Real-time options education and strategies
I’ll pass on many average setups to wait for a good setup. What’s a good setup? I have several tools that I use to identify good location for a trade; the upper or lower band of the 8 SMA is one, the High, Half-Back (HB), and Low of a prior period (hourly, day, week, month, … Read more
I’m a trader. My trades can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 weeks so I don’t need to add my opinion as to whether or not ‘the low‘ is in for the market or not. Doesn’t really matter to me. It’s a concern for long term investors but again, that’s not me. That doesn’t … Read more
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
On Monday, Paul had a good exchange with a Twitter follower about structures for trading upside moves, particularly in $SPX. Paul mentioned both Broken Wing Condors and the RS+. These structures work to the downside and the upside, but they are particularly effective on those grinding moves to the upside. The RS+ is Paul’s brainchild … 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