Successful Habits of a Trader
 
1) Follow the Rule of 3: I will not enter a trade unless I have 3 reasons from my list of indicators for doing so.
2) We keep our losses small
3) We adjust targets and stops at the end of the day
4) We try to keep our commissions low
5) We dont trade first thing at the open, we wait a while and trade later in the day.
6) We know the general market trend and trade accordingly
7) We write down our trades.
We never average down a losing position
9) We never overtrade
10) We give 10% of our profits to charity. Per the words of John D. Rockefeller:

Work for all you get
Give away the first 10%
Invest the next 10%
Live on the rest
Account for every penny

Thanks to member George A. for sending these to me. He notes that these habits are taken from Chapter 4 of a book he [...]

  by Edward Laporte

Question: How can you profit from a potentially strong bull move while protecting yourself from a second bear wave?

Answer: A ratio (unbalanced condor)

Can anyone think of a good reason to throw caution to the wind and go long equities? Listening to the “experts” can leave you feeling fear and trepidation, even when the market is advancing. The only ones making serious money (without losing sleep) in recessions are psychiatrists prescribing Xanax.

The media is constantly comparing this recession to the Great Depression; however, this recession is not that far from the mean of other recessions when measured by unemployment, duration and GDP. For example, unemployment was higher (10.8%) in the 1981-82 recession. If you combined that with the shorter 1980 recession, it was longer in duration, too (see “The Great Depression and after,” below). There are plenty of reasons to be bullish:

The markets are up an average of [...]

I often get asked by members which are better to trade, Indexes or ETFs. “Should I trade SPY or SPX, IWM or RUT, QQQQ or MNX?”

The answer is, it depends. But I do have my preferences.

Liquidity

Both ETFs and Indexes are very liquid.  As I write this the At The Money Call in  SPX has an open interest of 45,000 contracts. The SPY At The Money Call has an open interest of 85,000 contracts. So both are very liquid. Major hedge funds though trade the indexes because they trade directly with the market makers.

Advantage: Even

Commissions

Commissions play a role because the SPX is ten times larger than the SPY. So if you want to trade $1,000 credit spread, you can do it with a 1 contract spread in SPX or a 10 contract spread in SPY. If you are paying per contract, the commission to trade SPY is ten times larger. if you [...]

Part 5: Iron Condor Adjustments

Adjustments are what separate the men from the boys. Some traders and advisories say that you do not need adjustment. That they only lower your return and increase your commissions. That without adjustments your trades should work out due to the probabilities.

That has not been my experience. I have backtested several no adjustment iron condor strategies and have not found one that worked on a consistent basis without very large drawdowns in equity.

So why would an advisory not like adjustments? I think it is because it makes it much harder to keep subscribers. The easier the trade, the more people will stick around with the service. Even with my service when a trade gets hairy and there are several adjustments, members lose confidence and drop out. But I still have to trade the way I know how. If some people drop out, there is nothing I [...]

Part Four: Iron Condor Trading Strategy

There are as many iron condor trading strategies as there are iron condor traders. Everyone has their own preferences and style.

To create your own iron condor strategy you have to first choose the underlying. You don’t really need an iron condor screener or software program to find suitable candidates for you. Stick to Indexes and ETFs at first. As you become more experienced you can move into stocks.

Indexes and ETFs have the benefit of being composed of several companies and so the news, good or bad, of any one company will not affect the price as much. Pick one that you feel is relatively stable. Some good candidates are: SPX, SPY, RUT, IWM, DIA, QQQQ, NDX, MNX, XLE, XLF, and RTH.

Step two in creating your own iron condor strategy is to decide how far out from the money do you want to go. The farther [...]

Part Three: The Risk of the Iron Condor Spread and How to Mitigate it.

So far we have talked about how the iron condor has great probability of success and can generate a decent return month after month.

In this section we are going to talk about what happens when things go wrong.

Most traders say that iron condor options trading is a conservative strategy. Others say it is very risky because you can lose a lot more than you can make.

It all depends on how you set up the condor spread. You can choose strikes that are way out of the money and that give you a 95% probability of success or you can choose strikes that are close to the money and give you a 40% chance of success. The closer your short strikes are to the money, the more your iron condor becomes a butterfly. A butterfly is also two [...]

Part Two: Philosophy of the Iron Condor

Incase you missed Part One: http://optiongenius.com/blog/iron-condor-option-trading-mini-course/

Stocks move up and they move down. Very rarely do they move in only one direction for an extended period of time. Since most of the time, stocks trade in a range, why don’t we make money from the range, instead of trying to determine if they are going up or down?

That in essence is the philosophy of the iron condor spread. No need to determine which way the market will move, because within a 30-50 day time period chances are that the market will stay in a range. Over time, it may move in one direction. But in a short period of time it probably won’t.

So let’s sell options that are far out of the money, which have very little probability of hurting us, and make money by selling time. As days go by, the options lose value, [...]

Iron Condor Option Trading

In this multi-part mini course, I plan on explaining the major facets of the Iron Condor Option Trade. First I will go over the basics of the trade, the philosophy, the risk, putting the trade on, and possible adjustments

Part 1: Iron Condor Spread Basics

The iron condor is an option trading strategy that uses two credit spreads.

The strategy is simple: Sell credit spreads out of the money: both puts and calls thus creating a “box”. As long as the underlying, stock, etf, or index stays within this box, the trade makes money.  Since you are selling options the trade results in a credit, and this credit is the maximum amount you can make on your iron condor trade.

When you place an iron condor trade, you will be selling the condor. In most circles this is considered a short iron condor. I myself do not know too many traders [...]

Greetings fellow option trader!

Do you have any questions I can answer for you?

I was wondering if you had any questions about options, option trading, or other related topics that you have not been able to find answers to either on my site or anywhere else. If you do, great! I am ready to answer (if I can). But please read this entire post to find out how to submit your question.

I had an idea to make myself available to answer any and all questions as well as I could. No question is out of bounds and I will try to answer all questions submitted whether you are a member of the OptionGenius site or not. There is no charge for this.

But I do ask the following:

Please give me enough time to answer.
Please do not ask me anything that would require a specific answer. I am not a licensed investment advisor and cannot [...]

Got a great email from a member about how he made some quick profits from the recent volatility…

“Allen,
 
I had a wonderful two days with this volatility, by changing your procedure slightly.
 
The changes I implemented are:
 
1. When it looks like we are in a bearish market, do only the bearish call spread and NOT the bullish put spread. Do the converse when in a bullish market.
 
2. In a volailte market that whipsaws, do not close out both the high and low strikes simultaneously. Rather close out the short position first, since that is the one costing us the maintenance requirement. The long position has no impact on the maintenace margin requirement.
 
This is what happened:
 
On Thursday May 06, being my birthday, I wanted to try my luck at Day Trading with options, since the market looked quite volatile!
 
Did a RUT May 720/730 bearish call spread. Bought the 730 call at 2.39 and [...]