we get closer to expiration. This trade had 44 days to expiration, so the negative theta is relatively small ($3 or 1% of the straddle price). As we get closer to expiration, the negative theta becomes larger and the impact on the trade is more severe. The gamma is your best friend as we get closer to expiration. That means that the stock move will benefit the trade more as time passes. The vega is your friend. If you buy options when IV is low and it goes higher, the trade starts making money even if the stock doesn't move. This is the thesis behind our pre-earnings straddles. Make them Work For You If you expect a big move, go with closer expiration. But if the move doesn't materialize, you will start losing money much faster, unless the IV starts to rise. It basically becomes a "theta against gamma" fight. When you expect an increase in IV (before earnings for example), it's a "theta against vega" fight, and the large gamma is the added bonus. When you are net "short" options, the opposite is true. For example, Iron Condor is a vega negative and theta positive trade. That means that it benefits from the decline in Implied Volatility (IV) and the time decay. If you initiate the trade when IV is high and IV is declining during the life of the trade, the trade wins twice: from the declining IV and the time passage. However, it is also gamma negative and the gamma accelerates as we get closer to expiration. This is the reason why I don't like holding the Iron Condor trades till expiration. Any big move of the underlying will cause big losses due to a large negative gamma. The gamma risk is often overlooked by many Condor traders. Many traders initiate the Iron Condor trades only 3-4 weeks before expiration to take advantage of a large and accelerating positive theta. They hold those trades till expiration, completely ignoring the large negative gamma and are very surprised when a big move accelerates the losses. Don't make that mistake. One possible strategy is to combine vega positive and theta positive trades with vega positive and theta negative ones. This is what we do at SteadyOptions. A Calendar spread is an example of vega positive theta positive trade. When combined with a straddle trades which are vega positive theta negative, a balance portfolio can be created. Conclusion: when you trade options, use the Greek option trading strategies to your advantage. When they fight, you should win. Like in a real life, always know who is your friend and who is your enemy. The following videos will help you understand options Greeks: Related articles: Options Trading Greeks: Theta For Time Decay Options Trading Greeks: Delta For Direction Options Trading Greeks: Gamma For Speed Options Trading Greeks: Vega For Volatility We invite you to join us and learn how we trade our Greek options trading strategies. We discuss all our trades including the Greeks on our options trading forum.

Who Was Karen the Supertrader? Karen Bruton, known better as Karen the Supertrader, is a former hedge fund manager who became famous after multiple appearances on the Tastytrade live show. Bruton started as a novice retail trader who knew virtually nothing about trading and became a multimillionaire in a handful of years. Specifically, she turned $110,000 into $41 million between 2008 and 2011 using basic option selling strategies. Following her massive personal trading success, Karen started a hedge fund called Hope Advisors. Nowadays, Karen the Supertrader is infamous because she was barred from managing outside money by the SEC. According to the SEC’s complaint, Bruton was continually rolling losing positions forward to avoid realizing a loss and thus, in the eyes of the SEC, misleading investors. Because selling options results in immediate income, it’s been the weapon of choice for traders who are hiding large losses. Nick Leeson, a rogue trader who famously brought down Barings Bank, also hid his losses by selling naked options. What Was Karen the Supertrader’s Strategy? Karen the Supertrader’s trading strategy, sometimes referred to as the “KST method,” was based on the concept of theta decay. Her approach involved short selling options with the expectations that they would become worthless upon expiration. By focusing on options that were highly likely to expire out-of-the-money, Karen leveraged the gradual erosion of their time value to her advantage. Karen focused primarily on equity index options on the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000. Focusing on a small number of highly liquid symbols allowed her to form a consistent strategy. Her strategy involved selling options that were two standard deviations out-of-the-money with expiration dates ranging between 30 and 56 days to expiration. In other words, these options were roughly 95% likely to expire worthless. As far as systematically selling options goes, Karen’s strategy is par for the course. Most traders who use a similar strategy tend to sell deep out-of-the-money (OTM) options, as they will expire worthless most of the time. The strategy tends to rack up several consecutive winning trades that are relatively small in size with a rare losing trade that will be significantly larger. Karen the Supertrader Trading Rules Let’s take a more granular look at the specific trading rules that Karen the Supertrader has publicly reported using. Firstly, she preferred a short strangle trade structure. This gave her a market neutral market outlook, taking no position on which direction the market will move next. Her only goal with the trade was for the market to remain inside her chosen strikes until expiration or until she closed the trade. Here’s an example of what a short strangle looks like: When it comes to short strangle strike selection, Karen the Supertrader used Bollinger Bands to select her strikes. Bollinger Bands are a technical indicator that plots trading bands two standard deviations away from a moving average. See the chart below for an example: She primarily traded in expiration dates ranging from 25 days to 56 days at the latest. To round up all of these rules, let’s create a rough example of an SPX short strangle trade that Karen the Supertrader might take, based on the rules she’s reported publicly in her Tastytrade interviews: ● Trade type: short strangle ● Put strike: 3875 ● Call strike: 4230 ● Expiration date: June 23 (39 days to expiration) Karen would typically take profits on winning trades, and roll out losing trades to a later expiration. Today she manages 190 million dollars, after making nearly 105 million in profits. Before we start analyzing Karen the Supertrader's strategy, lets be clear: she did NOT make 105 million in profits as TastyTrade claims. That number includes money from new investors. This headline is misleading at best, deception at worst. How much did she really make? We don't really know, but lets try to "guess". With SPX currently at 2075, she would sell May 1825 puts and 2280 calls. This is how the P/L chart would look: So she would get around $700 credit on ~21k in margin. If she holds till expiration and both options expire worthless, the trade produces 3.5% gain in 59 days. That's 21% annualized gain on 50% capital, or ~11% gain on the whole account. This assumes that both options expire worthless and no adjustment is needed. This also assumes regular margin. With her capital, she obviously gets portfolio margin, so her margin requirements are significantly less. But if she wants to take advantage of portfolio margin, she has to sell more contracts, taking much more risk. For the sake of her investors, I hope she is using 50% of the regular margin, not portfolio margin. In any case, I have hard time to see how she can make more than 25-30%/year with this strategy. Don't get me wrong, this is an excellent return - however, by selling naked options, she also takes a LOT of risk. To make 25-30%/year with this strategy, she must use a lot of portfolio margin - which means a lot of leverage. Karen the Supertrader’s strategy is also short gamma and short vega, which means as the market moves against her, the positions become worse at a greater rate. If volatility spikes like it did in 2008, her account will be gone in matter of days. Here are some questions/comments taken from public discussions about Karen SuperTrader: I really have no idea how that is possible. In the TOS platform, if I sell a naked Put, the usual margin required is very large. We’re talking that my short Put usually would yield between 1.5% – 2.5% of the margin required. - I think there is more than a fair chance she may be a fraud and possibly even an invention of TastyTrade. Any manager worth her salt would be happy to provide audited returns, especially if only managing 150 million. She is probably generating around 30% a year while taking a lot of risk. I don’t know if that makes sense in the long run. Another thing that’s strange is the fact there’s not even one chart or table of her performance. I hear a lot of big numbers but just give the facts black on white. This strategy will only work for a period of time. When it stops, the results will be catastrophic. If she was that good as she claims she is, after 7 years of such spectacular returns she would have few billion under management, not 190 million. It’s Finance 101 isn’t it? The higher the return, the higher the risk you have to take. If she is generating 30% or greater per year, she is taking on a lot of risk. Hopefully her investors realize that. Here are some articles about Karen SuperTrader: http://www.optionstradingiq.com/karen-the-supertrader/ http://smoothprofit.blogspot.ca/2012/11/a-glimpse-of-option-strategies-of-karen.html So: IS Karen SuperTrader myth or reality? You decide. June 2016 update: Karen is now being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Don't say we didn't warn you. Read my latest article: Karen Supertrader: Too Good To Be True? Here are the links to the SEC claim and the verdict: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-98.html https://www.sec.gov/alj/aljdec/2019/id1386cff.pdf I suspect that investors will not learn the lesson from this case. Humans desperately want to believe there is a way to make money with no or little risk. That’s why Bernie Madoff existed, and it will never change. TastyTrade removed all articles and videos related to Karen the Supertrader from their website and YouTube right after the SEC investigation started, but returned them few days afterwards. Karen the Supertrader: Where Is She In 2023? The SEC sued Karen the Supertrader’s hedge fund, Hope Advisors, leading to the hedge fund paying a hefty fine, disgorging of profits, and Karen Bruton’s ban from managing outside money. However, Karen still appears in interviews, like she did with Michael Sartain in 2022. She maintains that the SEC unfairly targeted her firm seeking an easy prosecution. Both Karen and Michael Sartain, the host of the podcast, claim that the SEC’s complaint took issue with the fact that Karen’s hedge fund rolled losing positions forward, a common practice among systematic premium sellers. Her point of view is that the SEC interpreted the fund rolling its losing positions forward as the act of a rogue trader, rather than the routine actions of an options trader who sells premium.

Background Shorting volatility proved to be very profitable historically. The reason is that VIX futures are drifting lower over time, so all you have to do is being short a product that is long volatility (like VXX) or being long an inverse product (like SVXY). Looking at VXX historical chart tells the whole story: So what's the catch? Well, the issue with going short VXX (or being long SVXY) is those occasional big spikes, like the one in 2008. So the trick is to find a strategy that goes short VXX or long SVXY, but at the same time, doesn't lose much during those occasional spikes. This article tells the story of an incredible SVXY trade that was a big winner despite the total collapse of SVXY. Strategy Description We will be looking to hold constant exposure to short volatility while the curve is in significant Contango in an effort to harvest volatility premium. We will also look to go long volatility when the curve is in significant Backwardation and indicators reveal the trend will continue in the short term. Because the curve is in Contango approximately 80% of the time, we will hold short exposure to volatility most of the time. The main strategy to gain this exposure will be through a Collar spread. The PureVolatility model portfolio will be based on total capital amount of $10,000 with a 5% allocation on risk. This is very important as those who are trading in a Reg-T account would on average need $10,000 in initial margin to hold the position even though the risk may only be $500. Portfolio Margin accounts would only require the $500 max loss amount. Reg-T is somewhat antiquated when it comes to margin for a Collar spread. However, this really should not be an issue because if one does not have $10,000 to put aside for this strategy it is probably not appropriate. Furthermore, the increased margin amount will keep members from over allocating to this very aggressive strategy. We will target a risk reward of better than 1:1 for a two week holding period. Here is an example of the Hedged Collar strategy sized for the model portfolio: 100 shares of SVXY at 101.93 Short 1 contract of the 11/10 110 Call at (1.35) Long 1 contract of the 11/10 103 Put at 5.54 Using the above example, here is the P/L chart of the trade: Please note that the profit potential is around $400 and risk around $300. For a strategy that wins around 80% of the time, this is an incredible risk/reward. But it gets even better. One of our other veteran members posted the following comment on the forum: After some discussion, it has been decided to modify the trade and use deep ITM calls instead of the shares. Here is an SVXY "modified" collar entered on January 30 with SVXY at 114: P/L chart: Please notice how using ITM calls instead of shares allows to reduce the risk if the stock makes a big down move. The next day SVXY moved higher and short call has been added. On February 2 SVXY started to move down. By the end of the day on February 5, SVXY went down around 40%. After few adjustments the P/L chart looked like this: The trade was down $750 or 7.5% loss on $10,000. This is completely reasonable, considering that the underlying was down 40%. Any bounce to $90 area should bring the trade back to breakeven. But then black Tuesday came. SVXY opened around $11, 60% down. The calls became nearly worthless, but the puts were the big winners, far outpacing the losses in the calls: Overall this trade produced almost 45% gain on margin or 26% gain on $10,000 portfolio. The bottom line: A trade that was long SVXY, was a big winner after SVXY went down 90%+. This is options trading at its best. And this is the power of our trading community. Read the full description of the PureVolatility strategy here. Related articles: The Astonishing Story Behind XIV Collapse The Incredible Option Trade In VXX The Lessons From The XIV Collapse The Spectacular Fall Of LJM Preservation And Growth

This is a critical issue that many traders don't fully understand. To understand the real risk this lady is taking, I would like you to take a look at Victor Niederhoffer. This guy had one of the best track records in the hedge fund industry, compounding 30% gains for 20 years. Yet, he blew up spectacularly in 1997 and 2007. Not once but twice. Are you Aware of Black Swan Risk? This is how Malcolm Gladwell describes what happened in 1997: "A year after Nassim Taleb came to visit him, Victor Niederhoffer blew up. He sold a very large number of options on the S. & P. index, taking millions of dollars from other traders in exchange for promising to buy a basket of stocks from them at current prices, if the market ever fell. It was an unhedged bet, or what was called on Wall Street a “naked put,” meaning that he bet everyone on one outcome: he bet in favor of the large probability of making a small amount of money, and against the small probability of losing a large amount of money-and he lost. On October 27, 1997, the market plummeted eight per cent, and all of the many, many people who had bought those options from Niederhoffer came calling all at once, demanding that he buy back their stocks at pre-crash prices. He ran through a hundred and thirty million dollars — his cash reserves, his savings, his other stocks — and when his broker came and asked for still more he didn’t have it. In a day, one of the most successful hedge funds in America was wiped out. Niederhoffer had to shut down his firm. He had to mortgage his house. He had to borrow money from his children. He had to call Sotheby’s and sell his prized silver collection. A month or so before he blew up, Taleb had dinner with Niederhoffer at a restaurant in Westport, and Niederhoffer told him that he had been selling naked puts. You can imagine the two of them across the table from each other, Niederhoffer explaining that his bet was an acceptable risk, that the odds of the market going down so heavily that he would be wiped out were minuscule, and Taleb listening and shaking his head, and thinking about black swans. “I was depressed when I left him,” Taleb said. “Here is a guy who, whatever he wants to do when he wakes up in the morning, he ends up better than anyone else. Whatever he wakes up in the morning and decides to do, he did better than anyone else. I was talking to my hero . . .” This was the reason Taleb didn’t want to be Niederhoffer when Niederhoffer was at his height — the reason he didn’t want the silver and the house and the tennis matches with George Soros. He could see all too clearly where it all might end up. In his mind’s eye, he could envision Niederhoffer borrowing money from his children, and selling off his silver, and talking in a hollow voice about letting down his friends, and Taleb did not know if he had the strength to live with that possibility. Unlike Niederhoffer, Taleb never thought he was invincible. You couldn’t if you had watched your homeland blow up, and had been the one person in a hundred thousand who gets throat cancer, and so for Taleb there was never any alternative to the painful process of insuring himself against catastrophe. Last fall, Niederhoffer sold a large number of options, betting that the markets would be quiet, and they were, until out of nowhere two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “I was exposed. It was nip and tuck.” Niederhoffer shook his head, because there was no way to have anticipated September 11th. “That was a totally unexpected event.” Well, guess what - unexpected events happen. More often than you can imagine. The market bottomed right after Niederhoffer was margin called. By November, the market was back near highs. His 830 puts went on to expire worthless - meaning his trade, had he been able to hold on, turned out to be profitable. But his leverage forced his liquidation. He was oversized and couldn't ride the trade out. Niederhoffer had shorted so many puts that a run-of-the-mill two-day market selloff sent him out on a stretcher. If he had sized the trade correctly, he would have survived the ride and took home a small profit. But the guy was playing on tilt, got greedy, maybe a bit arrogant, and lost all of his client's money. Karen is managing over 300 million dollars now. Her annual returns are in a 25-30% range. Are those good returns, based on the risk she takes? Not in my opinion. I believe that betting 300 million dollars on naked options is a disaster waiting to happen. I'm sure that most of her investors are not aware of the huge risks she is taking. Niederhoffer's story should be a good lesson, but for most people, it isn't. Unfortunately, people desperately want to believe there is a way to make money with no or little risk. Personally, I have hard time to understand why Sosnoff is promoting those strategies. But this is a different story. As a side note, this article is not an attempt to bash tastytrade. It is an attempt to show a different side of the coin and point out some historical cases. If we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. tastytrade advocates selling premium based on "high IV percentile". They ignore the fact that IV is usually high for a reason. Personally, I consider selling naked options before earnings on a high flying stocks like NFLX, AMZN, ULTA, TSLA etc. as a very high risk trading. tastytrade followers consider those trades safe and conservative. Matter of point of view I guess. Some tastytrade followers argued that PUT Write index performed better than SPX. And it is true. But those are completely different strategies. The original purpose of PUT Write index (or any naked put strategy) is to buy stock at a discount and reduce risk. As long as you sell the same number of contracts as the number of shares you are willing to own, you should be fine, and in many cases to outperform the underlying stock or index. The problem with Karen Supertrader and Niederhoffer was that they used too much leverage. They sold those naked options just to collect premium. Same is true when you sell strangles before earnings. Related articles: Karen SuperTrader: Myth Or Reality? Karen Supertrader: Too Good To Be True? Do You Still Believe in Fairy Tales? Selling Naked Put Options The Spectacular Fall Of LJM Preservation And Growth James Cordier: Another Options Selling Firm Goes Bust June 2016 update: Turns out Karen is under investigation by the SEC. Read the details here and here.

