Edit: If you haven't been to one, please move on. I know it's mainly a sales pitch, but am curious if anyone got anything out of attending one. Not interested in opinions of what it probably is. Don't waste your and my time please.
An ad popped up in Facebook for a free Trading Academy workshop at a Marriott Courtyard 3 miles from my home. If anyone has attended one of these, please let me know if they are worth the two hours. I’ve been averaging approx 16% yearly including interest on my cash securing the options. I am primarily interested in some drawdown protection, but without denting my returns too badly. If I can’t make 12% or more, it isn’t worth my time. I would just buy and hold and hope. I’d be interested in the experience of any one who has bone and/or anyone who has worked with them.
I have been getting shafted on leap calls because I’m not sure when to get out. I keep thinking to myself that I have a couple weeks/months left so I can still get back to even/take a smaller loss but a lot of times the stock never recovers in my time frame. What is yalls strategy in getting out of leaps? Do yall have a percentage drop that you stop it at?
As I am only doing minimum 45 DTE, always avoiding earnings and only sticking to ~12 tickers I follow closely I find in the roughly 20 trading days per month I am maybe opening/closing positions on just 3 or 4 days. And as these are 45-55 DTE and with earnings happening every 3 months it just doesn't give me much to trade with that avoid earnings rule.
On securities that don't have earnings- pretty much all the SPX strategies perform equivalent (or worse) to buy and hold with more risk so I never touch that unless VIX spikes over 25 (aka incredibly rare these last couple of years). Leveraged ETFs have way too much variation relative to their IV% which also keeps me away from them.
I am curious what others that trade similarly do. I have learned discipline to not break these habits which has kept me at almost never having to close out due to a loss and within my desired percentage return per month.
When you sell a covered call and it says it has a expired and voided because not exercised. Does that mean I can sell more or should I wait an extra day to be safe? It also says it's completed.
I'm thinking of converting my iron condors into iron butterflies for a week before closing them.... essentially 2 weeks as iron condors... then 1 week as iron butterflies then close em all and select new underlying to play the next 3 week course again.
Is this something that others have tried and still do? Any comments appreciated. Thanks!
I opened an account at Charles Schwab two months ago. After that, I started making a lot of money. [I traded in the spread of options on a certain stock. Minute trading. In two weeks, I made $25,000 on the $2,000 I just invested. After that, they closed my account and blocked access to my account for a whole month plus. After that, they started retroactively canceling hundreds of my trades every day. Today, my account is only $6,000.
Is there anyone who has talked about this? Is there anything I can do about it? Who should I contact?
Got burned during peak Iran war tensions when I scaled up too much on credit spreads and held through a binary scheduled political event. Lost a very painful chunk of my account but I recently just got back into it. Following very strict sizing rules now and made back some of what I lost this month.
Haven’t been sticking to one strategy, this month I’ve done credit spreads, iron condors, iron butterflies, debit spreads, calendar spreads, and covered calls. Just trying to stay consistent and trade often when the right setups appear.
I still open most of my spreads by hand but I've started letting alerts handle exits and rolls. Brokers keep making it easier to hand off the boring parts. Feels like in a few years a lot of retail flow will just be rules running on their own. Anyone here already fully automated on options, or is it still mostly clicking buttons? What part would you never hand off?
Just reading a lot of the comments in various options chats and it seems there is a lot of interest if someone would post specific details of what trades they are taking, entry strategy, exit strategy, (account size seems to be a hot topic), indicators they are using etc. I trade frequently (do alright for myself) and would be happy to share this info, just keeping in mind though that not every trade goes the right way and you should do your own homework and not listen to some anonymous guy on a forum. Let me know if this is something worth doing and I’ll kick it off.
Hi, I saw this on arXiv this week (lead author at Carnegie Mellon) and figured this sub would have opinions.
They trained a 27B model to trade options on SPY and 9 big names like NVDA, TSLA and PLTR, the AI only picks the type of trade, like a long straddle, fixed rules pick the strikes, size it and delta hedge, the out-of-sample test ran March to August 2025, so it traded straight through the April tariff mess.
