eudaimonia

Does anyone know if Trade Hawk can do OCO orders? I watched through the intro videos but didn't see anything about that.

@Ophir Gottlieb Is this out for all users or just beta testers? I'm not seeing the Custom Strategy option when I log in.

Yes, I can definitely understand that it's a lot of work. I'd love to be a beta tester. I'll send an email. Thanks!

@Ophir Gottlieb Any updates on when calendars will be available?

@Ophir Gottlieb - here is another one that breaks apart expectations. Holding long straddles through XOM earnings is quite profitable: http://tm.cmlviz.com/index.php?share_key=5xGEIh1AsTOyoATw What I thought was interesting is that even though XOM is down 11% over the past 3 years earnings are essentially neutral as seen in the backtest.

Just signed up. Very cool and fast backtesting! In about 3 minutes I was able to test out our VXX trade (sort of). Would love to see diagonals supported. For now this gives a pretty good idea. http://tm.cmlviz.com/index.php?share_key=3ZPHymSmEWHXzAh6 Would love to see how this tests out if you can eliminate trades when VX futures are in backwardation or when the put skew is flat. I know - but a guy can dream right?

Search for One Cancels All order on the Steady Options forums or on IB's website. You can do an OCA order with the Classic TWS view as well as Mosaic.

@akhouston Tradervue.

@Kim thanks for the advice. I wanted to post this to show that even someone still learning can do pretty well following your service. I had never traded options until this year (been trading futures for about 12 years). I wish that my futures strategies did as well when I was still learning

@krisbee, Since others might have the same questions I hope it's ok to just respond in the thread rather than PM: Yes, I made mistakes like hitting the ask and paying the full price on a calendar or two. Or putting on the opposite position and having to reverse. Fortunately, I learned quickly from these but all warts are reflected above. I use this tracking software for all of my trades and the tags are custom. For purposes of what you are seeing here, SO and Edward are the same (I filtered the tags to exclude non SO trades and trades done in accounts for my wife). This is another custom tag. I used it to refer to SO trades like the SPX butterflies and RUT broken wing condor. I also use this tag for other trades beyond SO. Yes, everything was through IB. How I managed to improve my fills over the year (still not perfect): 1) When Kim says he's looking at a trade that is the time to start working your orders, 2) use IB's feature of OCO and go for multiple strikes as appropriate to the stock and strategy, 3) Sometimes I didn't get filled. Sometimes I chased. As I said this is very much my imperfect trading. As far as how to improve in the future? Look above at the stocks that did well this year - maybe ok to chase those for a few cents but don't chase the losers and the sub $1 calendars. Pay too much on a $.35 calendar and you will regret it. Also, you may notice that I started avoiding straddles and strangles. Adjusting these is too much work for me since I have a dayjob. So I let these go. Thanks.

Yeah, the September spike was the result of closing some winning positions at the beginning of the week (making it look like a huge profit) and closing out the rest of the position at the end of the week. Because the software I use only tracks closed positions it makes the equity curve jump up and then down but in reality my account never moved like that.

I started with Steady Options last January and paper traded until February when I went live with Kim's system using a $10,000 allocation for the year. Below are a few snap shots of my trading analytics. I'm very happy to report a net profit for the year 2/19/16 - 12/30/16 of 22.7%. Keep in mind that this is my own trading - warts and all. I've made a few egregious (and some less so) mistakes along the way and through it all managed to make a profit. I hardly ever get as good as Kim's fills but I do my best to setup the trades when he starts looking and simply execute as well as I can. I seem to be getting better every month. Thank you to Kim for providing an excellent service that is both profitable and highly educational, and thank you to all of the regular contributors to the Steady Options forums. Edward

To clarify what Kim is saying you can't actually get IV for the pure futures contract itself (e.g., GC, ZS, SB), etc. However, you can access the IV for many of these products via their proxy GLD, SOYA (there is no ETF for Sugar sadly) and you could get this info from ONE. You can also use an indicator in TOS that tracks something like IV rank (which is typically the instruments relative IV in relation to itself over a period of time such as a year). Pretty much most of the futures have an ETF other than the softs such as the following: ES, TF, any index - SPY, RUT, etc. CL, NG - USO, UNG 6E, 6F - FXE, FXF GC, SI - GLD, SLV ZC, ZS - CORN, SOYA ZB - TBT

I use IB and Tradestation for different purposes. For IB the advantage is that you can trade pretty much any product you want all in one account for a reasonable price. For example I have on some stocks, options, and futures spreads all in the same account. You can't do that with Tradestation; however, Tradestation has backtesting capabilities and built-in automated trading that I prefer for most of my directional futures trading.

The way that I deal with being mobile is that I use a Virtual Private Server. This allows me to use the desktop version of IB (which I use for options) and Tradestation (which I use for futures). I've been using speedytradingservers.com as my VPS for over a year and they have been very reliable. You can even select different server locations based on where you are in the world and what exchange you want to be close to.