"Maximum profit potential" Few days ago one of the options service providers sent a summary of his 2012 performance, bragging about ~42% average return per trade. A quick look on his website reveals how he calculates his returns: "The highest price the option achieves is recorded as the result since this was historically what the option price reached." Did you get that? Is anyone really able consistently to sell at the top, or even close? Pro-Trading-Options, an independent source which tracks performance of few hundred newsletters, actually stopped tracking this service because they track only profitable services. Turns out that based on real (auto-trading), not hypothetical results, not only the performance was not nowhere near 42% average return, but the service was actually not profitable. Calculating gains based on cash and not on margin This is one of the most outrageous frauds. This is how it works: One of the services makes a lot of risk reversal trades. A risk reversal involves selling a put and using the proceeds to buy a call (or vice versa). The track record includes many 100% losers, but also some ridiculous triple digit returns like 757%, 780% or even 1,150%.You would think that those returns would more than offset the 100% losers. Out of curiosity, I decided to check how they calculated those returns. The 1,150% trade involved buying a $18 call and selling a $18 put for a net cost of $0.04, and closing the trade for $0.50. 1,150%? Not so fast. What they "forgot" to tell us is that selling naked put involves a margin of ~$450 per spread, so $46 gain is really 10% gain and not 1,150%. No wonder they are able to present "4,344% cumulative return since 2007". "Cumulative return" There are a lot of services which make only one trade per month (or per week), yet they present their results as "350% cumulative return since inception". While technically this is correct, does it mean anything? Would you be comfortable placing your whole portfolio (or even half of it) into one weekly Iron Condor? For example, here is a screenshot from one of the services, so you can see how they report returns: Monthly returns: Detailed trades: Of course most people won't look on detailed trades (they are not easily visible like our trades) so they would think that the service makes 12-15% on a regular basis.. When a newsletter claims a 1,000% return for the year, wouldn't you assume that if you started the year with $10,000 and invested in all the recommendations given on the site, they would now have $100,000? But this is not the case. A lot of services calculate their yearly return by adding together all the individual returns on each trade recommended for the year. So, for instance, if a website recommended 100 trades for the year and each trade made 10%, they would claim they made 1000% for the year. The problem is that the returns on trades that overlap cannot be added together. If a service has 5 open positions and each position made 10%, did they make 50%? Of course not, because you could allocate only 20% to each position. So your overall return was 10%, not 50%. Holding losing positions indefinitely Many sites claiming unbelievable win ratios hold trades that move against them for many months while new recommendations continue to be given during that time. To you, it really doesn't matter what other trades are recommended during that time or what alleged returns are made because your capital is tied up. One service that does one trade a month had a losing trade at the beginning of the year that was held the entire year and ultimately closed at the end of the year for a breakeven trade. Yet, during that entire time, new trades were opened each subsequent month. So, they reported a 100% win ratio and a very good return for the year. The problem is that, realistically, you would not have made a dime since all your capital would have been tied up in the losing trade all year. Resetting past returns after a large drawdown One service we know of posts hypothetical results that change each time the service has a bad month. What happens is, when a bad month occurs, they just fix the bad month and post new past performance numbers. Another service has 10 trading programs. When one of the programs has a large drawdown, they simply close or rename it so new members don't see past results. Needless to say that no track record is posted on the website. Having too many open trades Some services claim to have a certain maximum of trades and base the performance on this number. In reality, they open much more trades. There is a service that bases their track record on maximum of 10 open trades and $10,000 portfolio, so members would allocate 10% per trade. In reality, they might have as many as 16-18 trades, with average trade value around $1,400. They have two separate trades in the Open positions section: active trades and "other" open positions. The "other positions are " trades that are still open in the portfolio but are down over 50%. They are on “hold” but are not worth mentioning until they turn around." Needless to say, most of the time those trades don't turn around and end up being 100% losers. Meanwhile, they tie up the capital, but the service continues opening new trades way beyond the maximum number of 10 positions. In fact, with average value of $1,400 and $10,000 portfolio, they should not open more than 7 trades - in reality, they have double most of the time. This is how they were able to claim 700% return in 2012. "90% winning ratio" You will see a lot of services advertising 90% winning ratio. Let me tell you a little secret: some strategies (like selling far OTM credit spreads) have built-in probability of success of 90%. The tradeoff is that the gains are usually very small (3-4%) and you need to hold 3-4 weeks to get that gain. So you win 9 out of 10 trades and lose one time - the big question is how much do you lose on that losing trade. If you made 4% nine times but lost 70% one time, the overall return is negative. Conclusion: winning ratio by itself means nothing. The only thing that matters is the total return. Annualized return When used correctly, an annualized return is the average annual return over a period of more than one year. When used incorrectly, annualized means "we had a good trade so if we continue to make these exact same returns in this same amount of time, we will make X amount by the end of the year." When someone makes a 10% in one week, they can advertise an annualized return of 500%. To achieve that return, they will have to repeat this 10% return every single week. Does anyone believe this is possible? How does SteadyOptions present performance? SteadyOptions does not use any of those dirty tricks. This is how we present our performance: The performance numbers are based on real fills, not hypothetical or backtested trades, and definitely not on "profit potential". We report returns on the whole portfolio, not on what was on risk. We base the model portfolio on 10% allocation per trade which leaves at least 40% of the portfolio in cash. All our trades are clearly presented on the performance page. We base the returns on the required margin, not on cash. We always mention that the returns do not include commissions. Be aware of those tricks before giving your hard earned money to crooks! Start Your Free Trial Related Articles: Why Retail Investors Lose Money In The Stock Market Are You Ready For The Learning Curve? Can you double your account every six months? How to Calculate ROI in Options Trading

Our performance reporting is on the whole account and based on real fills. We put our money where our mouth is. Our members already know that we execute all trades that we share with members in our personal accounts. You can read here what our members think about us. But today I'm going to take one more step toward complete transparency. I'm going to provide an additional reference to the current and prospective members and share with you my personal account performance. I'm going to show you the summary of my actual 2015 account statement, directly from my broker. Here it a screenshot from my broker's 2015 statement: Just to be clear, I have several accounts trading/investing different strategies, but this account is exclusive to trades that I share with my SteadyOptions and Steady Condors members. It uses a very conservative allocation of 5-7% for SteadyOptions trades and 15-20% allocation for Steady Condors trades, leaving around 30-50% of the account in cash on average. I followed the same allocation guidelines that I share with my members and started with account value consistent with what majority of our members allocate to our services. As you can see, the account return was 80.2% in 2015. You might have the following questions after seeing my performance: Q: Why are you revealing your personal performance? A: My goal is to show you that SteadyOptions performance is not a myth or hypothetical performance. By showing you my real numbers, I want you to see what is possible to earn by trading options if you have the patience, the discipline and the perseverance. I also want to silence the doubters who claim that I don't trade with real money. Q: Will I be able to replicate this performance if I subscribe to SteadyOptions and/or Steady Condors? A: That depends. If you just started trading options, then most probably the answer is NO. It will take time. I know this is not what people want to hear, but that's the truth. If you have some experience and spend the time to learn our strategies, then I see no reason why not. In fact, some of our members do better than our official performance. Q: Is 80% per year really that good? A: You might see sales pages showing you 200%+ returns on some cheap options they bought. But what they don’t tell you is that those trades happen once in a while and are not consistent. The real question is not how much you made on few isolated trades, but how much you made on the whole account. Performance Reporting: The Myths and The Reality shows a lot of examples of performance manipulation, so be careful. Q: How much risk did you take to achieve this performance? A: Trading is a risky business in general. However, we implement advanced techniques to reduce risk. For example, the Steady Condors trades are hedged and protected much more than "standard" Iron Condor trades. In SteadyOptions portfolio we balance the trades in terms of the Greeks to reduce risk. Position sizing also plays a big role. But those techniques can only reduce risk, not eliminate it. This is why I still don't recommend allocating more than 20-30% of your net worth to options trading, especially if you have big portfolios. Q: Can you achieve similar performance with $1,000,000 portfolio? A: NO. It is a well known fact that achieving very high performance numbers becomes more difficult as your account grows, for various reasons. One of the issues is liquidity, and this is why I don't recommend allocating more than $100,000 to SteadyOptions. Q: What is the impact of commissions on performance? A: As you can see, even with cheap broker, I still paid over $16k in commissions in 2015, which reduced the performance by ~20-25% per year. Commissions is the cost of doing business, but you should do whatever is possible to reduce them. Brokers and Commissions discussion can help you to pick the right broker. 2020 update: with availability of brokers like RobinHood, Tradier etc. the impact of commissions is much less than it used to be. Q: Why your performance page presents much higher returns for SteadyOptions service compared to your personal account performance? A: Few reasons: The performance on the performance page excludes commissions. My account traded mix of SteadyOptions and Steady Condors strategies and Steady Condors performance is lower. I kept relatively large portion of the account (around 30-50%) in cash most of the time. I might use slightly different allocation. I might execute some trades in my personal account that I don't share with the members, for various reasons (liquidity, higher risk etc.) Generally speaking, my personal account performance might be different from the official performance for the reasons outlined above. Q: Do you trade other strategies besides SteadyOptions and Steady Condors? A: This specific account is exclusive to SteadyOptions and Steady Condors strategies only. I have other accounts (retirement account, corporate account etc.) where I have longer term investments, including Anchor Trades strategy. I also have some Real Estate investments. Q: I would love to join, but I have a full time job and no time to dedicate to trading. Why don't you offer auto-trading? A: SEC considers newsletters that engage in auto-trading to be investment advisers, and I am not licensed to be an investment adviser. So most newsletters that engage in auto-trading are breaking the law and are exposed to lawsuits like this one. You can read more details here. Please let me know if you have any questions. I invite you to try our services and see how we can help you to become a better trader. I'm not going to promise you the Holy Grail. What I can promise you is that if you are willing to work hard and learn the craft, the sky is the limit. Watch the video: Start Your Free Trial *** Free trial is for new members only ***

When the loss has been reported, this is how it looked like: And then the fund suffered another, 54.6% fall to $1.94 a share on Feb. 6—a two-day total decline of 80%. “It may be the biggest two-day drop for a mutual fund ever,” says Gretchen Rupp, a Morningstar analyst who covers the fund. Like mountain climbing itself, the reality proved far scarier—especially for a fund with “preservation” in its name. “The fund sold naked put options on S&P 500 futures,” says Rupp. “It was leveraged and had above-average margin [borrowing] levels.” A put option is a contract that allows its buyer to sell a security at a specified price, the strike price. This allows the buyer to hedge a position or an entire portfolio; if the price of the security falls below a certain level, the option buyer will at least make money on the option. When an institution “writes” or sells a put option to a buyer, the seller is betting that the price will stay higher than the option price. When the seller doesn’t own the actual securities on which it is writing options, that is called “naked” option writing, and it amplifies downside risk. Standard & Poor’s 500 option prices are determined in part by market volatility; the more volatile the market, the more likely the option will hit its strike price and become profitable. LJM was betting that the market wouldn’t become too volatile—a strategy known as shorting volatility. “The VIX [volatility index] spike on Monday was the sharpest spike in history,” Rupp says. The VIX more than doubled from 17 to 37. So leveraging the fund’s bet against it proved disastrous. According to LJM’s prospectus, the fund’s investment objective is to seek “capital appreciation and capital preservation with low correlation to the broader U.S. equity market.” Nothing in that statement proved true on Feb. 5. “This fund should never have been marketed to fund shareholders as a tool for capital preservation,” Rupp says. As someone mentioned: "Short volatility strategies, selling options and collecting premium, have been critically described as picking up dimes in front of a steamroller," wrote Don Steinbrugge, the founder and CEO of Agecroft Partners, a hedge-fund consulting firm, in a blog post. "They generate very good risk adjusted returns until volatility spikes and then have the potential to lose most of their assets if not properly hedged." This is not accurate. Those strategies can produce very good returns if used properly. What most experts are missing is the simple fact that the problem is not the strategy. The problem is leverage. Strategies don't kill accounts. Leverage does. I did some simulations of how those strategies would perform on Feb.5 without leverage. Using different strikes and expirations, the fund would be down around 10-15%. Not pleasant, but survivable. I can’t even imagine how much leverage they used to be down 56% in a single day. LJM Preservation and Growth Fund was not the first to fall into the leverage trap. We all still remember the story of Karen Supertrader who suffered significant losses due to excessive leverage. I described what happened there in my articles Karen The Supertrader: Myth Or Reality? and Karen Supertrader: Too Good To Be True? Another famous case of excessive leverage was Victor Niederhoffer. This guy had one of the best track records in the hedge fund industry, compounding 30% gains for 20 years. Yet, he blew up spectacularly in 1997 and 2007. Not once but twice. Are you Aware of Black Swan Risk? This is how Malcolm Gladwell describes what happened in 1997: "A year after Nassim Taleb came to visit him, Victor Niederhoffer blew up. He sold a very large number of options on the S. & P. index, taking millions of dollars from other traders in exchange for promising to buy a basket of stocks from them at current prices, if the market ever fell. It was an unhedged bet, or what was called on Wall Street a “naked put,” meaning that he bet everyone on one outcome: he bet in favor of the large probability of making a small amount of money, and against the small probability of losing a large amount of money-and he lost. On October 27, 1997, the market plummeted eight per cent, and all of the many, many people who had bought those options from Niederhoffer came calling all at once, demanding that he buy back their stocks at pre-crash prices. He ran through a hundred and thirty million dollars — his cash reserves, his savings, his other stocks — and when his broker came and asked for still more he didn’t have it. In a day, one of the most successful hedge funds in America was wiped out. Niederhoffer had to shut down his firm. He had to mortgage his house. He had to borrow money from his children. He had to call Sotheby’s and sell his prized silver collection. A month or so before he blew up, Taleb had dinner with Niederhoffer at a restaurant in Westport, and Niederhoffer told him that he had been selling naked puts. You can imagine the two of them across the table from each other, Niederhoffer explaining that his bet was an acceptable risk, that the odds of the market going down so heavily that he would be wiped out were minuscule, and Taleb listening and shaking his head, and thinking about black swans. “I was depressed when I left him,” Taleb said. “Here is a guy who, whatever he wants to do when he wakes up in the morning, he ends up better than anyone else. Whatever he wakes up in the morning and decides to do, he did better than anyone else. I was talking to my hero . . .” This was the reason Taleb didn’t want to be Niederhoffer when Niederhoffer was at his height — the reason he didn’t want the silver and the house and the tennis matches with George Soros. He could see all too clearly where it all might end up. In his mind’s eye, he could envision Niederhoffer borrowing money from his children, and selling off his silver, and talking in a hollow voice about letting down his friends, and Taleb did not know if he had the strength to live with that possibility. Unlike Niederhoffer, Taleb never thought he was invincible. You couldn’t if you had watched your homeland blow up, and had been the one person in a hundred thousand who gets throat cancer, and so for Taleb there was never any alternative to the painful process of insuring himself against catastrophe. Last fall, Niederhoffer sold a large number of options, betting that the markets would be quiet, and they were, until out of nowhere two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “I was exposed. It was nip and tuck.” Niederhoffer shook his head, because there was no way to have anticipated September 11th. “That was a totally unexpected event.” Well, guess what - unexpected events happen. More often than you can imagine. But when we give our hard earned money to professionals to manage them, we expect better. LJM Partners had a solid long term reputation. Till Feb.05. As Warren Buffett said - "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” If you liked this article, visit our Options Trading Blog for more educational articles about options trading. Related articles Karen SuperTrader: Myth Or Reality? Karen Supertrader: Too Good To Be True? How To Blow Up Your Account James Cordier: Another Options Selling Fund Goes Bust

