Humble

Yes. I was trying to be conservative, but many sources did mention 50-70%. Then the death numbers are even higher. And even if we take only 0.1% death rate, which is really conservative, we are talking about 4 million deaths worldwide. P.S. And yes, not all models are reliable (most probably are not), but it's probably better than nothing. If you look at US, the initial death estimates were 37k if I remember correctly - they more than tripled in just couple months, while the country was on lockdown. Imagine where they will be when they start to re open?

Thanks for sharing @TrustyJules From my talks with some medical professionals, the estimate is that this will not be over till 30-50% of the population is infected. In US, that's 100 MILLION people. Taking a very conservative mortality rate of 0.5%, that's half million deaths in US only. Worldwide, it translates to over 2 BILLION infected and 10 MILLION deaths. I really hope those numbers are not correct. Any medical experts here can comment?

Dr Fauci just testified that the COVID-19 death toll is likely meaningfully higher than the 80,000 reported. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/12/fauci-testimony-coronavirus-reopening-deaths-hearing

Both options expired worthless, so yes, you kept the credit.

Going back to trading, I just went back to some PMs I had with @Yowster back in February and found this: I had a feeling from the beginning of February that the market is severely underestimating the potential impact of the virus. I have the same feeling now. With all the bad news coming almost every day, I think we can see at least 5-10% correction from the current levels, potentially more. In my personal opinion, this rally is built on hope. I'm not sure why the market doesn't realize it, but re opening will cause a big second wave. Which will force the governments to implement lockdowns once again. Whole industries will be devastated: tourism, restaurants, taxis, etc. Commercial real estate will collapse. Healthcare industry will suffer tremendous losses. These industries employ massive numbers of people. Increased diplomatic and economic tensions between the US and China will also have a big negative impact. Latest comments from Buffet and Munger also show that they are bearish short term. In my opinion, it will get much worse before it gets better. Please note that I DO NOT make trading or investment decisions based on my opinions, and I encourage everyone to do the same. I would like to position our SO portfolio in a way that we can benefit from the next leg down, but at the same time not to lose if I'm wrong. Our straddles and hedged straddles will benefit greatly if the next leg down comes, but at the same time they can make small gains even during consolidation phase or rallies.

Got this from someone: COVID: Top 10 current conspiracy theories

After reading some of the responses and the articles, I would like to ask a simple question. Except for very few countries (Sweden, Belarus, maybe couple more) that did not follow the rest (and the impact of their policy is still not clear), 95%+ of the countries followed the path of the lockdown. I'm sure the leaders had a pretty good idea about the impact of their decisions on the economy, the businesses and people's lives. So why did they do it? Did anyone force them? In case of Trump, it might actually cost him the elections if the economy does not improve dramatically by November. And still he and other leaders made this decision. Maybe, just maybe, it's because they knew that the alternative is much worse? Again, I'm not a medical expert and not pretending to understand all the models and the statistics. But I really would like to know how this can be explained. I'm sure many countries could handle it better, and nobody is perfect. But as @RapperTmentioned, this is a very complicated problem with no clear right answers. It's easy to criticize from the sidelines when you have zero responsibility and accountability (this applies to all of us). But when you have to make decisions that will impact millions of lives, things look a bit different. So I repeat my question: why they decided to implement the lockdowns, knowing the devastating impact it will have?

Speaking of politics, James A. Kostohryz just posted the following comment: "the response of state government and citizens to COVID-19 has been incredibly politicized. People's views on this are almost entirely driven by politics. Now, just to a thought experiment. Imagine that Trump had rung the alarm bells early on and stopped all in-bound flights from foreign nations and implemented extremely tight lock-downs like they did in New Zealand and other places. What would things look like now? Republicans would be praising Trump and emphasizing the existential threats and Democrats would be saying that Trump is being too extreme. This really COULD have happened. It is not at all hard for me to imagine a scenario, that Trump could have been convinced by somebody that his best shot at re-election was to take a "heroic" and authoritative stand against COVID-19. Just for fun, imagine if that had happened; just as a thought experiment." So true. btw, personally I believe that stopping all in-bound flights from foreign nations as early as possible would be one of the most important steps in reducing the spread. Look at Israel - they banned all flights around mid March, and they basically defeated the virus as of now. But then again, politics played a huge role in all steps. Canada never officially banned flights from China, which to me is unthinkable.

