Real-time options education and strategies
Paul 
When I trade any short term time spread in SPX or SPY I almost always use the 3-day rule. When I say short term I mean that the expiration of both the spread’s short and long options is generally within the following 30 days. The 3-days refers to the amount of days between the expiration … Read more
The S&P 500 has been in a strong downtrend along with almost every stock trading on the NYSE. Many stocks are down in excess of 50% so there’s been a lot of damage done. I’ve been trading profitably to the short side for awhile now and I continued to maintain short SPX Deltas as of … Read more
As this post brings the Vega Options blog one post closer to it’s 100th I realize how hard it is to reach most people and traders are certainly a special breed of people. Many are simply gamblers looking to make huge profits the easy way. What could be easier than buying a bunch of Calls … Read more
Below are my 4 SPX trade fills from today’s trading. I was bearish and expecting price to move lower but price is already very oversold so I didn’t want to take a large amount of Delta (directional) risk. Look at the fills and then keep reading to see what the risk profiles looked like and … Read more
When I’m looking for good setups I mostly rely on the 8 SMA bands (the upper band is the moving average of the prior candle highs and the lower band is the moving average of the prior candle lows) but often price is too far distanced from the 8 SMA bands to be useful. At … Read more
Over the many years that I have been a trader I have talked to and/or observed literally hundreds of other traders and in all that time I can think of maybe a handful of option traders that I know who were successful. Most every other option trader has lost money and many of those have … Read more
The opening range (OR) is the first 30-minutes of the trading day. It doesn’t include the overnight session so it begins at 9:30 Eastern time. The price action during the OR is often very important in setting the trading range for the entire day. Below are some charts to explaining OR setups. Reversal candles that … Read more
This post is about how any size account, even a relatively small one, can increase the efficiency of their trading method while alternating from full-risk to reduced-risk over and over again. Travis @RaadiaCapital has been kind enough to add important context to this post and his comments are in red. Get ready to learn some … Read more
Today is Monday, 4/11/22 and the trading day is over. Prior to last Friday’s close, I had a bearish bias on SPX. The price action that led me to that bias is well documented here in the blog post Understanding Price Action. Based on that bearish bias I initiated 2 new positions. In the first … Read more
I review the hourly and daily charts after the end of each session but on weekends I include a review of the longer term charts such as the weekly and monthly charts. Understanding price action on the longer term charts adds important context to the shorter term chart price analysis. I use the next few … Read more