The options, by themselves, are not dangerous tools. I mention that because one of the long-lasting misconceptions about options is that they are dangerous to use. It is possible to use options to speculate (gamble), but options were created as hedging, or risk-reducing, investment tools. An alarming number of financial professionals, including stockbrokers, financial planners and journalists are in position to educate the public about the many advantages to be gained from adopting naked put writing (and other option strategies), but fail to do so. Many public investors never bother to make the effort to learn about options once they hear negative statements from professional advisors. Except for extremely bearish prognosticators, no one ever suggests that owning stock is anything but the most prudent of investment strategies. Yet, writing naked puts is a significantly more conservative strategy and definitely less risky than simply buying and owning stocks. As such it deserves to be considered as an attractive investment alternative by millions of investors. Who should consider writing naked (uncovered) puts? 1. Investors Who are bullish on the market Who are bullish on specific stocks Who want to buy a specific stock at a lower price Who adopt a buy and hold strategy Who want additional income from their holdings 2. Traders Who want a higher percentage of winning trades Willing to consider holding a position for a month or two Who want to begin a spread position with a bullish leg Strategy Objective Why would you want to write naked puts? What is there to be gained? Writing naked puts is a bullish strategy. When selling naked put options, you are attempting to achieve one of two investment goals Profit. You are bullish on the stock and expect the put option to lose value, and perhaps expire worthless as time passes. If the latter happens, the option premium (cash from selling the put option) becomes the profit. Buy stock at a discount. If the put option is in the money when expiration arrives, you will be assigned an exercise notice and be obligated to buy the stock you want to own at a discount to today’s price. This is an intelligent method for an investor to gradually add positions to a long-term portfolio. NOTE: When you are eventually assigned that exercise notice, the stock may be below your target purchase price. However, if you had entered an order to buy stock at that target price, you would be in worse shape than the put seller (who cushioned any loss by the amount of the premium). Another alternative is combining put selling with call selling, a strategy known as the Wheel strategy This post was presented by Mark Wolfinger and is an extract from his latest book Writing Naked Puts (The Best Option Strategies). You can buy the book at Amazon or sign up for our free trial and get it for free. Mark Wolfinger has been in the options business since 1977, when he began his career as a floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). Mark has published four books about options. His Options For Rookies book is a classic primer and a must read for every options trader. Mark holds a BS from Brooklyn College and a PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University.

Lets take a closer look at position sizing and why it is critical for your financial health. How much should one allocate to any given trade? The 2% – 6% rules have been introduced in Dr. Alexander Elder's book "Come Into My Trading Room". The 2% rule is to protect traders from any single terrible loss that can damage their accounts. With this rule traders risk only 2% of their capital on any single trades. This is for limiting loss to a small fraction of accounts. Besides a disastrous loss, a series of losses can also damage traders' account. The 6% rule is lent to handle this. Traders have to set the maximum of accumulated loss for a month. When they reach that level of loss, they have to stop opening any new position for rest of the month. These 2 rules are designed to protect traders from the two types of losses. For those who are able to accept the higher risk, they might adjust the 2% – 6% rules to 5% – 10%, where the 5% is used to protect the account from any single disastrous loss while the 10% rules is used to protect traders from any series of losses in each month. With our earnings straddles, if you limit your holding period to 3-6 days and don't hold through earnings, it is very unlikely to lose more than 20% in a single trade. In fact, most of our losers are in the 5-7% range. If you adapt the 2%-6% rule, then you can allocate 10% per trade, knowing that you don't risk more than 2% of your account. You can adjust it after each trade, monthly, quarterly, etc. It depends on your risk tolerance. Adjusting monthly seems like a good compromise. Of course theoretically, any options trade can lose 100%, but for some strategies, it is very unlikely. You should usually account for a "reasonable" scenario when considering your position sizing. The general idea is knowing in advance how much you risk on any given trade and allocate the capital accordingly. If it is absolutely critical for you not to lose more than 2% per trade, you can set a stop loss of 20% per trade. I personally don't do it for two reasons. First, many times you have couple of days of theta with flat IV and then IV jumps, reversing the loss. Second, with spreads, your fills are going to be terrible if you place stop loss order, much worse than you could get with limit orders. And third, like I mentioned, the loss is very unlikely to be more than 20% anyway. How many contracts should you trade? Position Sizing - The Most Important Trading Rule article has a good explanation of the concept. I’m not sure about you. But I’m tempted to borrow as much money as I can from my family, extended family, friends, friends of friends, and my banker. Not to mention selling off my retirement portfolio and using the highest leverage my broker offers. I’m tempted to enter the market with as many contracts as I can. Yet, this is a temptation that I MUST resist. This is because there is a 1% chance of losing everything. If this loss occurs, it is one that I can never recover from. Not only will my broker and banker be after me, I will find creditors instead of friends. It is a catastrophic loss. Here is another way to look at it. Lets say you have a trade which you keep through earnings and require the stock to move about 5% to realize the maximum profit. If it happened, you would realize a 40-45% gain, depending on your entry price. The trade would be profitable 8 out of 10 last cycles. However, when the stock moves less than expected and doesn't reach the long strike, the trade is a 100% loser. In comparison, you can have trades which are sold before earnings, producing an average gain of 8-12%, with very limited risk. It is very rare for those trades to lose more than 7-10%. What is better – to make 8 times 40% and to lose 2 times 100% or to make 10 times 10%? In the first case, your accumulative return is 120% (12% per trade). In the second case, it is “only” 100% (assuming 10% per trade). But here is the catch: those returns don’t account for position sizing. Let’s assume you want to risk 2% of your portfolio per trade. In the first case, you know that you will win most of the time, but when you lose, you can lose 100%. So you can allocate maximum of 2% of your account per trade, which gives you a total portfolio return of 24%. In the second trade, you can rarely lose more than 7-10%. The maximum loss I had with those trades was around 20%. So you can easily allocate 10% per trade, which gives you a total portfolio return of 100%. Now you see the difference? With the second trade, I can have much smaller average returns, but with proper allocation, I’m still way ahead. Despite all your efforts, you will eventually have a streak of 4-6 losers. Those who tell you they haven't, are either lying or haven't been in the game long enough. Always ask yourself: How will your account look after 5 straight losers? As a general guideline, I always recommend starting small. Allocate maybe 5-7% per trade and then increase it gradually. Always keep some cash reserve (I recommend at least 20-30%). As for total account size - do it gradually as well. Prove yourself that you can make money with 10k. Do it for 2-3 months. Then increase to 20k. Don't increase from 10k to 100k. The markets will be there long time after all of us are gone. Dr. Van Tharp has some very good articles about position sizing. I would highly recommend his books to learn more on the subject. How we use position sizing in our model portfolio In our model portfolio, we allocate 10% per trade. Since most of our trades risk around 25-30% (there are some exceptions), we basically risk up to 3% of our portfolio in each trade. In some strategies (like trades that we hold through earnings) we allocate half position, or 5% of the portfolio per trade. Those are higher risk trades that can potentially lose 50-80%. "Profits come in bunches. The trick when going sideways between home runs is not to lose too much in between." - Michael Covel Recommended reading: Van Tharp’s Definitive Guide To Position Sizing Money Management Strategies for Futures Traders A Trader’s Money Management System: How to Ensure Profit and Avoid the Risk of Ruin Want to learn how to trade options in a less risky way? Start Your Free Trial

They Are Properly Capitalized – A very common mistake for beginner traders is not being properly capitalized. Beginners see the power of leverage option trading offers and think they can turn $2,000 into $20,000 in a matter of weeks. Before they know it, a couple of losing trades have completely wiped out their capital. I must admit I was also guilty of this. I was living in Grand Cayman and had just started options trading. I think in my first 6 months I broke just about every trading rule possible. I had a couple of small positions in the Australian stock market, one a utilities company and the other a REIT (real estate investment trust). Both of these positions had a low beta, meaning that the stocks did not move as much as the general market. So, through lack of knowledge and understanding I thought I would sell some call options on the main ASX index to hedge and protect my long positions. I obviously didn’t understand my net exposure was now hugely short as the short calls easily outweighed my stock holdings. Sure enough the market rallied, I refused to admit my mistake and take my losses and hoped and prayed that the position would come back my way. Next thing you know my capital has been completely wiped out and I had to send money via Western Union and have my brother deposit the money in my account the next day. Not a great experience for me, but one that I certainly learnt from! They Have A Low Tolerance For Risk – Another important aspect of successful options trading is having a low tolerance for risk. The best options traders will only trade when there is a low risk high reward scenario. They want to have the odds skewed in their favor as far as possible. The best option traders will not try to hit home runs with every trade.o the Stock Repair Strategy They Trade Only When The Market Provides An Opportunity – One quality all great traders have is patience. Successful investors will only enter into trades when the odds are stacked in their favor. They would much rather be the house rather than the average guy on the street trying to win big. They are focused on the bigger picture and are willing to wait and have the patience to only trade when the right opportunity presents itself. Some of the best traders often talk about sitting idle and just watching the markets, waiting for the perfect time to make a trade. Amateur investors find it very hard to not trade and are captivated by all the red and green numbers on their screen and feel like they are missing out on the action. Can you think of times in your trading when you have experienced this? Are you able to sit on the sidelines and just watch the market without jumping in? Knowing what cycle the market is in, is key to knowing when to trade and which trades to make. The best resource if have found for knowing what cycle the market is in is Investor’s Business Daily. Each day they publish a Big Picture article which states whether the market is in a confirmed uptrend, the uptrend is under pressure or if he market is in correction. I have found them to be incredibly insightful and you would do well to follow their advice. Their advice is to only buy strong stocks when the market is in a confirmed uptrend and this has been a time tested method for market outperformance. While it’s still possible to make money on the long side while the market is in correction, the odds are stacked against you and you would only want to be buying leading stocks such as those in the IBD 100. They Have A Trading Plan – Before opening an account, everyone should have a trading plan. This shouldn’t just be something in your head either, you need to write it down! By writing it down, it is clearly defined and you can refer back to it at any time. It will also be more real if you write it down and you’ll be much more likely to stick to it. Like anything in life, in order to be successful you need to have a plan and think things through rather than just flying by the seat of your pants. When I first started trading I would just place random trades based on how I was feeling at the time. I’d put on a bull call spread, then I’d try shorting stocks I thought were over valued and then I’d be making volatility trades. Needless to say I was not very successful during this time. While some of my trades were winners it was like I was taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back. All the great traders have a clearly defined trading plan. This is crucial to your success as a beginner options trader. They Have A Risk Management Plan – Only trade what you can afford, don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose. Trade defensively, rather than think of what you can make, every time you make a trade you should be thinking about the worst case scenario. What could you lose and how you are going to handle the position if things go badly? Beginner traders have trouble getting a handle on how much to risk on each trade. When starting out you do not want to have 90% of your capital tied up in one trade. One thing for beginner traders to consider is to split your trading capital in half, place half in an interest bearing account and use the rest to trade. This way, no matter what happens, you will never lose all of your capital. Another good risk management rule is to set a fixed percentage of you capital as your risk per trade. A common method would be to set 5% as the maximum capital to risk per trade, but for beginners you could even make that lower. Once a trade is placed you need to continue to monitor risk levels, you can’t just have a set and forget policy, you have to stay on top of your positions and your total portfolio risk. Having a risk management plan is crucial to success as a trader and something that should be done before you start trading. Everyone wants to make a great trade and make lots of money, but you should never take risk management too lightly. What risk management rules fo you have in your trading plan? They Can Control Emotions – Options trading is an incredibly emotional journey and one that you cannot fully appreciate until you have your own hard earned money on the line. The best traders are able to control their emotions not just when times are bad, but probably even more importantly when times are good. In my experience, and I’m sure this is the same for most traders starting out, some of my biggest losses have come when my confidence has been high. The best traders can keep their ego out of the equation and are able to stay grounded even in the midst of tremendous winning streaks. Also, when one of their trades turns out to be a loser, they are able to admit they were wrong and close out the trade. Great traders never get attached to a trade or a particular stock. A bad trade could turn out to be ok, but sticking to your pre-defined trading rules is crucial. You can be 100% right on a particular trade, but you also need to have the right timing. If your timing is off and your trade breaks your stop-loss you should always stick to your trading rules and keep your emotions out of it.Get Your Free Covered Call Calculator They Are Incredibly Disciplined – Successful option trading takes a great deal of discipline. Beginner option traders may find it incredibly difficult to just sit and wait for a good opportunity to trade. Waiting for the right opportunities may mean you don’t trade for a while, but trading out of boredom or excitement is one of the worst things you can do. Having a money management and a risk management plan is one thing, but in order to be a successful trader, you need to have the discipline to stick to it. You also need discipline to stick to the types of trades you are successful with and not start trading strategies that you are not an expert in. They Are Focused – For beginner options traders it is very easy to get carried away and get excited by all the green P&L numbers on their account statement. Keeping a level head is essential. Staying focused can also be hard when there is so much news on the markets and so many experts, each with a different opinion. The most important thing is to stay focused on your goals, your trading strategy and your rules. Don’t try to copy someone else’s trades or go against your trading rules just because of something Jim Cramer said. Get to know yourself as a trader as well, I have had a few periods when I wasn’t focused and that led to some big losses. I now can recognize those periods and I know those are the times when I really need to refocus my energies and review my trading plan. If you find yourself losing focus, or getting too distracted and stressed with everything going on, it can be a wise move to close out all of your positions and take break for a while. Sometimes that is the best medicine and will allow you to come back with a clear head, more relaxed and more focused. They Are Committed – Options trading takes a great deal of commitment. Any time you have your hard earned money at risk, you should be trying to get the most out of your investment strategies and controlling your risk. You need to be on top of your game all the time. Any time you stop paying attention to the market, you will get burned. Not only do you need to keep an eye on your trading performance, you need to be staying abreast of the current news, market cycles and investment outlook. Some of the great resources I use, that allow me to keep up to date on the markets and take up the least amount of my time include: Alpha Trends – Brain Shannon from Alphatrends.net is a market guru and author of one of the top 10 trading books ever written – “Technical Analysis using Multiple Timeframes”. Brian does a free video analysis of the markets a couple of times a week. In the first 5-10 minutes he goes through the current state of the general stock market and the various market indices. Watching this video only takes a few minutes each week, but you will receive expert analysis on the market from a trader with 17 years experience. Later in the video Brian goes through examples of specific stocks of interest which can be a great source of trading ideas. IBD – Investor’s Business Daily is the news service the market pros use. It only takes a minute each day to read their Big Picture article to see what cycle the market is in as well as how the some of the market leading stocks have been performing lately. IBD is listed as the 4th most visited site by Charles Kirk of The Kirk Report. If you’re a beginner options trader and find you’re struggling with the commitment required to keep up to date with the market, or find you are suffering from information overload, try these 3 sites out. You will be able to get opinions from multiple experts and it will take you less than 10 minutes a day! They Have Back Tested Their Strategy – Backtesting is a key part of developing your trading plan. This involves evaluating your trading strategy against the historical performance of the market to check the past performance. Of course past performance does not guarantee future performance, but it will at least give you an idea of how your strategy has performed in different time periods and market conditions. The average investor may not have the capabilities to run these calculations on their own but there are a number of software providers out there that will be able to perform backtesting. In addition, most brokers such as TD Ameritrade have backtesting software that is free to account holders. Backtesting allows you to evaluate the pros and cons of your strategy and also provides scope for improvement or tweaking of the strategy. However, a few things to consider are: Make sure you are using an appropriate time period – If you are testing a long only strategy between 1995 and 2000, you are likely to get some very favorable results. The same strategy may not have performed so well between 2007 and 2009. It’s a good idea to test a strategy over a long time period. Take into account sectors – If your trading strategy is solely focused on a particular sector, your backtest sample should be taken from that sector. However, in all other cases it is best to use a large sample size from all sectors. Take into account commissions – commissions can seriously erode your returns, so you need to adjust for this expense, especially if your strategy involves frequent trading. Past performance may not be a good guide to the future – While your chosen strategy may have worked in the past, there is no guarantee it will work in the future. A good idea is to paper trade for a month or two, just to make sure your strategy still works in the current environment. Some great resources for backtesting can be found at http://www.tradecision.com and http://www.amibroker.com. While I have not used these resources personally, they come highly recommended from other industry professionals. So, those are my Top 10 Traits For Successful Options Trading, what do you think? Can you think of any other important traits required for successful investing? Gavin McMaster has a Masters in Applied Finance and Investment. He specializes in income trading using options, is very conservative in his style and believes patience in waiting for the best setups is the key to successful trading. He likes to focus on short volatility strategies. Gavin has written 5 books on options trading, 3 of which were bestsellers. He launched Options Trading IQ in 2010 to teach people how to trade options and eliminate all the Bullsh*t that’s out there. You can follow Gavin on Twitter.

