I never said options was "investing" - if you want investing threads go to the Trading or Stock forums. This is the Options forums were 99% of the threads are to do with short term option trades.
Nothing says it more than that idiot picture of a rocket which OptionGuru posted. He had to spend time searching for and posting that little gem. If he had spent a little more time researching his trades and a little less time cavorting like a two year old maybe he wouldn't make such ill advised trades. His justification for this trade was based on hearing one piece of data, and then not following it up or investigating it. The piece of data he quoted had nothing to do with this quarter's earnings. Maybe HE doesn't see options as investments and is here for recreation but I need my money and don't want to have to filter out a lot of non-sense when I read things here or any place else. At the start of this thread OptionGuru asked us what we thought of his trade and I for one took a lot of time researching the trade because I thought his money was as valuable to him as mine is to me. This forum SHOULD be for people to get help and information that is worth something not a bunch of silliness. BTW: you'll note that OptionGuru only buys one contract for his trades...maybe he lost all his money behaving like Cuckoo-for-CoCopuffs.
I consider Options as a tool for short-term Speculating and Hedging - not investing. Investing is buy-and-hold 1 year or more. 99% of the threads in the ET Options forum are in the Speculating/Hedging category - including your Credit Spread threads and posts.
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=tsla Bottom line is OptionsGuru was as wrong as he could get and I was as right as I could get. Today both my trades are in the money...his trade is trash. I did the research... he didn't. I even told him ahead of time but he made his stupid, ill advised trade anyway. NO authoritative source anywhere was predicting what he was betting on. Its probability of occurrence was almost zero. Still he made the trade and STILL he opines a lot of nonsense defending the un-defendable. Conclusion: ..................do the research. ..................ignore OptionsGuru.
OptionsGuru continues to confuse Risk:Reward with expectation. The odds of TSLA hitting his target were something like 1% based on pre-earnings pricing. For the sake of argument, let's say both of you were trading with the same target in mind. Using quoted Risk:Reward values (which I dispute in at least one case, but whatever): oldnemesis had a 99% chance of making $1 and a 1% chance of losing $20. OptionsGuru had a 99% chance of losing $1 and a 1% chance of making $10. Over time, oldnemesis would return $0.79 per trade. Over time, OptionsGuru would lose $0.89 per trade. He'll disagree.
On this trade oldnemesis's Credit Spread trade would have been profitable - but over time his Credit Spreads are showing signs of the "picking up pennies in front of the steamroller" syndrome. With a Risk:Reward averaging about 10:1 he has had at least three trades expired at maximum loss - that's 30 successful trades needed to get his money back. Link: IBM, AGN, ALR
Ever watch "everybody loves Raymond"?? Whenever Ray's big brother Robert gets a good one in on Ray, Ray will come back with something like how Robert's feet smell. Ray conceives of everything as a constant competition. I'm smarter than you, your feet smell... and on and on and on. Their relationship is a net negative for both of them because of their overriding sense of competition. So what is the purpose of posting here? To compete with each other? Ideally it should be to develop a cooperative environment so that each of us is more successful in our trading than we would otherwise be. But it has ALWAYS been impossible to achieve this. Since the days of Atticus etc. the overriding tone is competition with a few bozos trying to be "ON TOP". On top of what? Ridiculous. This is an aerial view of the village of Shirley in Derbyshire England. It is my ancestral home. Soon I'll be buried there alongside my knights Templar ancestors who fought in the Crusades. What will they put on my stone? "Options Trader" ? Might as well be "Time Waster" I'll post my trades here as always because it is a convenience to me, but everyone is going on ignore. Talk among yourselves...I'm not interested.
Before you retire from the thread, can you offer any insight into whether or not you are able to trade for profit using your high risk, low reward spread approach? I don't need an audited P/L statement, I just would like for someone who has been doing this for a while in a very focused manner to speak to the pitfalls and how to avoid them, because honestly, in my experience the options (and spreads and expectation) seem to be priced fairly well (meaning profit is difficult and commissions are a terrible headwind). Ignore the OTM option gambler; er, "speculator".