Humble

Too many traders still rely on band-aids to deal with their emotions vs. actually solving the underlying problems. My plan is to bring more awareness to this issue by surveying traders from around the world to better understand the disconnect and create newsworthy facts for media coverage. At the same time, it would inform my next steps on how to best help traders and could help you gain some insight into your audience. You can view the survey here. Keep in mind the intent is to maximize the number of traders that complete it, we’ve intentionally kept it brief. By Jared Tendler

https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/fool.com

Member of the month award for October goes to @Bullfighter Hard to believe that this member joined SO less than 2 months ago.. His contribution is significant and very well thought. Well done, and looking forward for more great ideas and analysis!

Our brains have evolved to be successful hunter gatherers, but terrible for trading, as our natural tendency of being loss averse and risk averse means that we tend to hold to losers and get rid of small winners. When I joined here I did an analysis of all the logged trades from the performance page to understand how each of the strategies behaved, typical drawdowns and profits, exceptional drawdowns and profits, etc. This gives my hunter gatherer brain the reassurance that there is an statistical edge, and in order not to ruin it, I need to be consistent in execution. This means sizing, not giving up on a strategy when there is a period of draught, not joining only after a period of logged steady wins, and respect the win and loss conditions of each strategy. Otherwise I risk doing something that will lose the statistical edge. That makes me accept losers and give room to grow to small winners. @Bullfighter

You want to start with 7-8k, withdraw every month and live of those profits? Am I reading this right? Even if you make 100% per year (which would put you among the best traders in the world), that's $7-8k of "income" per year. On a related note, the whole concept of trading options for income is wrong. I recommend reading Debunking The "Trading Options For Income" Myth As others mentioned, the first goal of every novice trader should be learning. Profits will come if you are dedicated and willing to learn. But you are right, 3-4 years is a reasonable timeframe to give yourself, similar to University degree.

Member of the month award for September goes to @TrustyJules Probably doesn't surprise anyone, but I thought we should give another recognition to Julius' amazing contributions. This community wouldn't be the same without him.

Personally I always close, never let expire. The gamma risk is too big, and without the shorts, it becomes a directional bet, not to mention the negative theta of the long options that is not offset by the positive theta of the short options.

Member of the month award for August goes to @Peeyotch We all appreciate and thank them for their contributions.

Over the years, I've seen a few disgruntled members where they've posted similar comments, but they all seem to share the same trait - they expect fills at the same price as the official trades AND be able to enter right around the same time as the official. It's the second part of that that is the real kicker and the reason we say to be patient with fills, especially with trades where T-0 is a few weeks away - and why we started tagging things with [BETTER PRICING] on both entry and exit to show how often that happens. I like to use another stock analogy for this matching of official pricing - when an analyst issues a stock upgrade causing the stock price to rise, is everyone going to be able to react to the upgrade and buy the stock at the same price? Of course not, and I don't think anyone would expect that to be the case, but with these option trades some people get very upset when the can't match prices. I understand that the amount of time members can spend on trading and trade analysis varies greatly. Many people have other jobs that require significant time away from trading (I was in that same boat for many years). But if your goal is to treat SO purely as an alert service then there is a much greater chance that you may be disappointed. As had been said many times by many members - those who get the most out of SO are those that learn the trades and make them their own by applying the techniques to their own personal trades. I thought it might be beneficial to say how I handle entry into official calendar trades. As Kim has mentioned, although we talk about some trades in advance, for the majority of both our official trades we enter them without specifically notifying each other in advance - so with the calendar trades I am in the same boat as everyone else: I find that I rarely enter calendar trades on the same days as the official. I do keep track of planned trades and target entry dates, so sometimes I'll already be in the trade prior to the official, but in most cases I enter later. Calendar entry is based on either RV well below average to enter early, or time based when the RV hits the inflection date for the slope of the RV rise starting to increase. Ideally you can find trades with both, but especially in times when we are seeing some bigger market move days, my preference is to enter when the daily RV increase is greatest (so the trade can show gains quicker). If I do enter early at RV well below average, I'm more prone to exit at an smaller gain and then look to re-enter if RV drops back down or when the RV chart is in the time period of bigger daily increase. @Yowster

I would say that the big risk is entering at a price you already know is bad just for the sake of being in the trade. Not entering a trade carries absolutely zero risk. What it does carry is FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, and that, my friend, is an account destroyer. FOMO causes us to do dumb things because we’re afraid of not making the money we think we should, or afraid of not making back this month’s service charge. It’s insidious, and we have to be vigilant to keep it at bay, plan our trades, and trade our plan. @Peeyotch

Member of the month award for July goes to @White_Oak This member is another example of a member who is taking very seriously our suggestion "learn the strategies and make them your own". His MRNA trade alone (along with other trade suggestions) makes him eligible to this award.