Well, every trade should be put in context. Before evaluating a trade (or an options strategy), the following questions should be asked and answered: What is the holding period of the strategy? What is the maximum risk? What is the profit potential? What is the average return? What is the winning ratio? Why holding period is important? Well, making 5% in one week is not the same as making 5% in six months. In the first case we are talking about 250% annualized return. In the second case, 10%. See the difference. Maximum risk is important because it doesn't make sense to aim for 5% gain if your strategy can lose 50-100%. For example, when you are trading a directional strategy, and the stock gaps against you, the losses can be catastrophic. Since the risk is high, you should aim for higher return to compensate for the risk. However, if your maximum risk is limited, you can aim for lower return and still get excellent overall performance. Lets examine our pre-earnings straddles as an example. As a reminder, a long straddle option strategy is vega positive, gamma positive and theta negative trade. It works based on the premise that both call and put options have unlimited profit potential but limited loss. Straddles are a good strategy to pursue if you believe that a stock's price will move significantly, but unsure as to which direction. Another case is if you believe that Implied Volatility of the options will increase - for example, before a significant event like earnings. I explained the latter strategy in my Seeking Alpha article Exploiting Earnings Associated Rising Volatility. IV usually increases sharply a few days before earnings, and the increase should compensate for the negative theta. If the stock moves before earnings, the position can be sold for a profit or rolled to new strikes. This is one of my favorite strategies that we use in our SteadyOptions model portfolio. This is how the P/L chart looks like: How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy provides a full explanation of the strategy. Lets take a look at 2022 statistics for this strategy: Number of trades: 148 Number of winners: 103 Number of losers: 40 Winning ratio: 72.5% Average return per trade: 4.9% Average return per winning trade: 8.7% Average return per losing trade: -10.2% Average holding period: 7.2 days Lets do a quick math. If you can do 10 trades per month, each trade producing 5% gain on average and 10% allocation per trade, your monthly return is 5% on the whole portfolio. That's 60% non compounded annual return, with minimal risk. To answer the original question: for a strategy that has 70%+ winning ratio and loses on average 10% on losing trades, with average holding period of one week, 5% is an EXCELLENT return. In fact, I would consider it as Close to the Holy Grail as You Can Get. Related Articles: How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy Buying Premium Prior to Earnings Can We Profit From Volatility Expansion into Earnings Long Straddle: A Guaranteed Win? Why We Sell Our Straddles Before Earnings

Unfortunately, when it comes to options, all too many traders are led astray on the role probabilities play in option trading and end up limiting their chances of success. This article has two objectives: Discuss Probabilities and Option Trading Offer suggestions on making winning option trades Probabilities and Outcomes Most people believe that when placing a bet with multiple choices it is wisest to take the one with the highest probability. We see this frequently when option traders espouse selling Deep-Out-of-The-Money (DOTM) calls or puts and other strategies as “High-Probability” trades. This is facilitated as most every Broker-Dealer includes “probability” as part of their option trading platforms. One requires no special math skills to determine which of many options trades offer the highest probability. Option probabilities can be just a mouse-click away. But the real question is “Does knowing the option probability help us?” Expected Return When placing bets, or investing, it is NOT the probability of outcome that dictates choice … it is the probability of outcome weighed against the “pay-off” that matters. One cannot make a successful and informed choice until one is given the “pay-off”. It is NOT probability that matters ... it is EXPECTED RETURN that matters. If you take nothing else from this article, take this… When placing a bet, one does not choose the most “probable” outcome; one must choose the most “favorable” outcome. Let’s look at the simple coin toss to better understand this. We all know that a fair coin toss has a 50% probability of landing either heads or tails. But what if the odds for winning bets on heads were one-for-one (1:1) while the odds for winning bets on tails was only 0.75:1? Though the probability remains the same, the expected return does not. One can expect to break even betting on heads and lose money betting on tails. One must not just look at the probability of “winning” but compare it to the reward to determine if it is favorable. So, what do coin tosses have to do with option trading? Very simple … option pricing is 100% about probabilities. The real difference between options and a coin toss is that expected return is not as easy to calculate. There are numerous possible results. For instance selling a DOTM Call has a fixed return on the profit side, but many possible results on the loss side…including (theoretically) unlimited loss. In order to calculate the expected return one cannot just multiply the probability by the premium credit. One must also calculate the expected loss return for each strike interval that ends up in-the-money (ITM). It means taking every possible strike for the underlying, calculating the probability associated with that strike, multiplying each strike by its probability, adding them all together and subtracting them from the probability of gain. This is an arduous task (fortunately made easier through calculus). The Greeks Consider that the Market makers determine the pricing using very sophisticated statistics and “Greeks”. Most traders are aware of some of the first order Greeks such as Delta, Theta and Gamma … but there are second and third order Greeks most traders never heard of… such as “Charm” and “Speed”. So don’t fool yourself, without advanced training in math, statistics, probabilities and the proper algorithm you cannot properly assess all the factors taken into account in the pricing. I’ll save everyone a great deal of effort in making these complex calculations and simply state that every option is probabilistically equivalent. Over time, one has NO better probability of a GROSS profit on a DOTM option than a DITM option. This may take a little explaining. Surely, a call that is written 2% DOTM has a much better chance of not being over-run than a call 1% OTM. However, it also has a much lower premium credit. Over time, the extra “over-run” risk of the 1% OTM is compensated for by the extra premium credit gained when it is not over-run. They are probabilistically equivalent. If I may “hammer this home” by using a Roulette wheel as an example. Bettors can make the equivalent of a DOTM bet by betting on odd, even, red or black. Or they could make the equivalent of an ATM bet by betting on a single number, such as 28. Over time the monetary results will be the same. They will “hit” more often on the red/black/odd/even but will win less when they do. I won’t go into it here, but the “house edge” is the same 5.26% on every bet one can make (actually, there is one bet that increases the “house edge” to 8%, but few make that bet). Let me also clear up a common misconception about probability and the Roulette wheel. Probability theory DOES NOT predict that everyone will be a loser if they play often enough. Quite the opposite. Even in a game that is purely chance and requires no skill, there will be lifetime winners and lifetime losers. It’s only when these two sets of betters are aggregated will we see the expected result. Probability theory only predicts that, over time, the winners and losers will even out and winners will win 5.26% less than “fair” and losers will lose 5.26% more than “fair”. If you are not a member yet, you can join our forum discussions for answers to all your options questions. The House Edge With this basic understanding of options probability and expected return, let’s look to see if the “high-probability” option trade is, in fact, the “most favorable” trade. To make this analysis we must add in the costs of the trade. We need to move out of theory and into reality … a reality where the Market Maker insists on a “house edge”. Before I get started, let me say that there are, on occasion, mispriced options. If there is a mispricing it can be exploited. However, this is very rare and most traders aren’t equipped to notice it. So let’s leave that on the shelf and move forward. Let me use options on SPDR S&P500 ETF (SPY) as my example. I choose this underlying as they are widely traded, liquid and have a very low bid-ask spread. Let’s look at selling a call option. We can compare an At-The-Money (ATM) trade with a DOTM trade. We must remember that the pay-offs are adjusted according to their probability. From a risk/reward perspective on a GROSS return they are equivalent. Let’s look at the bid/ask of the ATM and the OTM option. Though the bid/ask will vary dependent upon duration (weekly, monthly, etc.) …. for these purposes let’s look a month ahead. Most typically, the option will be priced as follows: Strike Bid Ask Spread “House Edge” 214 (ATM) 4.04 4.05 .01 .25% 218 (2%OTM) 1.78 1.79 .01 .56% 222 (4%DOTM) .46 .47 .01 2.12% What we discover is that the bid-ask spread (the “house edge”) when represented as a percent of the premium, actually increases the further OTM one goes. Though the options probability/payoff is theoretically identical, the “house edge” is not. So, the further OTM one goes, the less “favorable” the option becomes. If one added the fixed trading costs … which vary by broker ($6.95,$7.95,$8.95, etc.) … it would further compound the disadvantage of OTM options. As a function of the “house edge” increasing the further OTM one goes, a nearly “fair” ATM option becomes an unfavorable DOTM option. The results can be even more dramatic with many other underlying stocks that don’t have as low a bid-ask spread as SPY. For instance, many stocks have a bid-ask spread of 5cents or 10cents (sometimes even more). That means the “house edge” can be from 6% to 15%. That’s a pretty steep hurdle to jump for profitable trading. Option Spreads Often traders will enter spreads as opposed to singular trades. The theory is to limit downside by reducing costs or exposure. One must consider that every option incurs its own “house edge”. So the more legs one enters, the less likely they will have a favorable outcome. This is a hard concept for option traders to get their hands around. So let me go back to the “probability laboratory” … the Roulette wheel. Each bet theoretically loses 5.26%. So, if one bets on, say, two numbers instead of one number, they increase their chances of a “hit” but they decrease their overall chances of winning money. Inasmuch as option pricing is neutral (except for the “house edge”) over time, one gains nothing by engaging in multiple legged option strategies. Winning Option Strategies Now, let me be perfectly clear. I’m not suggesting that one cannot make profitable option trades. Nor am I suggesting that limiting costs or risk through spreads and other actions is wrong. What I’m saying is that trying to make profit by looking at option trades that are, high probability is not a winning strategy. It is not “probability” that is important it is “expected return” that is important. What we’ve discussed so far is that option trades are “odds against”. That is, they may be high or low probability but the only favorable trade lies with the market maker. Does that mean I can’t win trading options? Of course not … many people do very well and since you’re on this site, you’re probably one of them. The one thing that separates option trading from the roulette wheel is that the Roulette wheel is a game of CHANCE and option trading can be a game of SKILL. But let me be as clear as I can. The skill is NOT evidenced in “fancy-dancy” option strategies. The skill is evidenced in correctly predicting the movement of the underlying security. This bears repeating ... so here goes …. The skill is NOT evidenced in “fancy-dancy” option strategies. The skill is evidenced in correctly predicting the movement of the underlying security. Successful option traders are successful because they spend most of their time understanding the stock or the market. Let me give an example: If I said that that SPY would end up at $218 on December 31st and asked for an option strategy to match that result … option traders could easily maximize a variety of strategies. Instead, if I said that SPY would end up between $200 and $218, completely different strategies would unfold. If SPY actually landed at $218, none of these would show the gains of the first hypothesis. In contrast, if SPY ended at $200 they would all show better results than the first hypothesis. Therefore, the viability of any strategy is dependent upon its relevance to the underlying. If one gets the underlying right, they will prosper. If they don’t, they won’t. Summary Successful long term option trading starts with an understanding that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Option trades involve counter-parties and there are winners and losers on every trade. That is, except for the Market Makers taking their “house edge”. It is important to understand that options are not some sort of Magic Elixir. They are not a substitute for stock market research. What they can provide is a very calculated methodology to exploit stock market movement. It doesn’t really matter if a stock is up, down or flat … there’s an option play to exploit every possible scenario. When option traders focus more on the characteristics of the underlying and less on the characteristics of a particular option strategy, they will find it much easier to pick the winning option strategy. Related articles: Is Your Risk Worth The Reward? 10 Options Trading Myths Debunked Can you double your account every six months? Debunking Options Guru Advice Why Winning Ratio Means Nothing Do 80% Of Options Expire Worthless? Want to see how we handle risk? Start your free trial

A popular option strategy is the short strangle, which consists of selling an out of the money put and call. My personal backtesting and real trading experience is that this strategy on equity market ETF's or cash settled indices can increase portfolio diversification and if overlaid on a portfolio of underlying assets like mutual funds or ETF's can also increase total returns. When you sell a strangle, you bring cash into your account. By doing so, you can "overlay" this trade on top of a portfolio consisting of ETF's or other investments without paying margin interest. Before we get too deep into the weeds, lets deal with the elephant in the room...you've heard strangles are risky. Is that true? The answer isn't that simple, as the trade isn't what measures risk, instead, it's the position size. Excessive leverage is risky, but strangles don't have to be traded this way. I'd encourage every option trader to not only consider the margin requirement of any particular option trade, but the notional risk. For example, think in terms of a 1 contract SPY strangle with SPY trading at $280 as theoretically being a $28,000 position (stock price X 100), similar to how buying 100 shares of SPY at $280 is a $28,000 position. When sized this way, a typical strangle will actual have less risk than the underlying asset. With this in mind, let's look at a rough example of how we could implement this idea in a $100,000 account. First, we'll look at the performance of a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio that is rebalanced monthly since 2000. This portfolio would have returned a little over 5% annually, with a standard deviation of 7.31%, producing a Sharpe Ratio of 0.54. Next, we'll add a 50% strangle allocation to this same portfolio. Yes, this equals 150%, which does make this concept only possible in a taxable margin account. The strangle allocation is based on our own backtesting platforms and proprietary rule sets and includes hypothetical trades on both SPY and IWM. A trader would sell 2 strangles on SPY in a $100,000 account to approximately replicate the concept. Blue: Stock/Bond Portfolio Red: Stock/Bond/Strangle Portfolio The 50/50/50 portfolio nearly doubles the annualized return to over 10%, and only with a modest increase in standard deviation to 8.37%. This increase in risk adjusted return substantially improves the portfolio Sharpe Ratio to 1.05. Even with a 50% increase in total portfolio allocation, the portfolio risk only slightly increases due to the low correlation of the strangle strategy to both stocks and bonds. This example is only meant to show the concept of an option overlay in action, and the potential benefits of doing so. Many other creative ideas could be implemented with other underlying assets and option strategies. My investment advisory firm, Lorintine Capital, currently implements these concepts in managed accounts as well as in one of our private funds, LC Diversified Fund. We are happy to have discussions with investors interested in a professionally managed solution, or ideas on how to implement this concept on their own. Jesse Blom is a licensed investment advisor and Vice President of Lorintine Capital, LP. He provides investment advice to clients all over the United States and around the world. Jesse has been in financial services since 2008 and is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. Working with a CFP® professional represents the highest standard of financial planning advice. Jesse has a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Oral Roberts University. Jesse is managing the LC Diversified portfolio and forum, the LC Diversified Fund, as well as contributes to the Steady Condors newsletter.

