“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 sold the 720 call at 3.99 for a $1.60 credit.
 
At about 2:30 I tried to buy the 720 call back to close. The screen went bonkers with ask prices lower than bid prices! Then all I got was the dreaded hour glass image!! This is when the market went crazy!!
 
Around 3:45 EDT, I gave up and entered a buy order good till cancelled for the the 720 call at a price of $2.00 and then went away from the computer.
 
Around 4:30 to my surprise, I found this was executed at 4:03pm, for a profit of 1.99 !!
 
Today, Friday after hearing the super jobs report, I entered an order to sell the 730 Call at $2.00 each. It had was bid at < 50 cents depending on where you looked!!  To my shock, this order got executed by 11:00 am EDT!!  It closed at 1.15 today! My loss 0.39. So the net profit was (1.99-0.39) or 1.60. Or I got to keep 100% of the credit received without waiting for expiration!
 
On a 100 contract spread, with the commission included, the profit was $15,679 or 18.6% in two days!!
 
While I do not quite follow your exact steps you suggest, I would not have had the guts to do this without reading your material.
 
Thank you”

I am posting this email for educational purposes only. I am glad this member did well but it could just as easily turned out badly. I agree with his strategy #1, where you only sell options on the side that is away from where the market is going. But I am not smart enough to always be able to tell which way the market is going. If I was, I would just buy puts or calls and ride them.

Ever since March 2009, the market has pretty much gone straight up. But every day there is someone somewhere saying there will be a correction and the market will come back down. I myself expected the market to go up until after 1st quarter earnings. But the rally sustained until 2nd quarter earnings.

Now with the increase in volatility and fears of Eupore the markets seems to be taking a breather before they pick the direction. It might be back up, it might be down, or it might be flat.  To me it doesn’t matter as long as the move happens slowly.  An option seller can make a ton of money when the market moves less than 1% each day.

As for strategy #2, this is a bit moe re risky because if you buy back the short option and the market rebounds you can lose money very quickly. But this is an adjustment I have read about so there are traders who use it. Never used it myself though.

Another Way To Play The Volatility is a post from Option Selling.
To learn how you too can earn 8-12% Monthly Returns Safely and Conservatively check out OptionGenius.com

In your lesson you said that volatility is not good for options trading since you trade within  a statistical mean. If you do condor trades don’t you need volatility?  Won’t you make more money or will out of the money be the same at any price?

My answer:

The higher the volatility, the higher the option prices.
But in a condor, volatility is not as important as price action.
If volatility drops, we can exit the condor trade faster. But if it rises it just means we have to be in the trade longer. Volatility is more important in trades like calendars where it can destroy the trade if it drops too much.

Iron Condors and Volatility is a post from Option Selling.
To learn how you too can earn 8-12% Monthly Returns Safely and Conservatively check out OptionGenius.com