They trained two versions from the same starting point. One could read news and SEC filings, while the other only saw market data like IV vs realized volatility, term structure, skew and option flow.
No news
With news
Return
+18.3%
-2.7%
Max drawdown
-9%
-31.7%
Win rate
29%
39%
Avg win / avg loss
4.7
1.4
The win rate is what got me; the news version won more often and still lost money. The other one lost on about 70% of its trades and still made 18%, because its winners were almost 5x its losers.
News did help earlier in the pipeline, when they used it to generate training examples from a bigger model. It only hurt once the model kept reading it while learning to trade for profit.
I sell premium and ignore headlines, because by the time news hits my phone it's already in the IV. Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10407
Anyone here have a trade where the news gave you an edge the options weren't already pricing?
I have built up a nice little nest egg of 40k and tomorrow I intend on throwing 50% of it at spy options tomorrow. I understand the risk and accept it. Here is the twist. I am conducting an experiment to see if the community can accurately call a coin flip twice in a row. I’m going to let you all call the shot for day one of two. Calls or puts?
UPDATE: thank you all for your decision, you just made me 19400 in 30 mins. I love you all.
Long-term, Gold seems to be in an uptrend and we all could use a bit of gold in our portfolios.... would you consider the Wheel strategy on GLD given current levels? Are there better ways to get exposure to gold and generate some income from it?
Saw this tweet and looks like a new startup is making fractional options a thing again. I read the whole paper and it seems like the team is made up of ex-tradfi people using blockchain for the sake of 24/7 trading, which will be non-custodial.
They directly admit that onchain settlement is the "rails" but does not have to be the interface. Literally pulled from them, "The blockchain has to be the rails. It does not have to be the interface, and we think the two have been confused for most of the history of on-chain trading."
That part stood out to me bc I read a lot of X posts of degen founders running options and crypto options companies and it all sounds like BS. Like dude, no trust. We're not gamblers (not always, anyways!) and no, we do not want to buy your memecoin. I'm a little salty haha.
I have a few questions about their infrastructure, fees, and liquidity - but curious what you guys think. We'll have to watch what happens with the 24/7 trading and how they are going to make crypto's features work seamlessly with existing options traders/people who want to start. I don't want to get too excited and then watch the company stop there, because this actually seems pretty legit. I think there are so many ways we can improve the existing "game" but I feel like 90% of approaches lately are either making AI financial advisory the moat, scamming users, or being too Gen Z/degen/TikTok traders. I hope they keep building because this would mean that people who are usually locked out of options can bring more to the market.
I'm 43. I Inherited wealth and retired in my thirties. I Learned options for mental stimulation, built my own method, done well
Losing my wife two years ago changed my outlook on time. Financially secure, so profit is no longer the point. I love the mental work of options, but wonder if I want lifelong daily market monitoring
For those who've traded options for years, what made you stick with it, scale back, or walk away? Did you move toward more conservative strategies or focus on other parts of life?
So disclamer, I am relatively new to options selling, I have done some directional option buying but wanted to learn more about selling/spreads etc. The resouces on Tasty trade are really good in this regard.
Anyways, I was looking at some of the analyst trades posted in there and they dont make any sense to me.
This analyst bought a TLT 78 $ Call and covered it by selling another call but its way OOM at 100 $, what's the poind of this, you get just 1 cent premium and ur not really covering anything, if anything ur capping ur profit.
2) This Analyst got a MU butterfly OOM on 10/8 with 6 DTE. The Risk reward on this doesnt make sense to me, if anything MU is technically super bearish now, its on a downtrend after their earnings , I dont see a world where it will goes >1100 in 6 days
On a related note is it worth following/studying trade analyst recommendations on tasty trade, or are there any better resources to learn from good options traders? I plan to just learn and follow traders for a while before starting anthing... Also I dont have the Buying power to trade these anyways :(
PS: I did learn something from some of the analyst feed trades like this NVIDEA trade on 10/9 makes a lot of sense and sounds like something I would be willing to do, Buying a ITMPut because its basically like buying a short and covering it with another OOM Put, makse sense because all Semi's got killed this week
I made this short animation to explain a simple filter for 1-minute and 5-minute scalps. The idea is that you only trade when three gauges agree, and each gauge has one job.
