Archive for options
Intriguing Conversation About Option Trading
Posted by: | CommentsAs Option traders, we are all on a quest for that magical formula to making consistent returns on our trades. Along the way we trade stories and tips with other traders and some information really sticks with you.
Something that stood out was when he said “Non-directional option trading doesn’t mean we can make money in any direction. It means that we make money if the underlying doesn’t move in any direction. In other words, it’s still a directional trade, sideways.” I couldn’t agree more, and it’s been advertised that it’s easy to make money with options because we can make money on any direction. In some respects this is true, but in others it’s not.
If you’re trading Iron Condors, you know what I’m talking about. Even more so if you’re trading the Condors that most of the books teach. If you were trading that strategy in 2009, you probably didn’t end up making anything. That’s due to Iron Condors being just as directional as other option trades, just that it was a sideways movement. For some traders, it’s just as hard to foresee a sideways movement as it is an up or down.
Over the years, I’ve received many calls from traders loosing massive chunks of their accounts from trading condors and credit spreads. Sadly, it’s always the same complaint; “It was going so well for several months, then all the sudden I lost nearly my whole account in one day.” I’ve heard this time and time again, and it’s about time something was done about it!
Therefore, I decided I wouldn’t teach traditional Condors and Credit Spreads. Using them will end you up a few days from expiration, with the RUT is right at your short strike, because you traded the way most people traded these strategies. Soon you’ll be telling your sob story to your friends and trying to hide your financial travesty from your wife! This is no laughing matter. It can happen to anyone, including you. Is the stress really worth sticking to traditional methods?
In response to this problem, San Jose Options Mentoring has redesigned Iron Condors and Credit Spreads, developing different techniques that give the underlying much more wiggle room. This lowers stress levels and keeps us out of dangerous situations. The less adjusting you do to your condor, the better off you’ll be in most cases.
In addition to our safer ways to trade condors, we’ve also come up with ways to lock-in our profits from them. The average option trader will exit the trade once they’ve made a profit. San Jose Options can lock-in our profits and we stay in the trade.
When you get right to it, if we ever have a Condor move against us, then we have developed a backup plan which gives us a free bonus trade! So, even though we may experience an undesirable month, we still get an excellent, free trade while most traders just take the fall and crawl away.
At the end of the month, win or lose, we at San Jose Options have trading Iron Condors and other strategies down to an art. Trade on, fellow traders!
Are you interested in preserving your savings while still maintaining a high probability of making money with Option Trading? Then visit the San Jose Options Mentoring Course for more information.
Before Short Selling-Know These Shocking Facts
Posted by: | CommentsShort selling is one of the favorite day trading strategies employed by many day traders. Many companies hate short sellers as they believe that short sellers were responsible in the fall of their stock prices. Nothing can be far from the truth. Short selling is just like anyother market mechanism that provides liquidity and better price discovery. Short selling can never destroy a company if its’ fundamentals are strong. Many stock brokers now let you short stocks with just the click of a mouse. When you sell stocks from your online brokerage account, the message asks you whether you are selling your own shares or short selling. You just need to click once on short selling and the rest is taken care of by the broker. These shares are a loan to you by the broker that you will have to return at a later date!
In some cases, the brokerage firm cannot borrow the shares as so many people have sold the stock short that there are no more shares to borrow. In that case, you will have to find another stock or use another strategy.
Day traders are not looking for long term fundamentals in order to go short. A day trader might go short on a stock that had go up for three consecutive days, figuring that they will go down on the fourth day. Day traders are only looking for stock that might go down in price for mundane reasons.
In simple words, once the stock starts to move down, you cannot short it. You will have to wait for its price to move up on the last trade, before your short selling order can be executed by the broker. Now, you cannot straight away short a stock as there are mechanisms in place employed by msot of the stock exchanges that don’t want a massive shorting attack on a stock. There is the famous Uptick Rule that has been put in place to prevent that from happening. What the Uptick Rule means is that you cannot short a stock unless it moves up on the last trade. This rule has been placed to prevent a stock from being driven down to almost zero by short sellers.
If you are wrong in your short selling decision, your loss can be catastrophic.How much risky short selling can be? Well, in theory there is no stopping a stock price to reach the sky. But don’t worry, short sellers also use stop loss so if the price starts to move up, your position will get closed automatically by the stop loss order.
There is something known as Short Squeeze. A short squeeze happens when the stock of the company that you have shorted has some good news that drives the stock prices high. Now if this happens, many short sellers might lose money and even get margin calls. When they get desperate to buy back the stock, its prices go even higher hurting them more.
Now many companies, brokers and investors hate short sellers and try tactics to bust them. Sometimes, they will issue good news or spread rumors of good news to create a squeeze. Other times, they can ask the stock holders collectively to tell their brokers not to loan out their shares. What this means is that short sellers have to buy back the shares and return them to the brokerage firm and close their short positions even if it does not make any sense.
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Are Your Options Losing Value?