I came across an excellent article by Colibri Trader. Here are some gems from the article. The question of what it takes to become a master in any field (sport or business) has been in the epicentre of research for many years. It has occupied psychologists and philosophers alike for decades. Is it the innate talent what matters or a skill can be mastered with practice. What does it take for professional athletes to become first among others with inborn talents… Almost fifty years ago Herbert Simon and William Chase summed up a groundbreaking conclusion that is still echoing with importance: After Simon and Chase there have been numerous psychologists and authors testing this hypothesis and proving and disproving the rule of “The 10, 000 Hours“. For example, John Hayes researched the works of over 70 of the most famous classical composers and found that almost none of them did create a masterpiece before they have been composing for a minimum of 10, 000 hours. There were just a few exceptions and they were Shostakovich and Paganini, who took them only 9, 000 hours. In trading, it seems to be the same or at least really similar. I don’t know a lot of other traders, whom after an honest conversation have not shared with me that have spent years of losing money consistently before becoming profitable. In my trading career I remember just one trader who told me that was successful straight from the very beginning. He was sharing with me that it only took him 3 months on a simulator and with the help of his trading mentor, he became successful. He is an exception because in his case- he managed to save a lot of costly mistakes by following his mentor’s trading approach. But most traders are doing it alone and that is why it takes them such a long time. Trading, as any other highly competitive sport discipline, takes a lot of hours in front of the screens and practice. In a book that I recently read (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence), Daniel Goleman reveals the complex truth behind the popular 10,000 rule: The words of Ericsson cannot be more true regarding the trading field. Professional traders know that going out of the comfort zone is what makes a difference in the long-run. Imagine you are doing the same trading mistake over and over again. The only way to get rid of your bad habits is to get out of your “comfort zone” and do something differently. Even if you are not sure where your mistake is, you should put all of your efforts into trying to find it. Only then and after long hours of practice, you would be able to become profitable. What matters in this case is not only the time invested in trading, but the quality of the time. It appears that even if you stay 20,000 hours in front of your screens, it won’t make a difference if you are doing the same mistakes repeatedly. It seems obvious and simple, but modern education is build on the premise of sheer time investment. That is why it is important to emphasize on the fact that success is “deliberate practice”, concentrated training with the sole aim of personal improvement, many times accompanied or guided by a professional and skilled coach or mentor.That is how I became successful myself- I have been mentored by one of the biggest and most successful traders in London. Before I had the chance to meet this important person to me, I was making too many mistakes- 80% of which I was not even aware of! That is such a striking number when I look back at it now. According to Goleman, what I have found also applies to other disciplines: That is completely in-line with trading field. You need an objective feedback from somebody, who can monitor your performance. Human beings tend to be subjective when it comes to measuring their own performance. That is why, it is crucial that you have a profitable trader helping you along the 10, 000-hours of trading journey. It is imperative that you are coached by a real professional or at least somebody with years of trading behind his back. No wonder that every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you keep on trading without a feedback from a proven profitable trader, you won’t be able to get to the very top. In the end, it seems that the trading strategy that you are using is not the most important element of becoming a master trader. It is the feedback that you receive from really experienced traders and the quality of the time invested in improving you own mistakes. Now stop thinking how good you are- start seeing how you can improve through concentrated trading effort. Some quick tips and facts My good friend Kirk Du Plessis from OptionAlpha lists few things to consider as you write down your expectations and goals. More traders lose more money than they make. The figures are a little off depending on who you talk to, but it is 80% to 90% (maybe more) who end up losers and leave the business altogether. Only a small percentage of retail traders are profitable. The numbers get even smaller if you look at a 3-5 year average which measures consistency. Don’t get discouraged, we all fell off the bike before we learned to ride it right? Paper trade first with a small amount of money. I always recommend members to paper trade everything first. This applies not only to new traders. Even if you have some experience with options, it always takes some time to get used to new strategies. This way you learn how to enter orders, adjust trades, and more importantly learn you’re your mistakes without losing real money. Then when you are ready to invest real money, keep it small. Prove yourself that you can make money with 10k, then increase it to 20k and so on, but do it gradually. You will have losing trades. Too many people quitting after a streak of 4-5 losing trades. Losing money is part of the game, the trick is to keep the losses as small as possible. Don’t expect to become financially independent. Don’t you think it’s completely unrealistic to expect a small account, say under $5,000, to generate consistent income to replace your regular job? I aim for many singles instead of few home runs. Those are all great quotes. I suggest remembering them when you get frustrated and overwhelmed by the amount of information and learning curve required to become a successful trader. Related Articles: Why Retail Investors Lose Money In The Stock Market Can you double your account every six months? How to Calculate ROI in Options Trading Performance Reporting: The Myths and The Reality Are You EMOTIONALLY Ready To Lose?

As always, note these are my opinions only, I am not able to predict the future, and you should form your own opinions before making any investment decisions. If anyone has any questions, I welcome your posts, emails, and even calls. Market Thoughts To me, there is only one investment rule currently in play -- do not bet against the Federal Reserve. Whether you want to call it a Bernanke put or the Yellen floor, the markets are being controlled by the Fed right now. In the last eighteen months, I personally have had this made very clear to me. While of course fundamentals of a business still matter, market trends as a whole are governed by the Fed and will continue to until the Fed stops. Interest rates, bond markets, gold prices, oil prices – are all tied to current Fed policy. In a way that is unfortunate, as it makes it impossible for efficient markets. However, it certainly is a great wave to be on while it lasts. So just how long is it going to last? Well according to Yellen, at least for a few more months (and thus the most recent run up in the market this week). Until the Fed starts hinting at taking their foot off the gas pedal, I do not think we’ll see a major market draw down. Now Fed policy cannot guarantee that markets will keep going up at a rate of twenty percent per year, but it should provide a floor and prevent a major sharp drawdown. But does the Fed keep its current policies in place through Summer 2014? Your guess is as good as mine. Not knowing when the rug is going to be yanked out from investors should keep everyone on their toes. If you’re not in a place to make significant adjustments once governmental policy changes, you certainly need to have some sort of protections in place – whether it is stops, puts, or owning inverse positions (such as a long/short fund). This past summer gave us a hint of how fast prices can move when the Fed even hints at changing prices. Bond prices cratered, very quickly, just on the hint of changing rates. Once it becomes official policy to increase rates and slow down bond purchases, it very well could be too late to save your bond portfolio. (Of course this also depends on what your bond portfolio is and the purpose of it – if you own physical bonds for yield and not growth, you likely will not be affected near to the extent as the individual who owns three major bond funds.) I realize that a prediction that (i) the market will stay somewhere between up and flat and (ii) until the Fed moves then bad things may happen is not much of a prediction and may seem obvious. However, that is the problem with large governmental intervention – it interferes with normal market movements and patterns. Because of this, I structure my personal investments always with one eye toward fast changes and try to invest as much as I can in actual non-correlated assets. If your investment adviser has you in a small-cap fund, a mid-cap fund, a large-cap fund, a foreign investment fund, a commodity fund, a bond fund, and a high dividend fund such as a REIT or pipeline, and tells you that you’re adequately diversified find a new investment adviser. In a market crash, ALL of those asset classes will get hammered. Sure, on a week to week basis in a bull market you are diversified and relatively protected against company and sector risk. But you are horribly exposed to market risk, and the vast majorities of investment advisers either simply do not understand this or believe that “that’s just the way things are.” However no investor should accept that answer. Yes, all of those investments have a place in a portfolio, but that should not be the end of the investment discussion. Rather the next questions have to be “how to I protect those investments,” as well as “if these investments do not perform, how do I get income/growth.” It is entirely possible to have it all in a well-designed portfolio. Anchor Strategy Update There is an entire thread, open to all members, where I provide a full review, analysis, and critique of the Anchor Strategy as a whole and as it applies to Steady Option's members, If you have questions on the strategies performance, please direct them there. In a short synopsis though, the strategy is performing as expected. It's not under performing and it's not over performing. As for new developments, we are in the process of developing a "leveraged" Anchor strategy. With interest rates (particularly the margin interest rates available through Interactive Brokers) where they currently are, the potential for massive returns appear to exist. Note that this strategy is in its initial testing phases. It has been back tested and is currently being paper traded. I try not to recommend, or put my own money at risk, until I have (i) back tested the strategy, (ii) paper traded it for close to a year, (iii) submitted it for a full Monte Carlo simulation, and (iv) traded it live with few funds committed. In the present case, I will have to avoid step (iv), as the strategy requires portfolio margin. I want to introduce the strategy here (as well as in the Anchor Trade forums) for members to comment on. The basic premise behind the Anchor Strategy, for those that don't know, is to fully hedge a "normal" stock/ETF portfolio, that is highly correlated to the S&P 500 through the purchase of LEAP puts. In essence, an investor is buying insurance in the form of puts that if the market goes down then the investor’s portfolio would not. However, such "insurance" typically cost (depending on volatility) anywhere from 7%-15% of entire portfolio. This is simply too expensive. If the markets average a 7% return over a decade, you'd only break even on such a strategy. If the markets average a 5% return over a decade, the investor would be down well over 20% while anyone just holding the SPY ETF would be up well over 60% (compounding). That's simply not acceptable -- so a way to "pay" for the hedge has to be found. The Anchor Strategy does this by purchasing "extra" LEAP puts and then selling short against them weekly. A full discussion of how this works is available in the Anchor forums. As noted the goal of the Anchor strategy is to not lose money, while not sacrificing too much upside in bull markets. However, investors are always on the quest for outsized returns. The question this is if this can be accomplished with the Anchor Strategy. It appears as if in the current interest rate environments it can. Again note, this is not a fully developed strategy, and I would not advise anyone to utilize it or trade it right now without further work and a very in depth understanding of the risks of trading options on highly leveraged portfolio margin. Here's the basic premise: Interactive brokers, on portfolio margin accounts, currently charges 1.09% margin interest; A weighted combination of the SDY, RSP, and VIG etfs (which HIGHLY correlate to the S&P 500), pays a dividend of 1.79%; On portfolio margin, these ETFs can be traded at ratios of 10:1 or 15:1; Going on "full" margin (a 10:1 or 15:1) is too risky, as it leaves no "wiggle room," so let's target a use a 6:1 ratio; Assume an account of $1m, with which we buy $6m of ETFs (using $5m in margin); We then apply the Anchor Strategy to the entire $6m we just bought. To hedge at current levels and costs would cost about $750,000.00 (so now at 5.75:1); Then just use the Anchor strategy week to week to "pay" for the full hedge; Margin interest on the year is 1.09%, on $5,750,000 that's $62,675.00 (that's not entirely accurate as it will be less than that as the year goes on as the hedge will be "paid for," so the number will be dynamic, but let's keep the calculations simple for now); Dividend payouts on the $6m will be $107,400 -- or at least $44,725 more than margin interest. What then are the possible outcomes, assuming the Anchor Strategy works as designed as a hedging vehicle? In a flat market (S&P 500 return of 0%, but dividends of 1.89%), the leveraged strategy would return more than 4.47% -- so it would out perform the S&P 500; In a slightly up market (5% or so), the S&P 500 would return 5.89% (inclusive of dividends) and the leveraged strategy would return 34% (inclusive of dividends); In major up markets (S&P 500 up 20%), the S&P would return 21,89% (inclusive of dividends) and the leveraged strategy would return 94% (this assumes a "lag" of about 5% due to the lag in the Anchor Strategy, so each $1m would only be up 15%); In slightly down markets (-5% or so), the S&P 500 would be down 3.11% and the leveraged Anchor Strategy would be up 4.47%; In large bear markets (-20%), the S&P 500 will be down at least 20% (who knows what dividends will be slashed), and the Anchor Strategy will be up 20% or more (due to increased value in the long puts because of volatility). Back testing validates the strategy. Paper trading started in July 1. Over that time the S&P 500 is up 10.01% and the leveraged strategy is up 13.5% (only one quarter of dividend payments). This includes "rolling" the hedge from 166 to 176 a week or so ago. In other words, in the absolute worst market for the strategy (S&P up over 10% in the immediate months after starting), the strategy is out performing the S&P 500 and working exactly as designed. The biggest risks I see to this is (i) interest risks, if interest rates go above 3.5%-4% I'm not sure it still makes sense as flat markets could really hurt, (ii) margin calls -- in wild markets, option pricing on bid/ask spreads sometimes gets out of proportion, and margin calls are based on the side of the bid/ask you don't want to be on. Once the strategy is fully tested I will update more, but I wanted to introduce it to members for thoughts, questions, and comments. Professional Update/Lorintine Capital As many of you know I have an investment advisory firm, Lorintine Capital. For quite some time the primary focus of the Firm was to serve as a manager to a few hedge funds. However, due to numerous client requests, this year the Firm elected to become a “traditional” investment advisory firm offering a full range of services. Lorintine Capital is now also provides traditional investment management services to its clients, including providing investment advice, portfolio management services, retirement account services, and generally serving as financial advisers. personally am adverse to long term buy and hold, “riding” the market waves, and cannot stand advisers who just stick investors in their firm’s “plan” and take their 1.5%-2% in fees per year for basically doing what Morgan Stanley (Dain Rauchser, Edward Jones, Merrill Lynch – take your pick) publishes. This is not a good value for the client-investor. Too many investors are unprepared for market crashes, miss out on potential income, and have investment advisers who are reactionary instead of proactive. Lorintine Capital tries to avoid that, while at the same time actually educating investors about their options and assisting them in meeting their long term goals. In furtherance of this change, the Firm recently added a new investment adviser, Jesse Blom, who runs the Firm’s South Dakota office while I still run the Dallas, Texas office. We are currently in negotiations to bring another advisor on board in January, will have a new website by the end of the year, and are actively adding clients of all kinds. initial feedback to this change has been overwhelmingly positive. Given the Firm’s advisers’ backgrounds and the fact that it is a completely independent Firm, we have the capability of bringing hedge fund models, conservative strategies, and any products to the table that fit our clients’ needs. We now operate managed accounts specifically garnered toward the strategies discussed through Steady Option (Anchor and Steady Condors), retirement accounts, and typical investment portfolios. If you would like to discuss any of the products or services Lorintine Capital provides, contact me or Jesse at your convenience.

