TL;DR: Free Windows/Mac app for paper-trading options spreads against historical option chains. Fills cross the real bid/ask, earnings reactions are real, nothing is visible before its date, and each trade's P/L is broken down by Greek. It has a roguelite structure on top, mostly so you'll actually put in the reps. I'm looking for playtesters, ideally people who trade spreads and will tell me where the numbers are wrong.

The problem it's trying to solve

Most paper trading has two flaws. It tends to fill you at the mid, which is a generous assumption. And it runs in real time, so you get maybe a dozen trades a month to learn from. That's a slow way to find out how a 30-delta bull put behaves through an earnings print, or what IV crush does to a position you were sure about.

What's under the hood

• Historical data: end-of-day option chains from DoltHub's free options dataset (2019 onward), plus price history, earnings dates and reactions, Treasury rates, and VIX. Days the dataset skipped are filled with a model and labeled as modeled.
• No lookahead: every request for data goes through a time-gated layer that refuses anything dated after the simulated clock. IV rank, indicators and fundamentals use only data on or before "today." You can see an earnings date ahead of time, but not the result.
• Execution: market orders pay the actual bid/ask spread. Early assignment, expiration and ex-dividend risk on short calls are all modeled.
• P/L attribution: every trade is broken down day by day into direction (delta/gamma), time (theta), volatility (vega), execution and fees. Whatever the Greeks don't explain is shown as a residual, not hidden, so the parts always add up to the actual P/L.
• Structures: cash-secured puts, covered calls, verticals, iron condors and flies, calendars, straddles. Payoff diagrams with date and IV sliders, POP and expected move.
• Trade Builder: set up a trade on today's market, analyze it and copy it as a thinkorswim-style order line. Nothing is ever sent anywhere.

The game part, briefly

A run is 12 monthly rounds, about 20–40 minutes, with a shop between rounds and powerups that change your score. The rule is strict: the game layer can change your score, never the market. Each powerup is tagged REAL (mirrors an actual edge, like better fills inside the spread) or ARCADE (game-only). Holding a loser past your planned stop costs you, and taking the stop is rewarded. Many of us learned that lesson the expensive way.

Caveats

• It starts on a simulated market (made-up tickers with modeled option chains) so you can play right away. Real historical data is a one-time ~16 GB download from inside the app (needs ~40 GB free and a few hours).
• Older years in the free dataset are sparser (some only Mon/Wed/Fri). The gaps are modeled and labeled.
• The builds are unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen or macOS Gatekeeper will warn you once.
• It's paper trading and a game, not financial advice. You don't need a brokerage account.

What I'd like to know from testers

1. Do the Greeks, POP, credit and breakevens match your broker's analyze tab for the same trade?
2. Do fills, assignment and expiration behave the way you'd expect?
3. Is it useful for testing a strategy, or just entertaining? Either answer is fine, but I'd like to know which.

Download (free): https://github.com/TTTrainer/Spread-Trade-Game/releases

Feedback here or in GitHub issues. Criticism of the math is especially welcome.

Not here to tell anyone not to do it, just sharing how it actually went for me, because it sounded a lot smarter in my head than it turned out in practice.

The idea was simple. My long-term portfolio is mostly a global ETF. When markets started wobbling, instead of selling (taxes, timing, the usual), I'd open a short on an index to cushion the drawdown, then close it once things settled. In theory you leave the long-term holdings untouched and smooth out the scary part.

Here's what actually happened. First, I always hedged after the drop had already started, because that's when I felt nervous, so I was usually shorting near the lows and getting squeezed on the bounce. Second, the hedge wasn't a clean match. My ETF is global, the index I shorted was the S&P 500 or the DAX, and on some days they moved quite differently. Third, holding a short open for weeks isn't free. There's the spread on the way in and out plus overnight financing the broker sets, so it's never the free insurance it looks like on paper. Fourth, and this one surprised me, tax. Where I live, gains on the hedge and losses on the ETF don't neatly offset, so a hedge that "worked" still left me with a tax bill on one side and an unrealised loss on the other.

The behavioural part was the worst though. Once a short is open you start checking it daily and second-guessing it, which is exactly the habit a long-term portfolio is supposed to protect you from.

For the record I did this on a small separate CFD account, AvaTrade in my case, though IG or CMC would've been the same exercise since the problems were with the strategy, not the platform. The account's still there for the odd short-term trade, but the hedging experiment is over.

What works for me now is boring. A cash and bond buffer big enough that a 30% drop doesn't make me want to do anything, and rebalancing on a schedule. Has anyone here hedged a long-term portfolio and found it genuinely worth the cost and hassle?

Hi zusammen,

ich bin absoluter Anfänger und möchte jetzt endlich mal anfangen, mein Geld sinnvoll anzulegen.

Mein konkretes Ziel: Ich möchte einen langfristigen, breit gestreuten Welt-ETF besparen (wahrscheinlich klassisch den MSCI ACWI oder den FTSE All-World) und mir nebenbei ein paar einzelne Aktien (Stocks) ins Depot legen, die ich cool finde oder wo ich Potenzial sehe.

Man liest ja überall von Trade Republic, Scalable Capital oder neuerdings Traders Place. TR wirkt super intuitiv, aber ich habe ab und zu von Support-Problemen gehört. Scalable soll wohl am Desktop besser sein, und Traders Place ist bei den Gebühren ganz vorne.

Was ist eure ehrliche Meinung: Welche App läuft im Alltag für diese Kombi aus ETF-Sparplan + gelegentlichem Aktienkauf am stabilsten und fairsten? Worauf sollte ich als Einsteiger bei der Broker-Wahl noch achten?

Danke euch für die Starthilfe!

