Real-time options education and strategies
Travis Tuesday, October 12 I can’t trade much this week. My only active position is a small trade in SPY. At about 12:30 Monday afternoon, SPY went 3d on the daily chart while simultaneously dropping below its opening price and the upper band of the descending-to-flat 8-day SMA bands. Over lunch, $SPY tried and failed to … Read more
Today marks another step in my trading journey. I cancelled a subscription to a trade alert service. I’d been a subscriber for over a year. It was a good service. It taught me a lot. I wanted to stay. But I needed to leave. Over time, my way of understanding and trading the markets developed … Read more
Paul’s comments: I’ve asked Travis to help me with this post because I have points to address that I think he can bring a better perspective to than I can. The point of this post is to help simplify things for most traders. If we give ‘students’ of technical analysis too much information to consider … Read more
UPDATE 9.21.2021 After talking to Paul, I want to amend this post. There are actually two mistakes in this trade, neither of which is the one I identified in the original post (which I’m leaving unchanged in case it’s helpful to see the evolution in my thinking). Although I entered the trade at a good … Read more
Paul gave me these screenshots and asked me to finish the analysis. Here goes: Just before noon on Friday, Paul bought the 24SEPT 4425/4400/4375/4350 put condor in $SPX. He paid $3.00. The Put Condor has an especially effective risk profile. The position carried just -2.67 deltas, and had a $300 max loss and a $2,200 … Read more
Paul recently published a great post called the One-at-a-Time Portfolio. In it, he showed how struggling options traders can build consistency by holding only one unhedged trade at a time. It’s a great approach. It helped me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is struggling to find consistency in their options trading. But … Read more
Paul put on a nice new trade in $AMZN last week. We discussed it a little bit in real time on the Twitter feed, but the trade deserves a more thorough breakdown because it contains a lot of good lessons about price action and trade structure. Paul gave me a set of screenshots and asked … Read more
Here are a few stocks I’ll be watching for new entries this week. I’ve gone into a bit of detail on the AMD setup; the others are more general ideas. $AMD Semiconductor industry is looking very bullish. The undisputed leader, NVDA, is extended and not at a great buy-point for me. AMD, on the other … Read more
If you get stopped out of a trade but the larger idea remains valid, don’t be afraid to take another crack at it *if* it sets up again. After falling like a stone for weeks on unrelenting news of Chinese government crackdowns, on August 24th $BABA gapped up right into a strong resistance area and … Read more
Last week hammered home an essential lesson for me: I have the knowledge I need to be a great trader. My technical analysis is sound. My options toolkit is bursting at the seams. But those are not the things that will take my trading to the next level. To truly “level up,” I need to … Read more