The assumption is that with careful stock selection, this strategy has a very high probability of success. I performed extensive backtesting on number of stocks, and the results were very promising. Stocks like AMZN and LNKD showed average gains of 30-35%. However, I also mentioned that this strategy has higher risk than other strategies that we use since earnings are unpredictable. High Probability High Risk is the right definition of this strategy. Not a good start.. Our first trade was NFLX. The stock has been selected based on its historical moves. It moved 13.7% on average in the last 8 cycles. The options predicted 17% move. The RIC trade was structured in a way that it required only 8% post-earnings move. What are the odds that the stock will move only 0.13% post-earnings? Slim to none if you asked anyone before earnings. Yet this is exactly what happened. We had a chance to close the trade at small loss or with some luck, even a small gain. But with 3 days left to expiration, we decided to wait. The stock reversed, resulting a 46.9% loss. Not a good start. The next one was AMZN. This one actually worked not bad. It did not move as much as expected, but still moved enough to produce a 21.2% gain. The real disaster came with the next two trades, GOOG and TSLA. The stocks moved much less than expected, reversed after the initial move and the trades have lost 70.6% and 100% respectively. With better risk management, all three losers could be closed for a small loss or even a small gain. I posted a full post mortem here (members only forum). Some members with higher risk tolerance decided to hold longer and were able to book 30-40%+ gains on AMZN and GOOG. In some cases the difference between significant loss and decent gain was a pure luck. What went wrong? This strategy is based on probabilities. If a stock moves xxx% in the last 8 cycles, there is a high probability that it will follow the same pattern the next cycle. However, probability is not certainty. There is always a chance that this cycle will be different. What are the chances that ALL 4 stocks will not follow the last cycles pattern? Not high, but this is exactly what happened. This is why you always need to have plan B. You always need to know in advance what to do if the trade does not behave as expected. It's called an exit plan to cut the loss. Instead of trying to cut the loss (and give up some potential gains), we continued holding, "hoping" that the stock will eventually make a move consistent with its historical patterns. It just did not happen. It all comes to what kind of trader you want to be. Is your goal to limit the losses or to maximize the gains? You cannot have it both ways. Higher gains come with higher risk and inevitably will produce some big losers. My first priority has always been limiting the losses. This time I tried to go for higher gains instead of limiting the losses, and it fired back big time. To be fair, all four trades could easily produce 30-40% gains with some more luck and more favorable market conditions. Main lessons Look for a good setup. Even if a stock is a good candidate historically, the options might be too expensive this time, decreasing your chances. Get out quickly once it becomes clear that the stock did not produce the expected move and the trade is borderline. Most of the time it should be possible to limit the loss to 10-20%. This rule might miss some gains, but at least we won't have catastrophic losses like we had this cycle. Close the short options of the losing side early, especially if there is still couple days till expiration. This way if the stock reverses, the losing side will benefit more. The probabilities will eventually play out, but while they don't, do everything you can to stay in the game. Limiting losses is all that matters. Always follow the rules. Generally speaking, if you consider this (or any other) strategy too risky, reduce your allocation or don't trade it. In a broader context, I always recommend that new members start with paper trading, then start small and increase the allocation gradually. Prove yourself that you can make money with 10k account for few months, then increase it to 20k etc. Don't jump right away from 10k to 50k or 100k. What's next? I feel the pain as much as my members do since I trade the exact same trades in my personal account. This was a very expensive lesson for all of us. However, I believe each lesson should benefit us and make us better traders. After a losing streak, your first impulse might be to overtrade in attempt to recover the losses. HUGE MISTAKE. The market doesn't know that you have lost money. And it doesn't care. If you tell yourself "now I really need some nice winners to cover for the losses", it's a safe path to more losses. What separates good traders from bad is how you react to your losses. "There's a difference between knowing the path... and walking the path." - Morpheus. To paraphrase Morpheus sentence, "there's a difference between knowing that there will be losers... and actually experiencing them". In a probability game, it is guaranteed that we will eventually experience a string of losses. The right thing to do is continue to execute our trading plan that has worked so well for us in the last 4+ years. Summary It gets tough when we experience losses or poor performances and that's where most traders quit because in the first place they never accepted emotionally that they are playing a probability game. As soon as a few losing trades and/or a drawdown of any kind occurs they hit the eject button and continue in their search for the Holy Grail strategy that always wins. Jumping from one trading system to another will only lead to more frustration. Only when you will accept emotionally that you are playing a probability game, you will be able to take your trading to the next level. We present a variety of strategies to our members. Some are more risky than others. Members have different risk tolerance and should take the risk levels of different trades into consideration before trading. Before entering each one of those trades, I made a full disclosure that those are relatively risky trades, so members have all the information to make an educated decision. To put things in perspective, the current string of losers is our biggest losing streak since inception. I encourage current and prospective members to look at the big picture. The big picture is that SteadyOptions produced over 770% non-compounded ROI since inception. The big picture is our history of 800+ trades and not only the last 10 trades. One bad month does not erase 4+ years of exceptional gains. Losses are part of the game, and if you can not endure losses, you should not be trading. Your maximum drawdown is ahead of you, not behind you. We will continue executing our trading plan, and those who have the discipline and patience to stay the course will be greatly rewarded. Start Your Free Trial Related Articles: Are You EMOTIONALLY Ready To Lose? Why Retail Investors Lose Money In The Stock Market Are You Ready For The Learning Curve? Can you double your account every six months? Big Drawdowns Are Part Of The Game

Don't you find it amazing? The guy admits he is new to options, but wants to double the account "at least yearly". Do you have realistic expectations? My reply was: "There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading. Some "gurus" out there will make you to believe that doubling your account every 6-12 months is an easy task. If it was, we all would be millionaires by now. My advice to you: if you just start options trading, preserving your capital during your first year of trading would be a great achievement" I didn't hear from him since then. He probably went to one of those charlatans who promise to double your account in one month and charge you few thousand dollars for a week of “one on one consulting”. Many people will tell you what you want to hear to get your hard earned money. Here is another email from one of our members: "I'm new to options trading. I'm retired and am hoping to make $1.25 million per year by trading" This member cancelled after just 2 weeks. Why I'm not surprised? And honestly, I would be very interested to know the psychology behind people thinking they can have no experience with something, probably not even know how to place an order, and start making money with options right away. A 7 figure income in this case. But maybe it's the same psychology that makes people to believe that they can lose 50 pounds in 2 months without any effort.. Making money with options is easy? Here is the problem: Making money with options is easy. Doing it consistently is much more difficult. People see all the hype and think it is an easy task. To become an engineer you have to study 4 years, and probably another 4 years (at least) to become a good one. Why people expect it to be different in trading? I see sales pages all the time that show you 200%+ returns on some cheap options they bought. But what they don’t tell you is that those trades happen once in a while and are not consistent. Maybe they did make 200%+ on a trade, but that doesn’t happen all the time and to set your expectations that high would be very ignorant. One website "challenges" you to turn 3k into 100k in four months (that's 3,233% in four months), charging $600/month in the process. They claim to do it successfully 2 times out of 11 challenges, but since the website is live less than a year, only one challenge was traded live. Incidentally, the live challenge has actually lost 99%. I just got an email from someone saying "Give Me 9 Minutes a Week and I Guarantee You $67,548 a Year. $185 Per Day, Every Day… Forever". Seriously? Is it even legal to make any guarantees in the stock market, not to mention the ethical aspect? There are many options sites that advertise "10%/month" or "5%/week" with no real effort. They might succeed doing that for a limited period of time, but it's only matter of time till they blow up their accounts. What they also "forget" to tell you that they present their returns as ROI (Return On Investment), not return on their whole account. You can read explanation about the difference here. In real life, 10% ROI would usually translate to 7-8% return on the whole account, before commissions. I can assume that those guys are much richer than me. But to me, my integrity is more important than money. Honesty is not a good business and has cost me a lot of potential members, but I will not sell my beliefs and will not mislead people just to get them to sign up. Someone smarter than me said: Here is the inconvenient truth about successful trading: It’s work. Setting realistic expectations is very important. I'm a big fan of the "slow and steady" approach. Aim for many singles instead of few homeruns. Be patient. Be prepared to lose for a while - set your goal as capital preservation instead of doubling your account. Think about the risk first. If you take care of the risk, the profits will come. Are you a quitter? Unfortunately, I see many members who sign up for a SteadyOptions with unrealistic expectations. Here is how it usually works with those members. Statistically, SteadyOptions have about 2-4 really good months every year when we make 20-25%. Those members see those gains and join the service, only to see the next couple months going back to the "boring" 3-4% per month (or even suffering some small losses). They quit, just in time to miss the next hot streak. Believe it or not, but I had few members quitting and re-joining 4-5 times, repeating the same pattern over and over again, always missing the most profitable months. Many of them cancel after just few weeks or 3-4 bad trades. One of my members told me after cancelling that he doesn't need me because he made 100%+ in 2013 trading mostly long calls. Well, 2013 was the best year for the S&P 500 since 1998, so making 100% with highly leveraged long strategies was not that difficult. I doubt this strategy would work well in 2008 or 2000. The key to successful trading is using strategies that work well in any market and have minimal drawdowns. Making 100% per year consistently and over time is an extremely difficult task. If you can do that, you would most definitely be among the top 0.1% traders in the world. In fact, most fund managers would dream to make half of that. Van Tharp says successful trading/investing is 60% psychology...only 60%? Humans desperately want to believe there is a way to make money with no or little risk. That’s why Bernie Madoff existed, and it will never change. Some quick tips and facts My good friend Kirk Du Plessis from OptionAlpha lists few things to consider as you write down your expectations and goals. More traders lose more money than they make. The figures are a little off depending on who you talk to, but it is 80% to 90% (maybe more) who end up losers and leave the business altogether. Only a small percentage of retail traders are profitable. The numbers get even smaller if you look at a 3-5 year average which measures consistency. Don’t get discouraged, we all fell off the bike before we learned to ride it right? Paper trade first with a small amount of money. I always recommend members to paper trade everything first. This applies not only to new traders. Even if you have some experience with options, it always takes some time to get used to new strategies. This way you learn how to enter orders, adjust trades, and more importantly learn you’re your mistakes without losing real money. Then when you are ready to invest real money, keep it small. Prove yourself that you can make money with 10k, then increase it to 20k and so on, but do it gradually. You will have losing trades. Too many people quitting after a streak of 4-5 losing trades. Losing money is part of the game, the trick is to keep the losses as small as possible. Don’t expect to become financially independent. Don’t you think it’s completely unrealistic to expect a small account, say under $5,000, to generate consistent income to replace your regular job? I aim for many singles instead of few home runs. If you are ready to start your journey AND make a long term commitment to be a student of the markets: Join SteadyOptions! Related Articles: Why Retail Investors Lose Money In The Stock Market Are You Ready For The Learning Curve? How to Calculate ROI in Options Trading Performance Reporting: The Myths and The Reality Are You EMOTIONALLY Ready To Lose? Can You Really Turn $12,415 Into $4M?

Option assignments occur in two basic varieties. First, on expiration Friday (or Thursday or Wednsday depending on the instrument your trading, but most commonly on Friday). If you have a position that is .01 in the money, or more, you WILL be assigned. For instance, if you have a 100 Call on stock XYZ that expires today, and XYZ closes (AFTER HOURS) at 100.01, you will find that you own, sometime Saturday, 100 shares of XYZ that you paid $100/share for. Now this option might have only cost you $100 or so. But all of a sudden, due to the inherent multiplier in options, you are now out of pocket $10,000.00. What if you're account only had $5,000.00 in it? Well, you are going to get both (a) a Regulation T Notice and (b) margin call from your broker. First thing Monday morning, your broker will automatically liquidate the position. What if there is adverse news over the weekend and the opening price is only $80? Well you just lost $2,000.0 -- in a $5,000.00 account. In other words, that $100 option just cost you 40% of your entire account. This happens. What if you had "hedged" the position though, and had a vertical call spread? For instance, you might have bought the $100/$105 spread on XYZ. Well if XYZ closes anywhere above $105 you are ok because BOTH positions will be auto-exercised. This SOMETIMES results in a margin call as well -- but don't worry. Option clear throughout the day on Saturday and your account will frequently show one position and the other not exercised yet. By Sunday morning it will be fixed. By way of example, I had a very large position (for me) (20 contracts) in the LNKD 92.5/95 vertical call before earnings. Well earnings did what they were supposed to and LNKD jumped to 104. Well Saturday morning, all of a sudden, I was SHORT 2000 shares of LNKD and had received roughly $190K in cash into my account. This sends off all kinds of margin alerts. I got an email, a call, and another call. Ignore them, they're idiots. The 92.5 side simply hadn't cleared yet. Three hours later the other option cleared, buying the shorts back at 92.5. Then Sunday morning, your account statement will reflect that all trades happened at the same time. HOWEVER, what if, on that 100/105 spread, XYZ closes at 103 on Friday? Well, guess what, you'll be assigned on the 100 position, the 105 will expire worthless, and now your back in margin call. MORAL OF THE STORY: DON'T EVER LET YOURSELF BE ASSIGNED ON A SPREAD THAT'S NOT FAR IN THE MONEY ON BOTH LEGS. What if, on Friday, the price of XYZ was at $106 at close? You better have closed the spread, because of after hours trading. The price of XYZ can move after hours -- but you can't get out of the options. So if the market closes at 106, and you say good, both legs will clear and I won't pay commissions (or pay less commissions) and get a huge tax break, you could be wrong, as in after hours the market might go back to $104.98. Then you're screwed, only the 100 option gets exercised and you go into margin call. I'm convinced when your near a strike the market makers manipulate the after hours markets to have this happen. Of course if you have enough cash in your account, you won't get margin called -- you're risk profile will just be largely out of whack. And this isn't to say you can't have a big benefit from this. My single most profitable trade EVER occurred on a spread that was $.50 above the line, I didn't close it, and then in after hours the price dropped. So I got assigned long on the lower strike. Well, that weekend there was big news involving the company and the price jumped 15% the next morning. In that case, here's what happens -- I own the 100 (long) /105 (short) vertical. After hours, the price is $104.92. Well that spread was worth $4.85 at close on 20 contracts, or $9,700. Well, Saturday I'm now the proud owner of 2,000 shares bought at $100.00 each, for a net cost of $200,000 -- oops. Margin call, broker call, broker email, etc. Well they inform me the trade will immediately close at open on Monday. Well the price jumped, and the position was closed, at $240,000.00. My original investment of $8,500.00, that I didn't want to close at $9,700.00, netted me $40,000.00, or roughly a 470% return. BUT, what if the price had gone down 20%? Well I would be owing my broker money and have completely blown out my account. If you have ANY questions on this, please let me know. Now SITUATION TWO -- and you will, sooner or later, encounter this. Let's say we have that same 100(long)/105 (short) spread on XYZ. Only we own the September spread and today (Friday) XYZ closes at 103. No bigger. UNLESS someone exercises their 100 spread. American style options can be exercised at anytime. Why would this happen with time value? Who knows, most likely someone needed to unwind a position, hedge something, take profits, any number of things really. Well if you had a 10 contract position, on Saturday your account is now down $100,000.00 in cash and you won 1,000 shares of XYZ. You will again go into margin call. However, while this is a headache and you will have to deal with your broker, you don't need to panic because the position is still hedged. You can certainly still lose money -- but only up to the 105 line. What happens? Well your broker will force you to exit the position Monday morning at the open. If you BEG and wheedle, the broker might let you close the position yourself, so you can close at the midpoint instead of just a market order. They should let you do this because the position is still hedged, but you are technically in a Reg T violation, so they won't let you hold it for long. Monday you'll have to sell your shares and buy back the short calls. This should be, at worst, a break even situation because of the time value left in the short calls. However, markets fluctuate and you might have to sell your stock at something like 104 and by the time you exit the short calls its up to 105 (or you get a bad fill price) so you give back some. When this happens, take your lumps and move on. I have this happen about once a quarter and my worse loss was 4%. There's nothing you can do to protect against this. You are hedged, and you won't blow your account out, but it does suck. I hope that clears some things. If not, please let us know. By Christopher B. Welsh Christopher B. Welsh is a SteadyOptions contributor. He is a licensed investment advisor in the State of Texas and is the president of a small investment firm, Lorintine Capital, LP which is a general partner of two separate private funds. He offers investment advice to his clients, both in the law practice and outside of it. Chris is an active litigator and assists his clients with all aspects of their business, from start-up through closing. Chris is managing the Anchor Trades portfolio.

