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Found 64 results

  1. I would like to share some of the thoughts expressed in the article and add my own perspective. Honesty and Transparency Above All Dan writes: "As we wrapped up the month of April, the sample account took another loss. Once again, due to RUT. When you take two monthly losses in a row with a high probability trading system, it stings a bit. My goal is always to accurately represent what I’m doing and not pretend to be some guru with a 100% win rate or who conveniently fails to disclose trading results. I firmly believe in honesty and transparency rather than deception or what you’re hoping to hear." SteadyOptions took three monthly losses in a row, also with a high probability trading system. Yes, it stings. But do you really believe that anyone is able to trade without losses? Whoever claims to not having any losses simply fails to accurately report his performance. Our results are fully documented, every single trade is on the performance page, winners and losers. Similar to Dan, I believe in full transparency. For a trading strategy that produced triple digit returns 5 years in a row, 3 losing months in a row is statistically expected at some point. Dan continues: "Armchair traders will say that we should change our strategy or not have been trading the strategy, but changing strategies every time we lose means we effectively have no strategy. Additionally, knowing when a strategy will work or won’t work is 100% impossible unless you’re Goldman Sachs, the Fed (arguably the same as GS), or a high frequency trading firm. Wise words. Probability Is Not Certainty One of the reasons to our performance this year was a new strategy (RIC - Reverse Iron Condor) we introduced and described in Lessons From Q1 2016 Earnings Season article. It was those 4-5 losers that contributed the most to the negative performance. We discussed why this happened in the article and in more details on the forum. This is a high probability strategy - however, probability doesn't mean certainty. Sometimes even high probability strategies produce few losers in a row. The RIC strategy bets on big post-earnings moves which happen 90% of the time for some stocks. To put things in perspective, NFLX, GOOG and LNKD produced some of the smallest post-earnings moves in history. What are the odds? Dan mentions that the start of 2016 has been challenging for many, if not most or all, non-directional options traders. We experienced it with our butterfly strategy. After booking 7 winners in a row, our last two trades became big losers due to wild market moves in February-March. Again, those are strategies that we have been using with great success, but no strategy wins 100% of the time. Those two big losers along with few big RIC losers impacted the most our 2016 performance. Rest of the strategies actually performed pretty well. How could the Fidelity Magellan fund make 29% per year from 1977-1990 while the average investor in the fund lost money? It's because investors always visualize the path to look like "your plan" and when it's not, the powerful impulse of fear and greed wins out (causing inflows around tops and outflows around bottoms). After a string of losses, what's next? SteadyOptions produced outstanding returns in the previous 4+ years. To put things in perspective, consider this: if you started investing in the stock market in 2007 based on historical returns of ~10%/year, then watched your money losing half of its value, would you quit? Some people would. Those who didn't, watched their money triple in the following 7 years. If you quit each time few losing months happen, you will just become part of DALBAR statistics. Losses are part of the game, and if you can not endure losses, you should not be trading. I would strongly advise not to think in terms of "how and when to recover". Just continue executing your trading plan if you believe it still has an edge, and the results will come. This is exactly what we intend to do. Focus on following your trading plan not the short term results of it. Robust strategies are profitable in the long term time frame. “It is critical to understand human nature if you want to succeed at investing. I’ve seen this time and time again. I’ve had investors who have been with me for years, getting great performance, and then suddenly we have a bad year or a bad couple of years, which we’ve told them about ahead of time, right, because we can always show them that nothing works all the time, and they still bail. Basing their decisions on short-term results is in fact the biggest mistake investors make.” - Jim O’Shaughnessy 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? Performance Reporting: The Myths and The Reality Lessons From Q1 2016 Earnings Season
  2. As I’ve done the past few years, I’ve broken down the Steady Options 2015 trade performance by trade type (there are a few open trades but these may not be closed until January). Here’s are this year’s stats along with some comments from my perspective... Pre-Earnings Calendars 51 Trades – 41 win, 10 loss (80% win) Average gain 12.67% Comments: Again one of our best performing trade types. Basically the same number of trades as last year (51 vs 48). We were probably on pace to have significantly more of these trades than last year, but large volatility jump in the Fall made entry prices not good from a historical perspective and therefore not many of these trades were placed during that timeframe. Win rate up from last year (80% vs 71%) Average gain down slightly from last year (12.67% vs 13.80%) Note that there are a few non-earnings calendars in here (like GOOG), but I included all company calendar trades in this section. Pre-Earnings Straddles/Strangles 34 Trades - 23 win, 11 loss (68% win) Average gain 2.61% (3.88% if you exclude the large QIHU loss) Comments: Count of these trades way down from last year (74 down to 34). Avoided trades on low IV stocks that were the poorest straddle/strangle performers in past years. Win percentage and average gain both up from last year’s percentages of 62% and 2.54%. Despite modest gains on straddles/strangles compared to some of the other trade types, these trades receive a lot of discussion in the forums. Rolling strikes as the stock price moves around is a big topic – note to some of the newer members, rolling does not lock in profits! (it may do so on one leg of the trade but the overall trade may still be down). There is no right answer to the rolling vs not rolling question as sometimes each will perform better. Index trades (RUT, SPY, SPX, TLT) 31 Trades - 21 win, 10 loss (68% win) SPY/TLT Combo: 6 win, 4 loss, avg loss -0.32% SPX and RUT Iron Condors: 3 win, 1 loss, avg gain +4.95% SPX and RUT Calendars: 5 win, 1 loss, avg gain +4.73% SPX Butterfly: 7 win, 4 loss, avg gain +3.49% Average gain 2.69% Comments: Large market moves this Fall were not good for these trades. When the market was relatively calm these trades performed well, when the market was volatile they performed poorly. VIX trades 11 trades - 10 win, 1 loss (91% win) Average gain 28.15% Comments: Overtook pre-earnings calendars as our best performing trade type this year. 8 of the 11 trades were VIX calendars and the ability to place these trades is very broker-specific. If you are not using IB ($150 margin per calendar) other brokers margin requirements are much higher and some will not even allow you to open the trade. I fear that many SO member missed many of these trades because they use brokers other than IB, which is a real shame as the stats clearly show that these trades were the best performers.
