Here's an excerpt from the IB report: The IB report seems to have nothing regarding risk, or have I maybe overlooked something? .
All's your report shows is that you're writing options contracts....what happens to your account if the underlying on those options you wrote makes a 2-3 (or more) sigma move against you ? Do u end up losing more than 30% of your account ?
I know exactly what I will do, but this is not the right place for discussing my tactics. A trader is like a millitary general in a constant war. He can't disclose his tactics. I doubt I will make any big loss under normal market conditions. Btw, NONE of my 584 trades so far in the last 3 weeks had a loss! Really! But this is of course not to say that there won't be any losses.
There is nothing new under the sun in trading or finance. -- there's just skill and tactics and experience and wisdom...and then, there's the opposite of all of that__ Everything is free, for the Taking...that's the beauty of this trading world...there's no ceilings or politics or barriers or other bs to deal with.
It sounds like OP believes that the vol crush since the start of July is normal and that no-one has ever heard of being short gamma; that bad things happen so rarely he'll be fine. The whole point of selling options is that you make money almost all the time and then abruptly give it back and more quickly - it's the strategy mirror of trend following, nothing else. Everyone knows the payoff is very skewed for option selling. Nassim Taleb has made a post-trading career out talking about such asymmetric risks. But yes, of course you can make money doing this, such a thing as the volatility risk premium has been studied to death. Just don't expect 30% a month without spending at least some of your life in a fetal position. Once you've been hit hard once the PTSD will make it hard to come back irrespective of the financial hit. Think ahead. If you want to stay alive doing this make sure you ALWAYS have a static hedge just in case.