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In my last article I showed you what you can expect selling short strangles and straddles and how much leverage is appropriate. Today I want to show you how to build a well diversified short strangle/straddle portfolio and how to trade it through difficult times.

I have seen a lot of discussions on Twitter lately about the issue if selling naked strangles or straddles is a great strategy or a recipe for disaster. If you have read my books or if you are following my sample portfolio, you know that I'm a huge fan of selling short strangles and straddles.

“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket.” Kin Hubbard. In this article I will discuss the reasoning behind buying back the short options and not waiting till expiration. Two of my basic trading tenets are related:   

We recently received a question from one of our members: "Is value allocation a contrarian strategy that identifies stocks that are considered "cheap" relative to historical prices?  How is value measured, and how would this strategy mitigate a pool of stocks like Blackberry in 2010 that was trading at metrics less than historical trailing averages?"

Nassim Taleb tells a great story about Thanksgiving turkey’s in his 2007 book, The Black Swan. "Consider a turkey that is fed every day…Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say.

Simplification: We can all better understand options trading by removing the complexity so often seen in articles. One of the best ways to understand the profit potential and risk levels of any options strategy is through diagrams and a demonstration of the formula.

“Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you own.” I’ve written articles and posts on this website about a wide variety of ideas and strategies, so in this article I’ll share my thought process of how I’ve put it all together for my own personal situation. My ability, willingness, and need to take risk is likely different than yours, possibly a lot different, so this should not be considered investment advice or recommendations.

One of the most common questions asked about the Anchor and Leveraged Anchor strategies relates to “what’s the most I can lose on the trade.”  Fortunately, that’s a fairly easy number to calculate for any one given time on a known portfolio.  A yearlong dynamic calculation is a bit more difficult. 

This is the last in a series of articles about how dividends affect option value and volatility. In picking stocks for options trading, what are your criteria? Analysis of dividends, debt and net return – all fundamental tests – help identify strong value companies (and lower-volatility options) versus weak, high-risk stocks.

As a financial advisor, investment advisor, hedge fund manager, model developer, and newsletter signal provider for over a decade now, I've had the opportunity to see quite a bit of human nature in action.

Our Steady Momentum PutWrite strategy attempts to outperform the CBOE PUT index, which writes cash secured puts on the S&P 500. An investable version of this strategy can be purchased with the ETF PUTW. The historical data for PUT extends back more than 30 years, highlighting how writing puts can be an attractive strategy.

The theory of dividends and underlying stock prices is simple: The underlying price is expected to decline on ex-dividend date, by the amount of the dividend. As a result, option prices should decline as well. Under this theory, calls for higher dividend stocks should be valued lower and puts should be valued higher.