Glad to help. Selling strangles is great in low volatility periods, but in trends you'll need to know how to adjust and reduce risk. All my adjustments also include reducing risk, which is critical when doing strangles.
After just closing out my current trade for a loss, I am certainly looking for something alternative. I diddled for an hour, wondering if the QQQ might close the GAP today? Jeff with his automatic trade in SPY saying it was going UP was encouraging. However, the GAP today was down in the QQQ and broke the trendline. After due consideration, decided I would take the quick loss and start fresh. Is there perhaps a web site someplace, that might be good reading on adjusting selling strangles? I got a message back from TOS HELP. They said I can sell if I have the margin. Been looking for my margin, but have a cash account and they don´t particularly say how much margin that allows me? So it would be by guess and by golly. In the meantime, will practice a bit on paper, strangle selling and see what happens, to clarify the nuances.
Think or Swim makes it easy to see how much margin you have with your cash account, simply by looking at "Monitor" and "Option Buying Power." It's truly that easy.
To Falconview, Atticus please back me up on this attempt. Try to think of the market staying in a trading range until the next expiration. Say, between 1370 and 1440 on the SPX. Or use GE as an example, between $18.00 and $22.00. Don't worry if GE goes to 19 or 21, or anything. Pretend you sold the $22 calls and the $18 puts. As long as GE stays within the range you think makes sense, I know I would, then your options will expire worthless. Take a bigger snapshot, forget deltas for a bit on this strangle. Just watch Theta time decay come in. Your broker should have bell curve graphs to show you all this, based on stock price movement, and days until expiration. Try that. Atticus? Make sense.? Don