  3. Since I started an options trading newsletter over 3 years ago, I met a lot of interesting people. I also learned a lot about human psychology. I would like you to take a look at this article. It provides some good perspective about Wall Street and human emotions. Click here to view the article
  4. Today we closed our VIX calendar trade for $0.80 credit, after opening it just two weeks ago for $0.25 debit. What percentage gain did we make? This is not a tricky question. Well, maybe a little bit. Any high school student would tell you that 0.80/0.25=220% gain. Correct? Not so fast. Click here to view the article
  5. While most major indexes continue to straggle, SteadyOptions continues to deliver strong gains. SteadyOptions flagship service produced 121.5% ROI in First Half 2015, based on fixed $1,000 allocation per trade (non-compounded) and 6 trades open. This translated to 72.9% return on the whole account, based on 10% allocation per trade. The winning ratio was a remarkable 82%. Check out the Performance page to see the full results. Please note that those results are based on real fills, not hypothetical performance. Click here to view the article
  6. This week we closed our June trades with gains of 10.1% on margin, and 7.9% return on 20k unit. This makes the year to date non-compounded return 31.6% on a whole account (including commissions). If we reported returns like most other services do (Compounded ROI before commissions), we would report 48.9% gain. As you noticed, we closed our June trades three weeks before expiration, to reduce the negative gamma risk. We recommend reading the Why You Should Not Ignore Negative Gamma article to understand the gamma risk. This is another thing we do differently from many other services. We open our trades early and close them early. We would typically open the trades 6-8 weeks before expiration and close them 2-3 weeks before expiration. Click here to view the article
  7. In one of my previous articles I described how we are going to play the current earnings season. I shared our plans to trade some of our favorite names (NFLX, GOOG, FFIV, CMG, FB, AMZN, MSFT, LNKD, TSLA and more). I expected this period to be good for SteadyOptions members. I was wrong. This earnings season was not good. It was outstanding! We closed CMG and AMZN trades for 20% gain, GOOG for 37% gain, TSLA for 34% gain, MSFT for 13% gain, among others. We also booked 22% gain in VIX calendar, 13% in RUT calendar and 17% in SPY/TLT combo. We closed 15 trades in April, 13 winners and only 2 losers, for an overall ROI of 30.0%! Our ROI in 2015 is an amazing 85.5%, in just 4 months. Click here to view the article
  8. Our long term members know that we like to use few non-directional strategies to play earnings. There are few things we like about those strategies: They are predictable. They are repeatable. They are flexible. They can be used on the same stocks cycle after cycle. The following article described few stocks that we use over and over again, cycle after cycle. We said "$TSLA, $LNKD, $NFLX, $GOOG: Thank You, See You Next Cycle".Well, the Next Cycle is already here. Click here to view the article
  9. What would you say if someone told you that they consistently produce an average annual return of 3,000-4,000%? You would probably think it's too good to be true, right? That's what I thought when I reviewed a list of best performing investment newsletters reported by Pro-Trading-Profits, an independent advisory monitoring site. So I decided to check out one of the services reporting those remarkable returns. Click here to view the article
  10. While most major indexes continue to straggle, SteadyOptions continues to deliver strong gains. SteadyOptions flagship service produced 47.4% ROI in Q1 2015, based on fixed $1,000 allocation per trade (non-compounded) and 6 trades open. This translated to 28.4% return on the whole account, based on 10% allocation per trade. The winning ratio was a remarkable 82%. Check out the Performance page to see the full results. Please note that those results are based on real fills, not hypothetical performance. Click here to view the article
  11. Numbers don't lie. Take a look how the major indexes performed in January, and compare it to SteadyOptions performance: S&P 500: -3.1% Dow Jones: -3.7% Russell 2000: -3.3% SteadyOptions: +20.7% ROI After booking 146% ROI in 2014, we closed 8 trades in January, producing an incredible 88% winning ratio and 16% average return per trade. Click here to view the article
  12. Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you and your families a lot of health, prosperity and happiness in 2015. 2014 marks our third year as a public service. We had a fantastic year. We closed 150 trades in 2014 which produced 146.6% ROI, based on fixed $1,000 allocation per trade (non-compounded) and 6 trades open. The winning ratio was pretty consistent around 63%. We had only one losing month in 2014. Check out the Performance page to see the full results. Please note that those results are based on real fills, not hypothetical performance. Click here to view the article
  13. Our readers and members know that our returns are verified by Pro-Trading-Profits, an independent third party website that tracks performance of hundreds investment newsletters. They have an excellent explanation how to analyze and compare performance of different trading systems. Here are some highlights of their article. Click here to view the article
  14. Kim, I couldn't find where this was posted on the site, but I have to tell you this is what makes you a real stand-up guy. I don't know anyone that would write such an honest e-mail. Well done Kim. Honestly you also don't have much to be sorry about. You discuss the risks up front. You have created an excellent community here. As long as I am able to afford it, I'll pay my monthly fee just for the chance to interact with some of the regular members on this site and you, regardless of the success of the earnings trades. I wish you continued success. Richard