Yeah yeah yeah, you options folks are still freakazoids, I am still trying to figure it all in my head. Here it is again with options...
Few years ago, he was talking about - All in, to achieve, 1% per day, when intra day - long UGAZ, which is in a down trend since. Thus, young, wise & intelligent, yes, but true genius, would never speak about that kind of a strategy for newbies (95% of his audience, i guess, because of sport cars and delusional dreams). Like, it can't get worse than that, if one is completely green ; unless, he had adviced as well, to take a loan for start, then,... 99/99/99.
Nah, you must be talking about folks like @destriero @TheBigShort @Kevin Schmit... those folks can make money with options no matter if the market goes up, goes down or stays the same. They trade birds (condors, iron condors), insects (butterflies)... they deal with delta, vol, theta, rho, gamma, vega, vomma, charm, vera... Me? I am human, just directional.
Gotta love these cyclical ET posts where the OPs experience means nobody else can do it. If he was only in my shoes and seen how many thousands of hours I spent studying and additional thousands spent testing strategies to get to where I am today including any other trader that treats it like a business and really puts the work in. I consider it the equivalent to getting a PHD b/c i probably had to be an equal amount of work....actually probably more work to get to where I am at today. Being successful year in and year out is very strategy specific. For me, trading ES/NQ futures was my path as the human psychology element in these indexes make its modeling a bit more predictable. I usually average 1 or 2 down days per month. In a continuous uptrend like we've had in the past 3 or 4 weeks, 0 down days. Practically impossible to lose money with a slow moving up market.
If you buy a put and sell a call same strikes, same expiry then you are short. Buy call sell put and you are long. It's crazy that you can be short one expiry or pair of expiries, and long another. You can mix longs and shorts across the calendar, pair the positions against each other, and even spread them with adjacent strikes. It's like jujitsu. Nuts that you can slice and dice the moves like that. I have dedicated all my study to learning direction. The end game is to play both directions at the same time, and basically doing multiple trades simultaneously. You can trade one instrument directionally against another.
I actually owe a lot of my success to Kevin. Here's a guy who can take you from a confused trader to a profitable trader in a year yet people like @raVar will block him. He literally spelled out a strategy in the delta 1 space on my spread trading thread. Dest has done the same in multiple threads. If you want to outperform as a retail it's not hard. Just listen to the guys who are smarter than you. Since I am in a good mood and it's Friday night (my friends just left - a few glasses of wine in), I thought I might mention an ingredient to the secret sauce. Currently I have 3 strategies that I am running. One strategy taking up the majority of my buying power. However, I am constantly thinking about and researching new strategies (pairs trading). Not because I have to but because I enjoy it. @ironchef every night before bed you should spend a few minutes to think about how the market might be making a mistake. When you have an idea, dive deeper - Ask questions (but don't forget to ask it in a subtle way). Eventually you will get better and better at identifying market mistakes. This is how you eventually generate alpha.
I do that almost every night. Even when I wake up in the middle of the night before I fall back asleep. But don't think I spend all my waking hours in thought about the markets. Got to have some down time, especially when downing a few glasses of wine as well.
your conclusion is based on your experience and may be experience of people around you, but you can not even give guarantee that a long term trader always makes money, every kind of trading has it's own drawback