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@oemOptions I would suggest reading the articles that we posed links to. They should provide you with the information you need. for more educational articles, please visit our Education Center Education Center

Risk Reward Or Probability Of Success? Calculating The Probability Of Option Payoff Option Payoff Probability Probability And Option Risk Risk/reward and probability of success always have reverse relationship. High probability of success means lousy risk/reward (you risk $8 to make $2). Generally speaking, 50% probability typically translates to 1:1 risk/reward (risking $5 to make $5).

For more details, you can read How To Calculate ROI On Credit Spreads

@Alan Thanks for posting this! I feel the same way. We all need to be reminded from time to time that there is life outside of the trading world.. If you enjoyed Robert Ludlum (I myself read most of his novels), you will enjoy Tom Clancy. His Jack Ryan series is amazing in my opinion (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Debt of Honor, Executive Orders). Frederick Forsyth is the same theme (political thrillers). I enjoyed all his books. For something a bit more "serious" I recommend Irwin Shaw and John Grisham. For more "classic" reading, Jack London, Erich Maria Remarque. Those are my personal favorites.

From SSO description: This leveraged ProShares ETF seeks a return that is 2x the return of its underlying benchmark (target) for a single day, as measured from one NAV calculation to the next. Due to the compounding of daily returns, holding periods of greater than one day can result in returns that are significantly different than the target return and ProShares' returns over periods other than one day will likely differ in amount and possibly direction from the target return for the same period. These effects may be more pronounced in funds with larger or inverse multiples and in funds with volatile benchmarks. Investors should monitor their holdings as frequently as daily. Investors should consult the prospectus for further details on the calculation of the returns and the risks associated with investing in this product. I would be very careful with those leveraged instruments. Not only will they have much higher drawdowns, but in the long term they might not deliver what you expect from them. Here is a good site that explains the benefits of passive investing. it is about Canadian implementation, but the principles are the same. It also gives some idea about long term returns and drawdowns using different asset allocations. So with 60/40 allocation, you can expect around 7% annual return with 21% largest drawdown.

Good luck and hope to see you back.

@porgie this makes perfect sense, especially if you have a larger account and can scale in. And lets remember: trading is a business. As in any business, prices are involved, and our profitability of success will always depend on our ability to get good fills. Every business revolves around this cost equation... If getting good prices was so easy, there wouldn't be any markets/any business... Sometimes playing with orders helps too, increasing/decreasing by couple cents, pausing and resubmitting. It's a negotiation. In the same way you don't pay a full MSRP for your car (I hope), you should never pay an asking price for your options.

Thank you @Markuse for your kind words, and hope to see you back.

1) The model portfolio is based on $100k. I believe the minimum is $50k 2) You will build the portfolio based on detailed instructions (the long calls, the long puts and the short puts) and then you will start rolling the short puts every 2-3 weeks based on market conditions. 3) No. Anchor trades SPY, diversified Anchor you can add IWM, QQQ and EFA. All of them have the most liquid options, so no issues with fills at all. 4) If the indexes go down, depending on the magnitude and the speed of the decline, Anchor can lose money, but almost always it will lose less than the indexes. 5) @cwelsh can explain better, but I think in case of sideways markets Anchor might underperform.

You could do something similar to what we did with our AAL or UNG trades - diagonals or ratio diagonals, using ITM long term options and selling short options against them every month.

I believe this is a bit different. @cwelsh refereed to more long term investing, using options as stock substitute. @zxcv64 referred to swing trading, which is probably more short term (from few days to few weeks)? Am I correct?

I'm going to merge the two topics.

@DubMcDub I'm actually glad that this topic has been created and it's open to non-members. I believe that prospective members can read posts from members like you and see the real value of the service. It also helps to set the right expectations and filter people who are not willing to put an effort or those who "cannot sustain losses". Of course everyone will see what they want to see, but we have nothing to hide, and we are trying to be as open and transparent as possible. "We are different" has to be proven by actions, not words.

I'm curious how do you know that? Even I don't have that information. What I do know is that many members reported that they make well north of $50k/year using SO strategies. Pretty good ROI on $1k investment. Many people in the US (not to mention many developing countries) don't make that kind of income in their full time job. But it took those members much longer than few months to get there. Thank you @Ticc I still remember your post: "for me it is big satisfaction that I have made this trade before you did. (same strike, same price) The reason was as same as you had. I have spend lot of time with learning last few months from you and now it pays off. Thank you." And for me it is a big satisfaction that many members are still using what they learned here even after cancelling.

I agree with you. It's good to see different opinions and different perspectives, although it can be pretty upsetting to be accused of misleading marketing, when in fact we do zero marketing and zero advertising. All the necessary information is in the service description. It describe exactly what SO is what it isn't. All you need to do is reading the service description before subscribing to set the right expectations. But I guess people see what they want to see. Members who feel misled are free to look elsewhere and compare what other services offer. To add to @Yowster last post, at this point he is posting 70-75% of the trades, so for his trades, I'm in the same boat as the rest of the members. And I do exactly what I recommend other members to do: being patient, scaling in and out, setting my own profit targets, using slightly different strikes and expirations etc. Yes, I miss some trades here and there, and I also take some unofficial trades, there are plenty of them. My personal account performance is very close to the official performance, and I'm trading few times the official model portfolio size and keep higher percentage of the account in cash. So it's completely doable, even for larger accounts, and it's not just few members that learned to do it successfully, it's much more. But yes, you need a lot of effort and practice to do it. Show me how to make 100% a year with no effort, and I will close the service immediately..