What lessons we can learn from this debacle? Were the Skeptics Right? "Self-taught options trader Karen Bruton (aka Karen the Supertrader) earned so much so quickly that some skeptics doubted her. In reality, the SEC says, she improperly concealed more than $50 million of losses." The new allegations paint a very un-uber portrait of Bruton, 66, a self-taught options trader who mesmerized fans and flummoxed skeptics with her life story of parlaying a $10,000 initial investment into a fortune and seemingly endless stream of profits. I'm still trying to understand the motives of tastytrade when they promoted her as making $105MM PROFIT, without properly discussing the risks. They also failed to mention that most of the growth in her fund came from new money and not actual profits. Was it extreme ignorance or some hidden agenda? You decide. As a reminder, Karen claimed to make 25-30% per year by selling naked options on indexes. The important point is this: As I mentioned in my article, there is only one way to make 25-30% per year with this strategy: leverage. Combine leverage with naked strangle strategy which is very risky to begin with is a certain path to financial disaster. Leverage Can Kill You! Our contributor Jesse wrote over a year ago: "All trading has risk. It's not the strategy that determines if something is risky...it's the position size (amount of leverage) and risk management that does (and then the discipline of the trader to follow the plan which often means taking a pre-defined loss before it gets out of control)." Is selling naked options risky? That's the wrong question - ask better questions, and you'll get better answers...Is selling excessively leveraged naked options that aren't cash secured risky? Yes, eventually. Short strangles on SPX and other index products are money making trades over the long term, you just have to use sensible position size and sensible exits. Just don't get greedy. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. "The point here is not to dismiss all volatility and option selling strategies as useless and blow up prone. The short volatility trade on equity indices is one of the best trades out there. It does very well long-term. " The point is to understand your risk. In fact, be obsessed with risk management if you want to survive as a trader for the long term. Well said Jesse. Also Hiding the Losses? To add insult to injury, Karen Bruton also started to hide the losses by rolling options positions, as explained here: "Between October and December of 2014, Karen took some heavy losses selling her options. But to keep the incentive fees coming in, she organized a sophisticated options roll at the end of each month. This allowed her to still “realize gains” of 1% every month to take fees from, while pushing unrealized losses out to the next month. Month after month the losses continued to snowball while she continued to collect her fees. Each month began with a huge realized loss. (The SEC reports that these losses now exceed $50 million dollars.) She offset these accrued losses by selling a ton of in-the-money call options on the S&P 500 E-mini futures due to expire at the end of the month. This injected fresh cash into the fund. Just enough so that she could report a small realized gain to investors. That way she could take fees that month too… But of course there’s no free lunch in trading. You don’t get gains out of nowhere. When these call options expired, yes she had her cash injection (from the option premium), but she was also left with a futures position (due to assignment) that carried a huge unrealized loss. Here’s where the loss rolling came in. She needed that futures position to stay open until the next month because if she closed it beforehand, that would realize a loss and cancel out the profits from the calls she sold. That means no incentive fees. So to cover this futures position, she would simultaneously purchasein-the-money call options expiring the following month on the same day she sold those original in-the-money call options. These calls allowed her to offset any gains or losses the futures incurred at the end of the month until the beginning of the next month. This all smells like a classic Ponzi scheme…Pay the old investors with money from the new ones." We are very familiar with those "rolling" techniques. Many options newsletters are using them to hide their losses. As we always said, rolling options position is simply hiding the loss. The Hope Investments fund has been created in March 2011, and October 2014 was only the second time since creation when S&P declined more than 10%. First time (August 2011) she probably hasn't been using as much leverage yet. If the fund experienced such significant losses after 10% market decline, imagine what would happen in 2008-like environment. SJ Options summed it up nicely: "It’s very important to alert the public of the true risks involved in short strangles because in the interviews the risk is not discussed as much as it should be. Because of the excessive media exposure, there are many of retail traders attempting to trade this uncovered options strategy that has nearly unlimited risk potential. The short strangle is not as easy as it appears to be. Margins change quickly and it’s vulnerable to quick losses and margin calls. Be very careful with this strategy. We conducted an 85 year backtest of the short strangle, 45 days to expiration, and it lost money overall." Tastytrade Response Tom Sosnoff was asked to respond to Karen Bruton story after the SEC complaint. You can watch his response here (18 minute mark). He continues to defend her, calls her "a very special person" and a victim of an evil government. Tom calls all the publications about Karen "crap". He claims that Karen was actually not paid enough in her fund. However, according to the SEC complaint, "Between November 2014 and March 2016, Hope collected over $6 million in incentive fees from the HI Fund. As of the same date, the HI Fund had unrealized losses of approximately $57 million." So she took $6M in illegal fees while the fund was down $57M, and Tom says that she was underpaid... Sosnoff also continues to claim that Karen "made ton of money" for her investors. He still sticks to his claim that she turned $100k into $105M between 2008 and 2011, "forgetting" to mention that most of those profits came from new investors money. God knows his true motives, but this article from 2014 gives some insights into the whole "tastytrade/dough/TD Ameritrade" scheme. Here are some articles about Karen SuperTrader: Karen SuperTrader: Myth Or Reality? Karen The Supertrader by Optionstradingiq A Glimpse of option strategies of Karen Karen The Supertrader Interviewed by tastytrade Karen the Supertrader's Winning Strategy Relied on Fraud, SEC Alleges Karen The Supertrader - SJ Options Tastytrade: A Shill with Skills The Spectacular Fall Of LJM Preservation And Growth

Buy the Winners Eugene Fama, Father of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), has referred to momentum as "the premier market anomaly" which represents "the biggest embarrassment for Efficient Market Theory". And it's also very simple. So simple that it's under appreciated. Source: http://systematicrelativestrength.com/2015/10/26/buy-winners-2/ In 1937 Cowles and Jones shared their findings that “taking one year as the unit of measurement for the period 1920 to 1935, the tendency is very pronounced for stocks which have exceeded the median in one year to exceed it also in the year following.” The key here is that it doesn't work 100% of the time. Listen to Jim O'Shaughnessy discuss this here. Jim was comfortable writing "What Works on Wall Street" because he knew the tendency of humans to abandon strategies as soon as they went through a drawdown or period of relative underperformance. Human nature is unlikely to change, and this is a key belief to why simple strategies can continue to persist in a world of competitive markets. Since nothing works (meaning always producing profits and/or outperforming a benchmark) 100% of the time, the weak hands will eventually drop out. This is why I believe in combining together a few simple strategies where you have done a high degree of due diligence, and then follow them faithfully. When the next strategy of the month is in favor, you treat it with a high degree of caution and skepticism before even considering adjusting your plan. We all want to believe that the perfect strategy is out there that we just haven't found yet. I found it interesting as I read Ben Carlson's book that the largest Ponzi Scheme in history, run by Bernie Madoff, did not promise investors excessively high returns. It promised very good returns, but with almost no risk. Bernie was not stupid, he knew very well that humans desperately want to believe in the idea of making very good returns with little or no risk. From Ben's book: "The beauty in Madoff's scam was the fact that he never promised home runs to his investors. Over an 18-year period, Madoff claimed to offer 10.6 percent annual returns to his investors, fairly similar to historical stock market gains. But the annualized volatility was under 2.5 percent, a fraction of the variability seen in the stock market, or the bond market for that matter. And what do investors want more than anything? If you answered a stock market return profile minus the stock market risk profile, you answered correctly. Investors want to believe this is possible." Michael Covel had a discussion around this topic with Ewan Kirk of Cantab Capital during one of Michael's Trend Following podcasts. I'm going to paraphrase about a five minute clip of the podcast which can be heard here. I highly recommend it. The podcast Covel: Losses are statistically inevitable. There are still a number of people out there, some astute and some not, that still don’t want to imagine losses as a part of the game. Kirk: Yep, people are desperate to invest in something that never loses money. And that, of course, is why Bernard Madoff existed. Everyone is desperate to invest in something that never loses money. I’d like to invest in something which never loses money. I’d love to come up with a strategy that never loses money. Of course, we all want that. The reality is that maybe the best you can look for over a long period such as 20 or 30 years is a Sharpe ratio of .8, .9, maybe 1. Take a simulation of a 20% volatility with a 20% return per year. Every 2 years you will have a drawdown of 15% statistically, and a 20% drawdown every 4 years. And you don’t have to run very many simulations before you get a 40% drawdown that can last five years. Remember, this (simulation) is something that is guaranteed to make 20% per annum over a long enough period of time. The expectation of losses should be something everyone should build into their investment process at all times. Summary The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan. Drawdowns and losses are part of the game but your human nature of survival will put up a fight against rationality when drawdowns occur. The human brain is capable of incredible optimism as well as pessimism. Be aware of it, and have expectations that are statistically valid. Not just past performance. Jesse Blom is a licensed investment advisor and Vice President of Lorintine Capital, LP. He provides investment advice to clients all over the United States and around the world. Jesse has been in financial services since 2008 achieving multiple industry achievements including qualifying membership in the Million Dollar Round Table for 5 consecutive years. Membership in this prestigious group represents the top 1% of financial professionals in the world. Jesse has a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Oral Roberts University. Jesse is managing the LC Diversified portfolio.

Since its introduction in 1993, the VIX Index has been considered by many to be the world's premier barometer of investor sentiment and market volatility. Several investors expressed interest in trading instruments related to the market's expectation of future volatility, and so VX futures were introduced in 2004, and in 2006 it became possible to trade VIX options. Options and futures on volatility indexes are available for investors who wish to explore the use of instruments that might have the potential to diversify portfolios in times of market stress. Much of the information below is taken directly from the CBOE website. What is VIX Index? The CBOE Volatility Index® is an up-to-the-minute market estimate of implied (expected) volatility that is calculated by using the midpoint of real-time S&P 500® Index (SPX) option bid/ask quotes. More specifically, the VIX Index is intended to provide an instantaneous measure of how much the market thinks the S&P 500 Index will fluctuate in the 30 days from the time of each tick of the VIX Index. CBOE calculates the VIX Index using standard SPX options and weekly SPX options that are listed for trading on CBOE. Standard SPX options expire on the third Friday of each month and weekly SPX options expire on all other Fridays. Only SPX options with Friday expirations are used to calculate the VIX Index.*Only SPX options with more than 23 days and less than 37 days to the Friday SPX expiration are used to calculate the VIX Index. These SPX options are then weighted to yield a constant, 30-day measure of the expected volatility of the S&P 500 Index. How Do I Trade VIX? VIX cannot be traded directly. However, traders can trade VIX futures, trade VIX options and also some other VIX related products, like VXX. Expiration VIX derivatives generally expire on Wednesday mornings. If that Wednesday or the Friday that is 30 days following that Wednesday is a CBOE holiday, the VIX derivative will expire on the business day immediately preceding that Wednesday. Last Trading Day The last trading day for VIX options is on the business day (usually a Tuesday) immediately before expiration. If that day is a CBOE holiday, the last trading day for an expiring VIX option will be the day immediately preceding the last regularly scheduled trading day. Settlement value The final settlement value for VIX futures and options is determined on the morning of their expiration date (usually a Wednesday) through a Special Opening Quotation ("SOQ") of the VIX Index using the opening prices of a portfolio of SPX options that expire 30 days later. VIX Options Pricing Please note that VIX options prices are based on VIX futures not the VIX spot. The VIX options are European exercise. That means you can’t exercise them until the day they expire. There is no effective limit on how low or high the prices can go on the VIX options until the exercise day. VIX trading hours are: 7:30am to 4:15pm Eastern time. Practical implications: Since VIX options are based on VIX futures, they bahave very differently from "regular" options. For example, calendar spread can have negative values - this would never happen with regular calendars. The Relationship of the SPX and the VIX The chart below shows the daily closing prices for the S&P 500 and VIX during the third quarter of 2012. The blue line and left scale represent the S&P 500 while the red line and right scale represent VIX. This chart is a typical example of how the S&P 500 and VIX move relative to each other on a daily basis. The table below examines price behavior from January 1, 2000 to September 28, 2012. During this time period the S&P 500 closed higher on 1692 trading days, and of those days, VIX closed lower on just over 82% of the time. Also, during this period, the SPX closed lower on 1514 trading days, and of those days, VIX closed higher over 78% of the time. Altogether, during the period covered in the table, VIX moved in the opposite direction of the S&P 500 about 80% of the time. S&P 500 Up VIX Index Down Percent Opposite 1692 1390 82.15% S&P 500 Down VIX Index UP Percent Opposite 1514 1187 78.40% Source: Bloomberg The conclusion from those tables is simple: VIX usually goes up when SPX goes down, and vice versa. That’s why many investors have (for better or worse) seen an “investment” in VIX as a kind of hedge against market risk. If you are not a member yet, you can join our forum discussions for answers to all your options questions. VIX Futures Curve A futures curve is a curve made by connecting prices of futures contracts of the same underlying, but different expiration dates. It is displayed on a chart where the X axis represents expiration date of a futures contract and the Y axis represents prices. The concept of futures curve is similar to that of yield curve, which is used for bonds or the money market and displays interest rates of different maturities. VIX futures curve is made of prices of individual VIX futures contracts. The first point (the left end of each curve) on the chart on this page is the spot VIX Index value; the others are futures prices. Contango vs. Backwardation When a futures curve is upward sloping from left to right, it is called contango (we say that a market is in contango). In contango, near term VIX futures are cheaper than longer term VIX futures. Contango is very common in VIX futures, especially when the spot the CBOE Volatility Index® is very low. Contango can be interpreted in the way that the futures market expects the VIX (and volatility in general) to rise in the future. The opposite situation, when near term futures are more expensive and futures curve is downward sloping, is called backwardation. Backwardation is less frequent than contango in VIX futures, but not uncommon. It typically occurs when the spot the CBOE Volatility Index® spikes up (to levels such as 35-40 or more) and the market expects volatility to calm down somehow in the future. VIX Term Structure (or VIX Futures Term Structure) is also the name frequently used for VIX futures curve. Conclusion VIX is a very complicated product. Please make sure you understand how it works before trading it. Related articles Using VIX Options To Hedge Your Portfolio VIX Term Structure 10 Things You Should Know About VIX VIX - The Fear Index: The Basics How Does VIX Work? How To Lose $197 Million Trading VIX Top 10 Things To Know About VIX Options Want to join our winning team? Start Your Free Trial

This infographic has been designed to make it easier for you to understand option trading.