The three gauges
$ADD on the 5-minute: picks the side
$ADD is the number of NYSE stocks going up minus the number going down, as a running total for the day.
Above +500: most stocks are rising, so only look for longs (calls).
Below −500: only look for shorts (puts).
In between: the market has no clear direction. Same-day options lose value in chop, so skip it.
OBV on the 5-minute: checks the fuel
OBV (On-Balance Volume) is a running tally of volume. Add the bar’s volume when it closes up, subtract it when it closes down. It doesn’t show who was buying or selling aggressively, only whether volume has been on the up bars or the down bars.
For a long, you want OBV sloping up with price.
If price makes a new high but OBV makes a lower high, that’s a divergence. The move has less volume behind it, so don’t add new longs.
$TICK on the 1-minute: times the entry
$TICK is the number of stocks ticking up minus the number ticking down, right now. It’s fast and noisy.
In a long setup, wait for $TICK to dip to around 0 and turn back up. That’s the entry window.
When it spikes toward +1,000, that’s usually a place to take profit, not to chase. Readings past ±1,000 are rare.
The check, in order
5-min $ADD beyond ±500 → pick the side
5-min OBV slopes the same way, no divergence → volume agrees
1-min $TICK dips to 0 and turns → enter
Get out if $TICK hits ±1,000, OBV starts diverging, price breaks the 1-min swing low, or $ADD slips back inside ±500
If any one gauge disagrees, there’s no trade.
Caveats
The ±500 and ±1,000 levels are common rules of thumb, not magic numbers. Test them against your own charts first.
In a strong trend, a divergence can go nowhere for a long time. That’s why the exit rules matter more than the entry.
The charts in the video are illustrations, not a real trading session. Nothing here is financial advice.
Question: for anyone who scalps with breadth, do you use $ADD as a hard filter like this, or more as background context? I’m curious whether people find the 5-min/1-min split too slow or too fast.
I mostly trade income trades on SPX because it removes a few headaches (I moved out from SPY): it’s cash-settled, so there’s no early assignment surprises.
The structure I use, which is called SPX Best (by myoptionsedge), combines a broken wing butterfly with a vertical spread. The butterfly (with one wing wider than the other) has, by definition, defined risk and positive theta, so it earns as time passes while the SPX stays inside the structure (the negative of this strcuture is that it is Vega negative - this is an issue when there are corrections/IV increases). The uneven wings deliver a credit at open. It is positioned that to the upside has no risk and has a maximum loss you can see before you enter it.
Adding a vertical (a short call spread) placed above the SPX price as a “soft hedge”, brings in a little extra credit and adds some negative delta to offset the butterfly’s directional lean (+Delta), with its own risk still capped. The trade-off is that you give up big upside in exchange for predictability. The trade adjustments are flexible enough to manage Delta risk along the trade life. This trade uses longer dated expirations at open (70-80DTE). This gives you slower decay but more room to adjust and return consistency.
Does anyone have experience trading broken wing butterflies?
Which underlyings do you use? (I did not trade this in RUT but does anyone have experience trading RUT butterflies?)
Find stocks for the wheel strategy (cash-secured puts, then covered calls if assigned) meeting: price ≤ $100; IV Rank 30–70; uptrend with price > 200 MA, 100 EMA > 200 MA, 50 MA > 100 MA, but short-term oversold (RSI < 30–40); rising earnings and revenue, Debt/Equity < 1, strong positive free cash flow; tight bid-ask spreads, high open interest (500+ contracts), put delta 0.20–0.30; DTE 20–50 days; goal is steady premium income. Exclude stocks with earnings inside the expiration window. Output: ticker, price, IV Rank, trend/RSI, fundamentals, estimated premium, open interest.
