Seth – When I was in the military, I was assigned as the unit trainer (started with 70 soldiers). To give a little more detail, I was a lieutenant in a patriot missile battery. When we would train, it would be three different platoons in one confined area, all training toward one objective (getting our site, missile launchers, and engagement control … Read More
Trade the Trade
A trader sent me this review of his work of yesterday: I made ~$250-300 right on the open which I was fairly happy with considering the stock I was trading didn’t move exactly how I wanted it to. I was trading actively, controlling my risk and in the trades I needed to be in. Most importantly, I was involved. None … Read More
Katz’s Corner: Are There Trading Hot streaks?
Do we have hot streaks as a trader? There is some research here from the must read @jonahlehrer that suggests that the belief there are shooting streaks in basketball is not supported by the data. I asked Dr. Jonathan F. Katz of High Performance Associates and who works with traders for his thoughts (see below): Ah, the age old question, perception … Read More
The key to winning options strategies is how well you handle the losing months
All great options strategies will have losing months. There is no getting around this simple fact, and it is critical to your mindset as a successful options trader that you accept these months as part of the game. While non-directional options spread strategies are also known as “income options trades” (giving some traders the mistaken idea that the strategies will produce … Read More
Insights from Wharton School’s Investment Management Club
I gave a talk in Philadelphia on options strategies to the Wharton School Investment Management Club last Thursday. My daughter Halima, who is an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia, sat in on the the talk as well. In addition to wanting to be a supportive daughter, she was my intern four summers ago, backtesting options … Read More
Can I Trade Options While Holding Down a Busy Full-Time Job? How About While I’m Asleep?
While there are common themes to every kind of trading discipline, there are of courses differences as well. Options spread trading, for example is a very different world in many respects from day trading. At SMB, our intraday equity traders tend to focus on the opening hour and the closing hour of trading, with sometimes very high speed activity and decision-making … Read More
Monthly Options Spread Trading is a Twelve-Inning Game
Imagine a major league baseball game, where your favorite team gave up no runs for the first eight innings and then twelve runs in the ninth. Are you happy if the opposing team gave up one run in each inning of that same game? Of course not. The opposing team won 12-9. Yet the opposing team “lost” each of the … Read More
What do all successful traders have in common?
In the summer of 2010, I traveled to Manhattan from my home in Philadelphia to meet with Roy Davis of SMB Capital for the purpose of checking out SMB’s intraday equities training program. While I am an income options spread trader myself, my premise was that intraday equities trading and options income trading were not at all mutually exclusive … Read More