Interesting take Z. I've never heard it described quite as such. It's always been about the money (as the outcome). I guess you figure that like any job that's not a job - might as well get paid a shitload for it. Cheers.
(Proper) strategies come in and go out of favor. This one might be out of favor now, and in favor tomorrow. Enjoying your story.
You are a smart guy. You will find great successes trading. Good luck to you and welcome. Hope you stick around to share your thoughts.
GUITLY!!!! Please don't spread misinformation about forex. One can trade extremely small size in Forex, as low as 10 cents and maybe lower with some brokers!
Took my picture when I was looking, huh? You rascal you! I took some heat from you and Z and 0(1) and ironchef and sle, but that is ok, I can even enjoy the good natured poking of fun. That said, you guys just show your lack of knowledge when it comes to option selling. I have to hand it to smallcapgrowth. He is a smart dude and as a total newbe, he can understand the value in being the banker and selling to the OTM option risk takers. In this style of trading there is no trading high like in the picture. I think that picture was taken a few years ago when the Illini came from 15 down in the last 4 minutes to beat AZ to make the Final Four.
Really, please do enlighten us why this particular form of free money has not been lifted off the side walk? -- the usage of the OTM expiration statistics. It's obviously a wrong metric. As an analogy, in case of Russian roulette, 83.33% trigger pulls "expire worthless" too. Instead, you'd want to see the net average payoff across time. -- the lottery analogy. There are many "wrongs' with it, but the main one obviously is that there is no competitive price pressure on the lottery ticket prices. Same goes for the insurance analogy (insurance industry is an oligopoly so they try not to compete with each other) plus insurance bets are diversified across a pool with low correlation, unlike selling OTM puts. Anyway, I said it before - if you are smart about your sizing (since that's the only risk management you'll get, realistically) you can sell some form of risk premium and be very successfull. It's a perfect strategy for a retail trader but you should expect that you are going to lose serious cash every once in a while.
It will always be on the sidewalk because the options most people buy are out of the money and most of those expire worthless. You are correct in that there will be losses but the Iron Condor creates a known max loss for each trade and there are ways to defend a trade other than just closing it. Proper money management is required but this is an ideal strategy for a 1.2M account trying to produce income. We all know at ET how hard to is to learn to trade so in my opinion this is more viable path for smallcapgrowth.
-- it's a derivative, if someone buys it, that means someone will be selling it -- you realize that every OTM option has an ITM equivalent simply via put/call parity? PS. if smallcapgrowth is really a former card counter, he should be looking for a proper institutional job, IMHO, not punting S&P iron condors in his PA
Did you work with that guy who made a million dollars playing poker during college? He was at one of your earlier employers around the same time you were.
Yeah. Actually, Bear had a high number of competitive bridge players too - I know that Ace was one himself.