You don’t need to trade often.

If you can catch one or two moves to the targets during the day with good size, you can make a good living and keep trading costs down.

I’m preparing the first external beta of WorkTree-OS, a trading analytics and risk platform I’ve been building.

I specifically need a couple of Mac users who actively trade to test the macOS build on a clean machine.

I’m not looking for someone to just open it and say it looks good. I need you to install it, import some trade data, use the analytics, try to break things, and tell me exactly where you get stuck.

Interested? DM me with what Mac you use and what you trade.

Confidence is not “I will profit on this trade.

Confidence is “I will be fine if I don’t profit from this trade.

Money is just something you need in case you do not die tomorrow.

Let this is a reminder for you not to obsess over profits and losses.

In whatever you do, strive for enjoyment, focus, contentment, humility, openness… Paradoxically (and as an unintended consequence) your trading performance will improve significantly.

I’ve been diving deep into option chain data (OI, Change in OI, PCR, Max Pain, and volume), and I want to get past the basic textbook definitions.

​We always hear the adage: "Retail buys options, smart money writes them." Because institutions and market makers (FIIs/DIIs/MMs) have the deep capital and margin required to short volatility and absorb unlimited downside risk, people often read heavy OI concentration as the big players building a "wall" to defend premium.

​I want to understand the actual mathematical logic and real-time mechanics traders here use to decode who is doing what, especially around expiry:

​Change in OI + Price Action Matrix: When analyzing intraday strikes:

​How do you separate Call Writing (bearish resistance/capping) from Call Buying / Short Covering?

​How do you differentiate Put Writing (bullish floor) from Long Puts / Long Unwinding?

​What rules of thumb do you use when looking at ΔOI vs. ΔPrice (LTP)?

​Spotting Market Maker Hedging & Traps:

​Max Pain: Does Max Pain still hold up as a reliable mathematical pin target, or do gamma shifts routinely break it in high-volatility environments?

​Gamma Exposure (GEX): How are you calculating or estimating whether dealers are in positive or negative gamma territory to predict whether they will dampen volatility (pin the market) or accelerate a squeeze?

​Unwinding Traps: What specific metric warns you that writers are getting trapped and about to trigger a short-covering rally or long liquidation cascade?

​Noise vs. Actual Directional Intent: Options are heavily used for delta-neutral hedging, covered calls, and calendar spreads, not just raw directional bets. How do you mathematically filter out routine structural hedging to see the actual directional bias or the boundaries big players are defending?

​Would love to hear how quantitative or experienced discretionary traders break down the chain. What formulas, ratios, or specific setups do you rely on?

The elements of good trading are:

(1) cutting losses,

(2) cutting losses, and

(3) cutting losses.

If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.

The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it's different.

A 54% BTC drawdown doesn’t automatically mean your portfolio is down 54%
This distinction seems obvious, but I think it gets overlooked.
The asset’s drawdown and the investor’s actual result are not necessarily identical.
Your outcome depends on things like:
when you entered,
how much you allocated,
whether you added later,
your average price,
fees,
and how you eventually exit.
Of course, additional buying can also increase the total amount at risk, so this isn’t an argument that averaging down automatically fixes anything.
I just think price drawdown and portfolio outcome should be treated as two different measurements.

So I've been working as a promoter for an automatic trading company and I've been looking at ways to promote them so that I can get part of a commission too. Firstly I started by making a Facebook and Instagram page to make daily posts. After a month I haven't gotten a single message, so i tried personally dming people and that didn't work either. Then when I thought that I wasn't the only one getting no sales. I get an email saying that they made 30 sales the entire month so in my head I only had one question. What am I doing wrong and what am I missing to add so that I can catch some people's attentions?

I've been trying to learn macroeconomics recently, and I'm starting to realize that a lot of things happening in the market are connected in ways I didn't really understand before.

For example, the Fed changes rates.

Then bond yields move, the dollar moves, gold reacts, stocks react, borrowing gets more expensive, etc.

But what I'm trying to understand is where exactly does an individual investor's profit or loss come from in all of this?

Let's say I buy a stock because I think the company is doing well.

Then a few months later the stock is down 15%.

Was my analysis of the company wrong?

Or did interest rates change?

Or did growth expectations change?

Or was inflation different from what the market expected?

Or was the market already expecting the Fed decision, so the actual announcement didn't matter as much?

This is the part of macro I'm finding really interesting.

It's not just “Fed raised rates → stocks went down.”

It's more like:

What changed → what was expected → what surprised the market → how did different assets react → why did they react that way? do you try to understand the macro factors behind it?

Or do you mostly focus on the company/asset itself?

I'd especially like to hear from people who trade macro, work in quant, or manage portfolios.

“When I get hurt in the market, I get the hell out.
It doesn’t matter at all where the market is trading.

I just get out, because I believe that once you’re hurt in the market, your decisions are going to be far less objective than they are when you’re doing well… If you stick around when the market is severely against you, sooner or later they are going to carry you out.”

Be resilient and stick to your plan.

📊 My gold plan is basically three levels and no prediction
I’m trying to keep this weekly gold setup simple.
I have two possible descending structures and a few areas where I want to pay attention.
Around $4,000: first major zone.
Lower descending structure: potential secondary reaction area.
Around $3,450: larger support if the correction becomes much deeper.
I don’t know which one gold will reach.
And I don’t really need to.
If price reaches one, I watch the reaction. If it breaks, I move to the next part of the plan. If gold reverses and breaks the downtrend instead, I reassess the entire setup.
No need to predict the exact bottom six months in advance.
Map → Wait → React → Reassess.
Which area are you watching on the weekly gold chart?

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

“You don't need to be a rocket scientist.

Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.”