ChadK

No. Works for me, and I'm a subscriber.

Slight correction. In the NVDA description, you mention 40/10, but the results photos are 40/20. I wasn't getting even somewhat similar results, and then I finally noticed you were buying the iron condor, not selling.

I wonder if this is a anomaly of not using the midpoint? If not, then I suppose it could be coded that, on the day of expiration, no spread be closed for more than it's width.

I think it depends upon what you are trying to prove, and with what confidence ("confidence level"). Therefore, there is no one correct answer. It would seem that @luxmon might be better qualified to answer this. That said, in my line of work, I've always heard that 30 data points is a good starting point.

@Ophir Gottlieb It seems that several of my questions are getting lumped together. I will separate each with a numbered list, and would appreciate an answer for each. You had mentioned looking at my question regarding earnings dates, but really there's about 3 questions regarding earnings dates (two in #1 below, and #2). 0. Yes, the limit/stop price bug seems to be fixed this week. Thanks. (No need to answer this one.) 1. On May 2nd, Ceugis shared some results on testing TSLA. I had looked at the results and saw some potential bugs that are different than the stop/limit bug: 2. I would like clarification as to what "days before" and "days after" earnings is defined as in CMLviz. 3. On May 5, on your post about AMBA, you stated use "Monthly Options". My question is: 4. Not really a question, but some feature requests. I would like to echo Yowster's suggestions for trade amount in dollars, a minimum credit received (or debit for debit trades?), and a way to turn off selecting expirations that are weeklies. I suppose I could pose these questions directly in an email to support, but thought it's best to do it here, so others can benefit. Thanks, Chad

@Ophir Gottlieb I've asked several questions over the last few days. Could you please answer? @Ophir Gottlieb How do you specify using only the monthly options? If I put in a 30 day rollover, then it looks for options that are 30 days to expiration on the day after earnings. In the case of AMBA, the most recent earnings was AMC 2/28. The trade was opened on 3/2, but it chose the Mar31 expiration. The cycle before, earnings was on 12/1, trade opened on 12/5, but chose the Jan6 expiration. So, how do you get it to do only monthly options? Have you considered having an option to disable weeklies? Some of the weeklies are so thinly traded that backtesting on them may not make sense. Being able to turn them off would be helpful.

Yeah, it used to be available through dough.com. I think now you have to sign up for an account on TastyWorks. But I don't think you actually have to fund the account to use the tools. Maybe the use of the word "account" is too strong here. I think you can get login credentials for the website, without having to open a brokerage account.

It's a list, but with filtering capability. As the top line shows, I've filtered out candidates with earnings within the next 0-36 days, and IV Rank less than 22. There's also a liquidity filter. You can also filter the inverse...only showing stocks with earnings within the next xxx days, etc. I'm not sure if any of their "lists" include the universe of stocks. I like using the default "Notable Stocks", as they are the most liquid.

I haven't had good luck with the TOS "sharing" feature (where you can just load it up), so here's a screenshot of my scan: Tastytrade believes that selling options with 45 days to expiration is a sweet spot. You can see that my earnings filter is set to 20 days. I always double-check earnings dates. I try to avoid earnings in those ~45 days, but won't always. I do exit a few days before earnings, but usually, if I waited that long, results aren't so good as the IV goes up, taking away profits. That said, many times my 45 day trades close in around 20 days. In fact, out of my last 84 trades, they were closed in an average of 19.29 days, with an average of 6.0% return on Reg-T margin figures. Out of those 84 trades, 11 were losers, for a 86.9% win rate. 44 trades were naked strangles, 5 naked straddles, 13 iron butterflies, 15 verticals, 4 iron condors, and a couple misc. Also, I don't believe that you need a TastyWorks funded account to use their tools. Here's what their screener looks like:

That's not 100% true. They do occasionally do calendars, and in low IV rank candidates that you want to go directional on, they do prefer buying a vertical over selling one. But yet, they greatly prefer selling premium to capture the decay. Yes, I do screen by both IV rank and earnings. In addition, I try to stick to candidates that have some reasonable option volume, as well as priced over about $40 (higher options premium). TastyWorks website allows you to filter by earnings and IV rank. I've also written a scan for Thinkorswim to do something similar, but include options volume, price, Market Cap, etc. Tastytrade also does a lot of earnings trades, but I shy away from them. I don't like binary events...seems too much like gambling which isn't my style.

