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 [...]

If this is your first visit or you just didn’t notice I wanted to point out that the blog has changed.

It has gone under a complete redesign to better communicate with readers and members as well as keep me better connected to you via, facebook, twitter, rss, youtube, etc.

And I also incorporated the Option Genius logo – the cartoon Einstein looking character. I think this brings out the playful side of the site. You can’t be serious all the time, right? After all, it’s just money.

If you are already on Facebook, you can click on the Like button to become a fan of the OptionGenius Facebook page. I haven’t launched it officially yet. Still getting some programming tricks for it. But the more friends and fans the better.

You can also click on the orange rss button to follow this blog and get notified whenever there is a new post.

All [...]

This post has no educational value. I am just venting my frustration.

Got an email today from a member that was having a problem getting our emails. So when I investigated, it turns out that he has taken advantage of the $1 30 day trial FOUR TIMES. What a wonderful fellow (sarcasm). He went through the effort of using different email addresses and different names to create new accounts every time his 30 days was up so he would not have to pay the monthly fee.

And this is supposed to be someone who can afford to be investing? If you have thousands of dollars in the market, why would you go through all this trouble to screw me out of a few dollars a month?

You are stealing you loser. Why would you stoop so low to save a couple dollars a day?

And it’s not like he did not get any value of [...]

In a bold move, Mayor Bloomberg of New York called to free Congress salaries. He did it in response to Congress wanting to limit Wall Street bonuses but I happen to agree with him.

I think Congress should have term limits. 4-6 years and you are done. Go back to your job/business/etc. The founders of this nation were all citizen representatives. These people in Congress today have to inclination what the common man in their district is going through. They are not informed about the issues enough to vote properly and they care about getting reelected than doing any good.

They vote their own pocketbooks. And that is a hainous crime. I am really sick of Dems and Repubs fighting and attacking one another just because of party lines. I don’t care what party you belong to but your loyalty should be to the people.

It’s obscene that Congress passed salary increases for [...]

Today the VIX, traded below 20 for the first time all year.

What does this mean? It means that the markets are calming down almost back to normal, that volatility is coming out, that wild price swings in the stock market won’t be so large, and that option premiums won’t be so juicy.

But overall, a low VIX is fine with me. I don’t like all the wild price swings.  A couple years ago there was a saying, when the VIX is high, time to buy. When the VIX is low, look out below.

When the market drops, VIX moves up and if it gets too low, the market will correct by dropping.

I don’t know how much lower it will go, but I feel it will stabilize somewhere in the area around 20. For the last couple months, it has traded between 20 and 30. A good trade has been to [...]

How bad is the economy, really?
The economy is so bad that African television stations are showing ‘Sponsor an American Child’ commercials!

The economy is so bad, a picture is now only worth 200 words.

It’s so bad, Snoop Dogg had to start eating regular brownies. 

The economy is so bad, I saw the CEO of Wal-Mart shopping at Wal-Mart.

The economy is so bad, I went to my bank the other day and the teller handed me a note saying, “This is a robbery!”

The economy is so bad, George W. Bush appeared in a flight suit and declared economic recovery was complete.
The economy is so bad, Bill Gates had to switch to dial up.

The economy is so bad, Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

The economy is so bad, Dr. Seuss rose from the grave to write a new book: Green Eggs and Spam.

The economy is so bad that I went to my bank to [...]

A member sent me this link and I really liked it so I thought I would share it here. The original site I got this from was

http://deliveriesgalore.com/2009/03/18/one-trillion-dollars/

$100

Let’s start with a simple $100 bill – nearly everyone has seen one, and most have used one at some point:

Ahh, hello Mr. Franklin…

$10,000

Now, lets take it a step further – a packet of $100 bills is less than 1/2 inch thick and is worth $10,000. This can easily fit in your pocket and can be used to buy a cheap car or a year of your kid’s tuition:

Vegas, here we come!

$1,000,000

This little pile of cash can easily fit into any backpack and weighs just about 22 lbs. Just in case you didn’t believe that those criminals in the movies couldn’t fit a million bucks in those briefcases, it’s very possible! You’re not likely to ever see this amount of cash in one place [...]

The financial news networks were busy yesterday covering the sentencing of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff. Madoff was given the harshest penalty possible; 150 years in prison for defrauding thousands of his investors.

Luckily I was not a Madoff investor. But from what I have learned about his investors, I would not have been one of them. There was a guest on CNBC that said out loud what I was thinking.

From CNBC.com

People who invested with Bernard Madoff were greedy and happy to accept high returns without probing too much in the way these were achieved, Hugh Hendry, chief investment officer at hedge fund Eclectica, told CNBC Tuesday.

“I’m sympathetic for people losing money but I think this pejorative term of being greedy still applies,” Hendry told CNBC.com. “There was an implicit greed in not questioning and just accepting unnatural returns.”

“They didn’t show the requisite amount of fear that would have generated the curiosity [...]