Thanks everyone. You gave me some food for thought. Let me think about all your comments. In particular, Thank you very much for your suggestions. These are actionable. I can back test with my underlying and see if I can gain some ground with your ideas. Thanks. No, I only traded equity options, mostly options on stocks I was holding. I have been watching VIX and am quite puzzled with their movements. Let me paper trade VIX and see where it leads me. Regards to all,
I Googled John Locke's M3 system and will take a look. Thanks. I need to learn some basics first before I can join a group. Regards,
Oh gosh..... I can give advice on other stock options like Auz and Euro options. Thing is US options are severly affected by IV... I mean seriously. Here in Auz the options happily follow the underlying instrument. I actually always opened my straddles first thing in the morning even if the market was volatile because it didn't make a difference. Make a small pile of cash doing this.... Then I saw greener pasture in 'merica. I went to my local library and studied for a week deciding what stock to straddle. In the end I went with BAC. 1 month out. 10K trade. I entered roughly 1/2 hour into the session. Now normally I would check my straddles via e-mail each night and they would be roughly break even +- mbey 2%. Then I checked my BAC straddle after the first session...... DOWN 20%!!! WHAT!! I'd never seen that ever B4. I ended up losing my hard-earned 10K on the trade. My poor ego BTW. So I have now looked into IV and how it works. If you don't want to deal with IV then trade elsewhere. Mbey top 15 stocks in AUZ. They aren't affected by IV at all. They follow the underlying very closly. I must have traded 15 straddles or so and there was none of this IV stuff. I never even knew about it actually after my first 6 months trading straddles. Had I started in US I would have had to learn it. And quick 2!! IMO USA is a sellers market. Thats just how I view it. Some people would think otherwise.