@Ophir Gottlieb Can you describe what "1 day after earnings" means to you/CMLviz? In the case of TWTR, February's earnings was before market open on Feb 9th. So, earnings happened before the market opened, and options traded all day. The following day was Feb 10th. I'd call that the day after earnings. CMLviz opens the trade on Feb 13th (after the weekend). It's previously been said that the option prices used are at the end of the day, so there was 3 full days of trading before the trade was placed. It would seem that Feb 10th would have been the most appropriate "1 day after earnings".

For example, here's what I find a bit interesting. DE, naked straddle. http://tm.cmlviz.com/index.php?share_key=UYejzl3gnZBTTBfG 30 day rollover Avoid earnings (custom, close 5 days before, open 1 day after) Close when trade >25% gain, or >200% loss. (Sell spread for $2, close for $0.50 profit, or for $400 loss - 200% of $2.00 x 100) Open next trade immediately. Results on just a 1-lot, 3 years: And while the risk is $3807, the Portfolio Margin on that is about one-third of that. If that's too much risk, you can butterfly it off. Reduce the risk in half, and even increase your ROI% by almost double (50/10d).

Well, there were periods of downward movement in KO. Apr - Nov 2016 had a 15% decline, and several other 10% declines in 5yrs. AMBA is up 100% in 3 years, but it had a VERY wild ride in the middle of those 3 years. It first ran up 400%, then dropped nearly all the way back down, then doubled, dropped 30% again, then back up a bit. But I fully agree. One need to be very consciousness of curve fitting when using this tool. If, like most stocks in the past 3 years, has had a tear up, of course bullish strategies are going to perform well. (Bull put credit spreads, bull call debit spreads, naked puts, long calls, etc.) I've been having a little fun with backtesting naked strangles and straddles (the TastyTrade style). It's a little more interesting now that some of the bugs have been fixed in the software, but there's still a few others which makes it hard to believe the results without going over the individual trades with a fine toothed comb.

From trial and error, it looked like it was something like a -30d/+10d spread.

Any update on those potential bugs?

@Ophir Gottlieb How do you specify using only the monthly options? If I put in a 30 day rollover, then it looks for options that are 30 days to expiration on the day after earnings. In the case of AMBA, the most recent earnings was AMC 2/28. The trade was opened on 3/2, but it chose the Mar31 expiration. The cycle before, earnings was on 12/1, trade opened on 12/5, but chose the Jan6 expiration. So, how do you get it to do only monthly options? Have you considered having an option to disable weeklies? Some of the weeklies are so thinly traded that backtesting on them may not make sense. Being able to turn them off would be helpful.

$200/month thereafter. Ouch.

Apex is the clearing firm for both Tradier and TastyWorks.

Yes, I am using all of these settings, other than the profits I listed were for a 40/20d spread (which had the highest PnL%. So, to my understanding, the "rollover 10 days" means to open a trade that is 10 days to expiration. If one is not available at exactly 10 days to expiration, pick an expiration cycle that is closest to 10. In this case, there are weekly options, and it's picking a 7 DTE instead of a 14 DTE. Once that trade is opened, it then expires after ~7 days, and then a new trade is opened immediately. It looks for an expiration with 10 days, doesn't find one, picks 7 again, and the cycle starts all over. Then, when it's 30 days after expiration, it says you don't want to trade anymore, so it closes the last trade before it expires. It then waits until 1 day after earnings ("sitting on the sidelines" for 2 months), then starts all over again. This is why I say it's informative to look at the individual trades to see if they make sense. Of course, if you stumble across some interesting trade by not doing what you intended, that's great, as long as the individual results look meaningful. @Ophir Gottlieb Did you see these comments of mine?