Tons of unofficial trades in the last few days posted by @Yowsterand @TrustyJules Hope you are following.

Here is a VERY bearish case by SA contributor James A. Kostohryz: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4334820-next-leg-down-another-massive-decline-is-coming "My current “base case” scenario (my working hypothesis) is that the current bear market will ultimately fall into the “severe” category. In this particular analysis, this would imply a trough for the current bear market cycle in the range (S&P 500 index) of 1876 to 1463."

Thanks for posting @Yowster As someone who is observing from the outside and not involved in the US politics, I'm shocked how biased the mainstream media has been against Trump from the beginning. I know it's a sensitive issue, and I'm not taking sides (although I have a very strong political opinion, but this is obviously not the place, especially considering I'm not a US citizen). But the media bias was very clear from the first day of Trump administration, and it's not surprising that during the election year it became much stronger. I believe a LOT of the COVID-19 related coverage is political and not medical, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Expecting from the media to be objective, not biased, and act for the "public best interest" is not realistic and naive. It's like expecting from CNBC to help the small investor, while we know that their first priority is to increase ratings to sell more advertising.

No, I'm still using the classic version.

This is what we do. A practical down to earth approach to options trading, the most engaged community and proven results.

You need to think in percentage terms, not dollar terms. In order to compare apples to apples, you need to allocate equal dollar amount to each trade. So if you buy 1 280 contract, you need to buy around 5 200 contracts to reach approximately same dollar amount in terms of position sizing.

This comment is definitely true in the real world - the original question referred to a fantasy world where you know the value of the stock at expiration. In this fantasy world, IV is not that important because we could just buy the option that provides the best percentage gain at expiration and ignore all the "noise" in between. Of course we all know this is possible only in a fantasy world, not the real world, so your comment is very relevant, especially as a warning to new traders who tend to ignore the IV or underestimate its impact.

My calculation was based on the price at Aug expiration. We don't know how we get there so obviously if at some point between now and August expiration SPY is lower than 180, then the gains will be higher. You can also do Sep options, but we don't know what the IV will be on Aug 21, hard to calculate the value of Sep options. The percentage gain is simply the price at August expiration divided by the current price. No different from calculating gains on stocks.

You could simply look at option that provides the best percentage gain. For example, looking at current prices for Aug21 puts: 280 put is 19.50, will be 100 250 put is 10.50, will be 70 220 put is 5.20, will be 50 210 put is 3.90, will be 30 200 put is 2.90, will be 20 190 put is 2.17, will be 10 Looks like 200-220 range offers the best percentage return.

Understood. We will try to post more detailed explanation, and all members are welcome to ask specific questions.

We are trying to offer only the setups that we consider the best. Obviously we cannot be right 100% of the time, but I can assure you that we focus only on quality setups.

I'm not familiar with tools for Mac, but I assume you can find some that work on Mac. I find candidates in optionslam and backtest them in volatilityhq. But volatilityhq also provides a list of potential candidates. The best thing to do is to try them and see what they provide.

I believe every options trader should have an options analytics software like ONE. This is a comprehensive tool that includes backtesting, analytics, P/L charts etc. To me this is a must have. clmviz is a backtesting tool that allows you to scan and find trades. It’s nice to have and very powerful, but it is not related to what we do. It has tons of other strategies, technical indicators etc. volatilityhq is more tailored to our strategies and it helps to analyze our strategies like straddles and calendars in terms of pricing, timing etc. so after finding trade candidates, I analyze then in ONE to see how the P/L chart looks.

Thanks @Mattatut very helpful input from first source. According to this data both number of cases and number of deaths in your state is among the lowest in the US - and yet you are saying you are overwhelmed. I can only imagine what's happening in states with higher number of cases. How in your opinion the situation in Sweden is different and why their model wouldn't work in the US?

In the previous years, we provided around 10-12 trade ideas per month. In the recent couple years (especially since @Yowster started posting official trades) the number basically doubled to 20+ official trades per month on average. I checked unofficial trades forum and there are around 10-15 trading ideas there every month. I'm not sure how many more trading ideas we can provide. We aim to provide only the setups with the best risk/reward. That said, we will try and mention if we see a good setup that doesn't fit into 10K portfolio, but it would be unrealistic to manage several official portfolios. As a side note, while increasing the total number of trading ideas almost 3 times, the subscription fee has not increased for over 7 years. Something to consider.