That’s why you should be prepared to expect them and if possible not make them. Easier said than done you would say and you will be completely right. That is why I have compiled that list of trading mistakes that you should be trying to avoid. Real life trading will show you how “easy” that could be. 1. Trading without having a predefined trading plan The first of the 10 fatal trader mistakes often made is trading with no plan. Having a written predefined trading plan will help you for two reasons. Trading depends on several aspects, which include the situation in the markets around the world, the status of overseas markets, the status of index futures such as Nasdaq 100 exchange-traded funds. Considering index futures is a wise option for evaluating the overall market conditions. Make a to-do list and build a habit of researching the market before calling your shots. This will not only keep you from taking unnecessary risks, but it will also minimize your chances of losing money. 2. Over-leveraging Over-leveraging is the second mistake of “what are the 10 fatal mistakes traders make”. Over-leveraging is a two-edged sword. In a winning-streak it could be your best friend, but when the trend changes, it becomes the greatest enemy. Recent talks about banning leverage higher than 1:50 for experienced and 1:25 for new traders in the UK have been a result of a lot of traders losing their money too fast. Whether it will happen next year or not is a matter of time for us to see. This is good news for most of the inexperienced traders, because it will somehow limit their exposure. It will allow them to follow their money management rules easier. For greedier and more impatient traders, this is terrible news. Fortunately, this might lead to a better result on their performance in the long term, as well. Over-leveraging is a dangerous way to believe you can make more money quicker. A lot of traders are mislead into this way of thinking and end up losing all their money in a short period of time. Some brokers are offering insane amounts of leverage (like 1:2000) that can lead to nothing more than oblivion. Therefore, one needs to be extremely careful when selecting those levels and the brokers that represent them. That’s why diversification among different brokers is probably the best strategy. 3. Staying glued to the screen a) Set entry rules Computer systems are more effective for the purpose of trading because they don’t have feelings about the things that go into the trading environment and they are neither emotionally attached to the factors that are in one way or the other related to trading. Moreover, computers are capable of doing more at a time as compared to mechanical traders. This is one of the several reasons that more than 50% of all trades that occur on the New York Stock Exchange are computer-program generated. A typical entry rule could be put in a sentence like this: “If signal A fires and there is a minimum target at least three times as great as my stop loss and we are at support, then buy X contracts or shares here.” Computers are more rational when it comes to taking quick decisions following a set of rules. No matter how experienced traders are, sometimes they tend to be hesitating at taking a decision no matter what their rules state. b) Set exit rules Normally, traders put 90% of their efforts in looking for buy signals, but they never pay attention to when to exit. At times, it is difficult to close a losing trade, but it is definitely wiser to take a small loss and continue looking for a new opportunity. Professional traders lose a lot of trades each day, but they manage their money and limit their loses, which leads to a profitable trading statement for them. Prior to entering a trade, you should be aware of your exits. There are at least two for every trade. First, where is your stop loss if the trade goes against you? This level must be written down. Mental stops don’t count. The second level is your profit target. Once you reach there, sell a portion of your trade and you can move your stop loss on the rest of your position to break even if you wish. As discussed above, never risk more than a set percentage of your portfolio on any trade. 4. Trying to get even or being too impatient What are the 10 fatal trader mistakes? Rule number 4 is patience. Patience in FOREX trading eventually pays off as it allows you to sit back a bit and wait for the right trading setup. Most traders are too eager to jump in and trade whenever any opportunity arises. This is probably due to our human nature and the eagerness to make a “quick buck”. But if there is one thing that ensures a high probability of winning, it is having the patience to grasp all the necessary information before you trade. This apparently will take time as there are many factors involved in it, such as the forming of trends, trend corrections, highs and lows. Impatience to look at these matters could result in loss of money. It could be helpful sometimes to take a break, allow oneself to have the time to look at the bigger picture, instead of focusing too much on one aspect. Remember that a single transaction might resonate in a series of future losses if executed at the wrong moment. It takes time and patience to wait for the market correction, before you commit to a trade. BUT IT TAKES TIME…Some traders fail to realize that to be successful will take time. They often fall prey to their own impatience in the hope of earning fast money. It could be a rough environment, and charts might be hard to read, so it is wise at times to step back in order to avoid costly mistakes. Don’t rush things out, or try to enter in a trade at all costs by just following your gut. The market could be quite tricky and often does send out the wrong signals. Wait patiently for the best opportunities to align themselves and then act mercilessly. 5. Ignoring the trend “The trend is my friend“- another cliche sentence, which has helped me stay on the right side of the market for as long as I am a trader. If you think about trading the way I do, it could be a boring business, but at least one that makes money. I am not really interested in quick returns. I am not interested in penny stocks. I am not interested in the most popular trades that everyone is talking about. I like to do my own analysis. The more boring a trade looks, the better for me the trade is. Always consider the trend before placing the trade! 6. Having a bullish/bearish bias Folk wisdom says that if you throw a frog in a boiling water, it will promptly jump out of it. But if you put the frog in lukewarm water and then slowly heat the water, by the time the frog realizes that the water has become boiling, it will already be too late. Studies of decision making have proven that people are more likely to accept ethical lapses when they occur in several small steps than when they occur in one large leap. This statement also explains nicely the unfortunate process of unprofitable trading. Once you are in a losing position, you don’t realize if it slowly accumulates into a big loss. You have your own bias and it might lead you into obscurity. That is why one of the most important elements of successful trading is objectivity. It is also one of the hardest elements of mastering the field of trading. Inattentional blindness is definitely not helpful to the human psychology and when it comes to trading, it could be detrimental. 7. Little preparation or lack of strategy Make sure that you close any unnecessary programs on your computer and reboot your computer before the day begins, this refreshes the cache and resident memory (RAM). Several trading systems allow you to set up the environment according to your needs, set it up in a way that allows for minimal distractions and help you keep an eye on each in and out, alongside. Keep in mind that a flaw in the trading system can be costly. Make sure you have a valid proof that your trading strategy does return positive results on a consistent basis. Do not rush into trading before that. 8. Being too emotional Trading the markets is like stepping into a battlefield- you need to be emotionally and psychologically prepared before entering the field, otherwise, you are stepping into a war zone without a sword in your hand. Make sure you have checked three things before you start trading: 1)you are calm, 2)you had a good night’s sleep and 3) you are up for a challenge. Having a positive attitude towards trading is extremely crucial. If you are angry, preoccupied or hung-over then you are at a bigger risk of losing. Make sure you are completely relaxed before you step into the market, even if you have to take yoga classes, it is totally worth it. 9. Lacking money management skills Rule number 9 of “What are the 10 fatal mistakes traders make” list is money management. Risking between 1% to 2% of your portfolio on a single trade is the best way to go. Even if you lose while betting on that amount you will be capable enough to trade some other day and make up for your loses. The amount of risk a trader can take is the amount he thinks he will be able to get back the next day. It is a wise option of start with a smaller amount and slowly and gradually increase the percentage. You can come back to point number 2 “Over-leveraging” and read it again. Having the right money management skills is probably one of the most important traits of the profitable trader. And of course- it is one of the most common mistakes among the losing traders. 10. Lack of record keeping Keeping records is a key to being successful at trading. If you win a trade, you should note down the efforts and the reasons that pulled you towards the trade. If you lose a trade, you should keep a record of why that happened in order to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Note down details such as targets, the exit and entry of each trade, the time, support and resistance levels, daily opening range, market open and close for the day and record comments about why you made the trade and lessons learned. You should save your trading records so that you can go back and analyse the profit or loss for a particular system, draw-downs (which are amounts lost per trade using a trading system), average time per trade (in order to calculate trade efficiency) and other important factors. Remember, this is a serious business and you are the accountant. Conclusion What are the 10 fatal mistakes traders make?? Successful paper trading does not ensure that you will have success when you start trading real money and emotions come into play. Successful paper trading does give the trader confidence that the system they are going to use actually works. Deciding on a system is less important than gaining enough skills so that you are able to make trades without second guessing or doubting the decision. There is no way to guarantee that a trade will return profits. This is the actual beauty of trading and being consistent is based on a trader’s skill set and his/her eagerness to improve. Keep in mind winning without losing does not exist in the world of trading. Professional traders know that the odds are in their favour before entering a trade. It is a continuous process of making more profits and cutting down loses which might not ensure a win every time, but it wins the war. Traders or investors who don’t believe in this adage are more viable to making loses. Traders who win consistently treat trading as a business. While it’s not a guarantee that you will make money, having a plan is crucial if you want to become consistently successful and survive in the trading battle. About the author: Colibri Trader is a price action trader that is constantly looking for the apha. In the meantime, he does not forget to enjoy life, travel and even mentor other traders.

What are Weekly Options? For those less familiar with options, they expire on the third Friday of every month. Weekly options, first introduced by CBOE in October 2005, are one-week options as opposed to traditional options that have a life of months or years before expiration. New series for Weekly options are listed each Thursday and expire the following Friday. Not every stock or index has weekly options. For those that do, it basically means that every Friday is an expiration Friday. That opens tremendous new opportunities but also introduces new risks which can be much higher than "traditional" monthly options. Let's see for example how you could trade Apple (AAPL) using weekly or monthly options. Are they cheap? Lets buy them. Apple took a hit after their recent rare earnings miss. Many people think that the selloff is overdone. They want to use the recent pullback as a buying opportunity. The stock closed at $585.16 on Friday, July 27, 2012. Looking at ATM (At The Money) options, we can see that August 18 (monthly) calls can be purchased at $10.10. That would require the stock to close above $595 by August 18 just to break even. However, the weekly options (expiring on August 3, 2012) can be purchased at $6.15. This is 40% cheaper and requires much smaller move. However, there is a catch. First, you give yourself much less time for your thesis to work out. Second and more importantly, the weekly options are much more exposed to the time decay (the negative theta). The theta is a measurement of the option's time decay. The theta measures the rate at which options lose their value, specifically the time value, as the expiration draws nearer. Generally expressed as a negative number, the theta of an option reflects the amount by which the option's value will decrease every day. When you buy options, the theta is your enemy. When you sell them, the theta is your friend. For the monthly 585 calls, the negative theta is -$0.22. That means that the calls will lose ~2.2% of their value every day all other factors equal. For the weekly calls, the negative theta is a whopping -$0.43 or 7% per day. And that number will accelerate as we get closer to the expiration day. You better be right, and you better be right quickly. Buying is too risky? Maybe selling is better? If this is the case you might say - why not to take the other side of the trade? Why not to use the accelerating theta and sell those options? Or maybe be less risky and sell a credit spread? A credit spread is when you sell an option and buy another option which is further from the underlying price to hedge the risk. Many options "gurus" ride the wave of the weekly options and describe selling of weekly options as a cash machine. They say that "It brings money into my clients account weekly. Every Sunday my clients access their accounts and see + + +.” They advise selling weekly credit spreads and present it as a "a safe option strategy because we’re combining an option purchase with an option sale resulting with a credit into your account". This strategy can work very well.. until it doesn't. Imagine for example someone selling a 133/134 SPY credit spread on Thursday with SPY below $132. That seems like a pretty safe trade, isn't it? After all, we have just one day, what could possibly go wrong? The options will probably expire worthless and the clients will see more cash in their account by Sunday. Well, after the market close, good news from the EU summit took traders by surprise. The next day SPY opened above $135 and the credit spread has lost 100%. So much for the "safe strategy". By the way, this was a real trade recommendation from one of the options "gurus". He is charging $2,500 for his advice. So what is the biggest problem with selling the weekly options? The answer is the negative gamma. The gamma is a measure of the rate of change of its delta. The gamma of an option is expressed as a percentage and reflects the change in the delta in response to a one point movement of the underlying stock price. When you buy options, the gamma is your friend. When you sell them, the gamma is your enemy. When you are short weekly options (or any options which expire in a short period of time), you have a large negative gamma. Any sharp move in the underlying will cause significant losses, and there is nothing you can do about it. The Bottom Line So is the conclusion that you should not trade the weekly options? Not necessarily. They can be a good addition to a diversified options portfolio - as long as you are aware of the risks and allocate only small portion of the account to those trades. Link to the original article Related articles: The Options Greeks: Is It Greek To You? The Risks Of Weekly Credit Spreads Options Trading Greeks: Gamma For Speed Options Trading Greeks: Theta For Time Decay Why You Should Not Ignore Negative Gamma Make 10% Per Week With Weeklys? Want to learn how to reduce risk and put probabilities in your favor? Start Your Free Trial

Many newsletters post testimonials on their website, and you not always can know how real those testimonials are. Our reviews are posted by a third party website, so you can be sure they are all real, from members that actually have used the service. So please check out what our members say about SteadyOptions. The owner, Kim Klaiman, must be one of the most knowledgeable people in the field, yet he manages to remain humble. His personal integrity is obvious and plays a big part in the value of this service - Saud. Kim and all the other traders are incredibly generous with their time, and will go into painstaking detail to explain how to THINK about these trades - Halito27. The professionalism of the forum is top notch, and is accessible for many different types of investors - Mike_tee_vee. Over the last 12 month, my understanding of option greeks, intrinsic/extrinsic value, option volatility and other technical terms have increased tremendously, thanks to SO and Kim(owner) - Maxtodorov. So far, I have learned far more from SO than anywhere else for event-driven trades like pre-earning straddles/strangles. In my opinion, the educational value of SO far outweighs the price of admission - Mikescool. Kim is a very professional and capable trader who offers education on options trading on top of a very profitable trading strategy - Uli808. You really are able to look over the shoulder of an options expert. But what I found to be even more impressive is that the owner of the forum responds so quickly when you are stuck with a concept - Msuick. One of the things that distinguishes Mr. Klaiman's service from others is that each of his trades are real, filled orders--not hypothetical orders. There is something very scientific and mathematical about his approach that pleases my engineering sensibilities. - RobertB. A great site provides good trades plus educational and interactive ways to learn how (and why) to trade strategies successfully. It's the whole "teach a man to fish" thing. SO is run by a real trader with proven strategies which I now include in my own trading portfolio - JasonV. SteadyOptions will guide you in the right direction! Then once you've mastered the concept, you can look over the shoulder of Kim Klaiman and trade right along with him. With SteadyOptions not only do you have Kim, but a whole community of people who are in the same or similar trades - Xpresstalk. This is not an "advertise the wins, hide the losses" community. It is intellectually honest, analytical (data-driven), and precise--lots of very bright people are here, maximizing their trading success - Joseph_Kusnick. Kim has always been willing to go the extra mile to make sure I have been fully satisfied. I am not sure how he can do all the things he does, but he is always prompt and thorough in his responses - Tjlocke99. We wish everyone profitable trading. If you are still not a member, we invite you to take the SteadyOptions free trial and see by yourself. Please refer to Frequently Asked Questions for more details.