@yalgaar I never believed that anyone can be successful by blindly following someone else. I still don't believe it. Learning and finding your own style is the only path to success. I'm glad that you are glad to find someone with similar experience, but if you really want to succeed, maybe it's better to listen to dozens of successful members who found a way to make very good money with SO, instead of former members who cancelled after just few weeks. Most of our successful members will tell you that they started with paper trading, and this is something that most industry experts agree on, but you find it completely useless and waste of time. You ask for advice, but when advice is provided, you dismiss it as useless and/or insulting. There are hundreds of services out there that will gladly take your money and will tell you how easy it is to make money with options. You are welcome to try them and see for yourself how easy or difficult it is.

When using any directional service, please pay attention not only to overall returns, but also to volatility. The below losing streak is not uncommon for directional services, and while they might present the performance based on 10% allocation per trade, with such volatility I would never allocate more than 2-3% per trade for directional speculative trades (which of course would completely change the overall returns).

2019 Year End Performance by Trade Type Our typical goal is 10-30% profit, depending on the strategy. Anything beyond 50% is a bonus. On the other hand, we also aim to eliminate 50%+ losers (to our "defense", all three of them were half position, but we still would like to have zero of those big losers). The winning ratio of ~70% is in line with our long term stats, although Winning Ratio by itself doesn't mean much - you can have a winning ratio of 90% and still lose money. Anyway, thanks for posting this.

@shipdriver I won't repeat everything that others mentioned earlier. I will just say that evaluating a service based on 2 months of experience is really not fair and not representative, especially for a service like SO. Especially considering the fact that those 2 months had returns significantly below historical our historical averages. And honestly, I now understand why many services have only yearly terms. Maybe this is what we need to do as well. Also, I'm sorry to say that, but those who "can't sustain ongoing losses" probably should not be in this business, and fees have nothing to do with the returns. You can pay hundreds of dollars per months for different tools (like ONE, cmlviz etc) and still lose money. As for your comparison to directional strategies (stocks or options), this is really not apples to apples comparison. I hear those comparisons all the time, but they always come after big market rallies, never after big market declines.. Most major indexes are up 35-40% since April, so it's not surprising that your long equity portfolio is up 45% since April. How this portfolio performs during market meltdowns is a more relevant question? How does it perform during periods of sideways markets? Like 2015 when the markets were flat and our model portfolio produced 200% return? Looking at returns alone is meaningless without considering the risk. P.S. This is taken from one of the options trading mentoring programs website: Plan on at least six to twelve months of paper trading and live trading to get to break even. Once you are not losing money, you can slowly start scaling your trading size up. Your doctor, attorney or pilot all started by hitting the books and then getting instruction from a current and qualified professional to teach them their trade. It is no different with option trading. It's a complicated skill set that needs a good amount of understanding before you start trading live. I guess I'm not the only one advocating this approach. btw, most mentoring programs are priced around $5-6k (5 years worth of SO membership). Usually people don't expect to get back their fee during their first year with the program, but for some reason they expect to get their SO fee back during their first few months..

I didn't notice any issues with IB. IB has a different set of problems (terrible customer service, buggy algorithm, very unfriendly handling of margin calls etc.) but I never experienced any issues with platform stability or fills. In fact, I still remember that IB was probably the only platform that was fully functional during the flash crash in 2011.

We are sending invitations periodically when we have available spots.

We were always very transparent and open about the reasons why we are closing. As for longevity in any business, I invite you to read Performance Reporting: The Myths And The Reality article. One of the examples was a service bragging about ~42% average return per trade. A quick look on his website reveals how they calculate returns: "The highest price the option achieves is recorded as the result since this was historically what the option price reached." Is anyone really able consistently to sell at the highest price the option was trading during its lifetime, or even close? Turns out that based on real (auto-trading), not hypothetical results, not only the performance was not nowhere near 42% average return, but the service was actually not profitable. This service has been in business for 20+ years. They are proving year after year that Abraham Lincoln was wrong when he said "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." There are hundreds of services that completely and brutally mislead potential members about their performance. So you have to excuse me for getting really offended when someone says that our "marketing" is misleading.

Couldn't say it better. For some reason people get insulted when I compare trading to engineering or medicine, but the truth is there is no difference.In fact, trading is more difficult. If you are good in engineering, you are most probably will be successful. In trading no matter how good you are, there still will be periods of losing streaks or low returns.

Thank you @yalgaar You are more than welcome to suggest concrete changes and improvements to the service format. As for expectations - I believe that anyone who takes few minutes to read the service description can see that we are being as open and transparent as possible. As you could see from some of the comments, there are members that actually achieve similar performance, but we never said it would be easy. We could have much more members by doing "clever marketing" and promise what other services promise, but we will never do it.

Since you continue spreading misinformation, I feel I have to address it. We close the service every few months in order to limit the number of members and provide the best service to existing members. I challenge you to find another service provider who is willing to sacrifice his income in order to provide a better experience for his members. We re open the service because members cancel. And they cancel for different reasons (new job, too busy, too lazy, family reasons, wrong expectations etc.), and simply because as others mentioned, there is no perfect product and there are always happy clients and not so happy clients. This is the truth. So we have to find a balance between limiting the number of members, but still allowing new people to benefit from what we provide and have a "new blood". Of course there is no way to satisfy everyone, and even when you do all you can for your members, some people still accuse you in hidden motives and "smart marketing". If you consider 1-2 updates per month "smart marketing, I suggest you use the "Unsubscribe" button at the bottom of each email.