Nice one; sardonic wit is underrated. Here is a question for you, Howard, or anyone else selling OTM verticals: what are you doing with the rest of your funds? The logical thing would be to keep the other 2/3 of your money (or 80% in Howardâs case) in cash equivalents since you have admitted to taking so much risk with the short vertical or iron condor. Since everyone must also admit that at some point over the years you will eventually have a 100% loss on a vertical because of a big gap, and the majority of the rest of your funds are in cash, what exactly do you hope to achieve as a long term average yearly return on your total funds?
Run with the big dogs? On the contrary. I know I have a lot to learn, even if my results have been pretty good. For more than two millenia the didactic method of distilling truth out of aggressively argued positions has worked. It's only in the no-fault, every opinion is equally worth while, let's be nice culture where learning has deteriorated has this method been ignored. If you want to learn, engage and defend with logic and not emotion. Some find it uncomfortable and would rather remain ignorant. So be it.
How is it that he's down 21% when in fact the spreads blew-out to a multiple of the initial credit? How is it that he published some months at 10-20% gainers that equal the return computed on the spread requirement? To me that is proof that he's computing winning % on spread requirement and losing % on a larger fictional portfolio.
From this thread it appears others have found your comments both without merit and full of malice. So it's not just I.
I heard about a collar-fund producing 12% a year and knew it was BS. Madoff's name was nowhere to be found on the offering. It turns out my brother contributed a mil to the Madoffs. If I am wrong and libelous about your performance then sue me. Go on the record.
My other investments are managed by others. I expect to and have done better than the market. It is not clear to me that a "Black Swan" event will wipe out my total account. I did a long analysis of why I don't believe this will happen in another forum. No one challenged the analysis on the details but responded that with options "it must be so." The big loss I took in March was primarily do to trader (me) failure, not strategy failure. Had I executed properly I would have had a small gain or small loss for the month. It was a horribly expensive lesson. But aren't they all. I backed off for a while, while I examined how my trading had changed over time. I made my way back to my original rules, added another procedure for allocating funds and developed a closed form analytical expression for how much cash I needed to maintain based on the new procedure.
My offer to you requires you put up the money to prove you are right. Suing someone with your level of veracity has little likelihood of collection. Nice try, but transparent.
Howard, please answer my question in regards to your "scary" comment. Would you be scared being short the S&P 500 1230 puts with the S&P currently at 1285 with 2 and 1/2 days to go? A simple yes or no please.