The price is set by CML. Early adopters always pay lower prices (we still have members who pay $49 or even $25 per month). As far as I know, they intend to raise prices to ~$200 area, and it's worth every cent.

Jared Tendler, Mental Game Coach and Author, just released a free eBook, Leverage Your Intuition, as a companion piece to his latest book, The Mental Game of Trading. As Jared says in the eBook, “Intuition is a critical tool for traders. It allows you to cut through noise and self-doubt. But in order to leverage your intuition, you need to know when your intuition, or gut, is more likely to be right, or wrong. Trading with that knowledge is powerful and lucrative. It allows you to capitalize on opportunities other traders can’t see, or get out of moves that typically lead to bigger losses.” With that in mind, Leverage Your Intuition is a free eBook intended to make intuition within trading more recognizable, so you can cultivate it and use it effectively. In just over 31 pages, Jared covers the reasons why intuition is hard to trust, including that for many of us listening to intuition feels like taking advice from a stranger. He also clarifies the relationship between instinct and intuition, and talks about the role that being “in the zone” plays in cultivating intuition. In the eBook you will learn: How to spot real intuition vs. emotions just masquerading as intuition The origin of intuition within the mind Strategies for producing intuition deliberately and more often Jared tells me this material has helped many of his clients over the years and across a variety of industries. His argument is that by leveraging your intuition you can bolster both your PnL and your confidence. To find out for yourself, get a copy today. Disclaimer: I do not receive any compensation from Jared Tendler. I like his work and provide this information as a courtesy to SteadyOptions members.

Member of the month award for June goes to @karsh @karsh has been with us only few months, but he is already making very valuable contributions to our trading community.

I have been with the community for last 6 months, and I have learned that instead of complaining about the existing SO process or methods, it is best to focus on various things to learn, and believe me, there is endless thing to learn here.. fun part is that it is never ending. I suggest that you start small, pick few SO repeats, read every thread of past 3-4 cycles of that trades (calendar) of each, create a date wise upcoming calendar for yourself and place these stocks on these dates, slowly you can start predicting what will come next in few days. It has started working out for me, and it looks like it is working out for a lot of people. To give recent examples, I was able to open my positions before SO’s alert on MU, TSM and FSD. Once you can predict successfully, use SO alerts and community contributions as validations and further guidance. Also, entering into a position is only a very small item, the vast experience of SO will be at your help on deciding how to close, when to close, what worked , what did not work, how and when to roll etc. My advice might sound bitter and boring at first, I think that’s the right thing to do, there is no alternative to hardwork. Paid or unpaid, no subscription can serve you gold plated ready made food. @White_Oak

Whatever you see in the link in the first post of this topic is the current rate.

With great sadness, we inform you of the death of our long time contributor Michael C. Thomsett. Michael was a widely published author with over 80 business and investing books, including the best-selling Getting Started in Options. Michael wrote about 70 articles for the SteadyOptions blog. He will be missed.

Member of the month award for May goes to @mccoyb53 May marks 5 years since @mccoyb53 joined SteadyOptions. We would like to thank you for your contribution and your long term loyalty!

Couldn't agree more Tom. This is why we always recommend to start small with any system. You never know when the next drawdown will come.

It doesn't really matter what the criteria is. It could be fundamentals, momentum, pricing, TA etc. Once you rotate between different ETFs, you are aiming to time the market. Not saying it's good or bad, just need to be aware what the system is. This is for example compared to a system like Anchor that is in the market 100% of the time. Also when comparing returns, it's important to compare apples to apples. Anchor uses around 50% (1.5x) leverage. Using 3x leverage would probably produce much higher returns but also higher drawdowns.

So this is basically a market timing system?

Most of the track record is backtesting, correct? Live trading is from Sep.2020 only?

@capper you can PM some of our mentors and ask if they are willing to provide mentoring. You can also subscribe to one of our services where we teach members how to trade.

The way I see it - the big advantage of Anchor is that you don't really have to worry about market timing. We all have our opinions about the markets and the economy, but the markets will do whatever they want, not what we think they should do. When you do a strategy like Anchor, all our opinions don't matter. We are in the market all the time, and we are protected against the market crash. Honestly, if I didn't know better, I would say that this is the holy grail of investing.

Anchor trades SPY options, the most liquid instrument on the market, so no issues with fills or scalability. PutWrite is similar, with very liquid instruments like XSP, IWM, EFA, and EEM. Absolutely no issues here as well.