We had an ice storm on the East Coast this week that knocked my Internet service off the grid and shut down electricity throughout the area, and so I wandered through the city whose infrastructure had failed me as snow and ice fell around me.

From home to office to a soccer-mom-filled Starbucks, I finally made it to my daughter’s apartment building that somehow had all services intact. My wife and daughter (who is a Kindergarten teacher) and I camped out in her apartment building while we weathered the mess outside.

My daughter invited some friends over to play board games and hang out, and I ended up striking up a conversation with one of them, a young man named Pete in his mid-20s who was seeking a career change. It turns out that he’s a math major and was considering a career in accounting.

I asked him whether he had ever considered options trading for a living. It was clear from his reaction that the thought had never occurred to him.

My daughter and wife laughed at me and rolled their eyes—they knew what was coming next—which was my excitedly explaining to Pete why, having left a career as a CEO in corporate America for an options trading career, my Monday mornings are now fun and interesting (which they were not earlier, trust me).

I explained to him that the great thing about options income trading is that there is no end to the creative uses of options to address your market view of a stock, commodity, index, or currency. And the best part is that, if you have no view at all—or you think that the market will just chop around in a range for a while—there are very powerful strategies that can be employed to exploit that situation as well.

I told him that my favorite day of the week was Thursdays—when I prepare for our weekly student meeting—a group meeting for the students in our options training program. That’s the day I review one of the hundreds of options strategies that I’ve traded and back tested over the years and select one that I’d like to present that evening.

I’ll often “dust off” the strategy and tweak it a bit from its original form as I incorporate new concepts that I’ve learned since I first developed it or learned it from a colleague. I then present the state-of-the-art version of that strategy to our students who in turn tweak the strategy further to adapt it to their personality and trading style.

I love when one of our trainees challenges what I’ve presented and then goes off into his or her own “workshop” to create an even better mousetrap than one that I might have imagined.

“So what can I say?” I asked Pete. “I’m an options geek.” I love trading options, I love teaching options trading, and I love tinkering with old strategies to adapt them to incorporate the wisdom I’ve gained from trading options for years.

I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. Honestly. Not too many people can say that.

Seth Freudberg
Director, SMB Options Training Program

The SMB Options Training Program is a program designed for novice and intermediate level options traders who are seeking an intensive training process to learn how to trade options spreads for monthly income. For more information on this program contact Seth Freudberg: [email protected].

Risk Disclosure
No relevant positions