Posted by: | CommentsLet’s discuss the complexities of options and how they differ from trading stocks. First of all stocks are simply one-dimensional trading vehicles, the dimension of “price movement.” For example, one can go long a stock if he/she is forecasting a rise in the price of the underlying asset. The stock trader doesn’t need to worry about time or changes in volatility affecting the outcome of his trade. The stock trader only needs to focus on the asset’s price movements.
Options, however, involve these other two dimensions just mentioned, plus the dimension of price as well. So options are actually three-dimensional trading vehicles based on price, time and volatility. To compare stock and options in a practical sense, let’s consider this scenario:
A stock takes a full year to move up 10%. The stock trader who bought and held on to his stock has just made 10% on this particular trade. However, the option trader might have made nothing at all or even lost money if he just bought an option.
The reason the option buyer may have just lost money is because of Time Decay. His option just lost a whole lot of Time Premium because the trade took so long to develop. Also, since the volatility of the underlying asset probably went down, this could have also caused the Call option to lose value. Options lose premium over time.
So, hopefully you can see that in order to trade options, we really need to be educated. Entry level option traders usually buy Calls and Puts, and they don’t understand why they lose money when the underlying asset goes the direction they are hoping. Remember, when trading options, you are not trading a single dimension; you are really trading a 3 dimensional asset. Finally, the exciting thing about options is that once you understand them, they allow you to be very flexible, creative and can be traded in any type of market.
Are your current Option Strategies keeping you up at night? See why our motto is Max Safety, Max Reward trading options. Get your FREE Option Trading Video on Option Greeks by visiting us at www.SJOptions.com
The Beachfront Iron Condor
Posted by: | CommentsSince the Iron Condor is a negative Vega strategy, this should be the right time to use this income option spread. But what is negative Vega anyway? When is the right time to use this Iron Condor spread? If you do not know that answer, then you may want to watch some of the free videos on the Option Greeks that you can find on the San Jose Options’ website. Anyway, now that the volatility has been moving downward and the markets have become a calmer place to be, this makes it much better to manage this option spread.
With little effort and/or changes at all, most of us Condor traders have been making money over the last few months. With this kind of income spread, at times, it can really be great! There are those times that we have very few adjustments to make. If the underlying simply trends and stays within a tight price range, then the Condor works well and you can make money in this market almost each day.
This is one time that the stock market will give us the chance to really enjoy our option strategies. When it’s not so high maintenance, it is a great way to make a living. It is a great way to be able to make money this way. It is very low stress, and at times you will have a steady income.
Now, I studied with San Jose Options, and leaned a far better, more conservative way to trade the Iron Condor option spread. It is a lower risk, safer way to trade the Iron Condor. What I learned before from other courses, and what they had me doing was very high risk. Now I can trade the Iron Condor with much more confidence knowing that my portfolio is safer than it has ever been before.
Before learning this conservative trading I was doing adjustments almost every week to my portfolio in order to keep myself from losing my money. Now, with very little changes at all I have been making about 10% per month. Now that I have a safer way to create the Iron Condor from the beginning, I have less changes to make. Over all it has been really nice trading the stock market over the last few months.
Want to find out more about Low-Risk Options Trades? Then you should take some Options Classes
Automate Your Forex Trading For Bigger Profits
Posted by: | CommentsForex trading has gained tremendously in interest and popularity in recent years mostly due to the introduction of automatic and automated forex trading systems. The market that was open to banks and similar big financial institutions is now luring medium and even small investors.
Forex trading involves the exchange of one currency of one country for the currency of another country. As forex trades happen round the clock with transactions of billions or perhaps trillion of dollars everyday, thus it is considered one of the largest and most active financial markets.
As internet and technology become more popular, automated forex trading systems has become quite common. Anyone who has a computer, internet connection, a forex brokerage account can participate in the forex market.
Trading forex requires constant monitoring due to the fact that the market does not close. But with an automated forex trading system, you can specify in advance your entry and exit price. Together with a small seed amount and with the help of a broker, your trading orders will be executed instantly.
With an automated trading system, you can trade profitably even without becoming an expert in trading. In automated trading through a managed account, it is the trading program that will executes the trades for you.
One attractive point about automated trading is you do not need to do the actual trading. This will free up your time for other things. But if you do watch the market constantly, you can then manage multiple accounts from your trading platform simultaneously. Previously with manual trading, this is not possible. With the introduction of automated trading system, it allows you to trade multiple systems and multiple markets.
An automatic and automated forex trading allow your trades to be made at any time of the day or night, regardless of your presence. You do not miss a single profitable trade even if you are not present in front of your computer terminal.
With an automated system, it can help you take advantage of using a few forex strategies and systems. You can then diversify your investment and lower your risk as the system will trigger trades based on different trade indicators.
With an automatic and automated forex trading system, you will be capable of monitoring many currency pairs at a time and you can follow and execute all of them. An automatic and automated forex trading also eliminates human emotions and psychology that can often affect proper and profitable trading decisions.
Even though the automated trading system will trade for you, it is good to learn some basics on forex trading. Learn more about fundamental and technical analysis and some popular indicators.
Just being automated, the trading system never guarantees you success as the market is influenced by many variables and parameters. The forex automated system is not just mechanical, but is fully programmable and you can customize them according to your needs.
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