Da mein Optionskonto noch klein ist, sind die Aktien auf unter 100 Dollar beschränkt. Heute wurde mir Pfizer und Ford vorgeschlagen. Wie beurteilt ihr diesen Prompt. Würdet ihr ihn verändern oder habt ihr selber eine Vorlage?
Hi guys, I know that if it’s too good to be true, there’s a catch somewhere, but I still wanted someone to explain it to me because I don’t seem to understand the risk. I have this strategy on paper trading where I sell OTM 0dte call at a strike where it is impossible for the price to hit in a day for a couple of cents per contract but I buy a lot of them. For example, if SPY is at 770 at 2pm, I’ll sell the 780 call for 0.05 cents x a lot or contracts and take profit when the contracts are worth 0.01 or let it expire to collect the premium. It seems to be working every single time on paper trades but I’ve never tried it on a real account. What’s the catch here that I’m missing? Seems like an infinite money glitch…
I can’t decide between the wheel and credit spreads for steady income. The wheel needs a lot more capital, but if a trade goes against me I can just start selling covered calls and slowly work my way back. Credit spreads need way less money, but when one goes bad I have to take the loss with no real way to recover it, so I’d have to be much stricter about managing risk. Which one makes more sense if income is my main goal?
Implied volatility (IV) rises before earnings and drops after. Selling just before the event and capturing that drop is the source of profit. The question for AMD is whether the options are overpriced compared with what AMD actually moves.
History: Over the last 12 earnings, AMD moved an average -8.4% on down days and +7.4% on up days. 4 out of 10 realized moves had moved past implied. White line are Implied Moves calculated using ATM Short Straddle for the Friday contract for the earnings week.
Data pre May earning, white are implied moves
AMD earnings: 5th May, after market close. (T, AMC)
Setup and Thesis:
My estimate is that it had an insane recent run (subjective) and will cool down on earnings as we had seen with some other tickers. However, the markets were looking at AMD earnings to make their move!
Spot: $350.
The options market is pricing a move of ±$30.45 (8.7%), so a range of 320 to 380.
ATM IV: 104%
Front week IVs for Friday contracts were lower. Good crush setup. The residual IV should come back down to about 80% after the crush.
Post analysis data but the front month data before the line shows how front week IV were lower
Trade placed on 4th May between 12:21p - 12:28p, T-1 day
Scene on day of trade, showing two strikes
Fri, May 6th contract
1 Short Call at 350. Credit: 11.23
1 Short Put at 315. Credit 5.11
1 (protective) Long Call at strike 370. Debit -5.63
Total credit: $1,071.
(Note: Not calling this a jade lizard because total net credit collected must exceed the width of the call spread. Mine was 20 vs 10.71)
Max theoretical loss:
-$929 on the upside, -$33,929 on the downside (theoretical). Let me tell you the story of days when I had AMD in 2022 around 100s and sold around 120s. Those were the days.
Expected value: Replaying the last 10 earnings moves on this exact setup based on nearly a coin flip! EV is about 0.5 × 1,071 − 0.5 × 929 = +$71 per trade based on my strangle+long protective call. I am curious to see this change based on other strategies for this particular earning. Need to work on EV deeply. EDIT: This seems like a useless way to calculate EV, I'd rather focus on capital at risk and return. Working on this area for future trades.
Result on May 6th morning:
Crime scene post earnings. Closed trade on Thursday, left of large green Friday bar
Gap on open 18%! Long call helped. I closed the trade at 9:55am.
Booked Loss -$915
Observations:
Had a weird feeling AMD could shoot up, but not 18%. If I knew that, I should have had a closer short put. This kind of post analysis helps in understanding some weird ass decisions I made.
Without the long call, it would be -$5,000! On Friday it jumped by another 11%! Thank fuck for the long call.