Interesting thing to stumble upon. Essentially, you are buying WEEKLY verticals, doing that every week ONLY during the first 30 days after earnings. Then, you essentially take the next two months off until earnings hits again, then you start up again the day after earnings, but only for a month again. I think it's important to study the individual trades in the trade log section. Having just purchased a subscription yesterday, it only took me my first simulation to find a couple potential bugs, which greatly affected the results. In this case of TSLA, it's interesting to see the individual trade results, and how each month after earnings did. Here's a quick rundown of some of the 30-day periods, based on 1-lot, 40d-20d verticals: 2/10/16 $1619 (all 5 winning trades) 5/4/16 $-147 (1 winner, 1 scratch, 3 losers) 8/3/16 $-479 (all 5 losing trades) 10/26/16 $-137 (4 losing, 1 winner) And here's where it gets interesting... Next position opened is March 3rd. But earnings was on 2/22. So it entered a trade this time 7 days after earnings, not 1. Looks like potential bug #1, or wrong earnings date data. Then, instead of stopping the weekly trades after a month (~5 trades like in other cycles), it just kept going and going until today, 9 trades later. This would appear to be bug #2. The first 5 trades netted $827 (3 win, 2 losers), and the next 4 trades netted $-30.

Note to others trying to duplicate this with the link. Apparently the *Custom* earnings handling does not get included in the link. You need to change it manually.

Just signed up right now. I'm surprised there's no SSL secure login? Looking forward to trying it out!

One more thing with Tradier... they do not provide quotes on RUT (Russell 2000) index. They have quotes for RUT's options, but not RUT itself. Therefore, you need to use another source just to find out what the current price of RUT is. This also applies to when using OptionNetExplorer (ONE) to model trades. ONE gets all messed up because it needs the current price of RUT to do any calculations. @semsem24 There are no hidden fees that I've found. $40 per month gets subracted from your account, and each contract's fees are about $0.09 per contract. The few trades I've put on have already paid for (more than) a month's worth of OptionNetExplorer to use as a front-end. They claimed that they do not have a planned end date for this deal, but reserve the right to change at any time. It is currently not an introductory offer with an expiration date. That said, I'm not sure how they can stay in business only making $40 per customer.

That was very nice of them to inform their customers of this.

@mukundaa asked: One of the major benefits of Trader Tax Status is that you can deduct business expenses. For a trader, this can include internet service, margin interest, software, and trading information services, among many other things too. For me, I wrote off the cost of OptionNetExplorer, OptionVue, and services such as SteadyOptions. In the beginning years, I went from trading service to trading service (subscribing to several at once), the large expense of the Sheridan Mentoring program, lots and lots of different software. It was very beneficial to get the 28% tax back. As time progressed, I stopped using many of these services, and my expenses dropped considerably, so the benefit (getting back ~28% of the cost) didn't outweigh the cost (the remaining 72% out of my pocket). It just was no longer worth the extra hassle of filing out business taxes. Everyone's situation will be different. Commissions are not tax deductible, but they are priced in to your PnL, so effectively it is tax deductible. If you had a gain of $100, and your commissions were $20, you'd only show $80 as your net gain, and only pay taxes on $80. If you had a $100 loss, and also paid $20 in taxes, then you get to subtract $120 from other gains. For taxes, more specifically, for trade accounting, I really like TradeLog. It's not cheap, and is an annual subscription, but in my opinion, it's worth it as it's accurate, matches trades very well, and is pretty easy to use. Once done with TradeLog, I use TurboTax to complete my personal taxes (and previously used TurboTax Business for the LLC).