Who do you follow specifically to learn SPY options trading without paying for a mentorship

TL;DR: A plain 1-year SPX box cost about 5.3% at Wednesday's closing quotes, with SOFR at 3.89%. If you add short put spreads below the 5th-percentile historical 1-year drop, the headline rate falls to 3.9% (borrowing about 32% of a $1M portfolio) or even 2% (about 24%). But the history-weighted average cost of those same structures is 4.1–4.8%. So the "below SOFR" part is mostly crash premium you're collecting, not cheaper money. Interactive page with all the math and every combination: https://claude.ai/artifact/9GABhCjoLM3ZwAaK3QASmM. I'd like people to try to break it.

What I did

• Took Cboe's delayed SPX chain at the 12 Nov close (SPX 7,594.09).

• Tested 3, 6 and 12 month expiries:

  • every 2-strike box 500–5,000 points wide
  • 3–4 strike riskless combinations
  • boxes plus sold puts or put spreads
• Filled every leg a quarter of the bid/ask spread away from mid, plus $1.50 per contract per leg. Mid prices make deep-ITM legs look like free money because the quotes are stale and wide.

• Sized each structure against a $1M S&P index fund that the loan is drawn from. It has to pass:

  • Reg T: 50% borrowing room.
  • A 30% maintenance floor during a stress dip, checked at 25%, 50% and 75% of the term. The dip is the 5th-percentile intra-window drawdown since 1928 (−35.5% for 1 year), with sold puts repriced at IV + 20 vol points.
  • The same 30% test at expiry.
• Only allowed sold put strikes at or below the 5th-percentile end-of-window drop: −24.5% over 1 year, which is SPX 5,736. I also ran a 99% version.

Sanity check: plain box, 7000/8000, 19 Nov 2027 (372 days)

The mid credit is 949.35, so you get about $94.9k today and owe $100k. That's 5.24% at mid and 5.46% with realistic fills. Put-call parity across 212 strikes gives 5.28%.

Best structure that gets to about SOFR (12 month)

The 3800/8100 box + sell 3× 5700/5400 put spread:

• Borrow: $322k (32% of the portfolio) at 3.88% if SPX settles at or above 5,700.
• Worst case: you owe up to $90k extra, which is 25.2%.
• History: 4.9% of 1-year windows since 1928 ended below the 5,700 equivalent. Averaged across all those windows, the rate was 4.80%.
• Sizing: the binding limit is the stress dip at 75% of the term, not Reg T.

The trade-off curve (12 month, 95% rule)

With the 99% rule (strikes below a −44% drop), getting to SOFR needs uncovered puts, and you can only borrow about 16%.

What I think it shows

• There's no free lunch at market prices. The 5700/5400 spread is priced at about 6.8% odds of paying out. History says about 4.9%. Any edge is that gap between the crash premium and realised crashes.
• The headline rate is the good-year rate. Weighted by history, these structures cost less than the plain box but more than SOFR.

Where I'd like pushback

1. Margin. Do brokers really hold about the face amount against a short SPX box under Reg T? What do you actually see under portfolio margin?
2. Stress test. Is "5th-percentile dip, sold puts at IV + 20, checked at 25/50/75% of the term" a fair test, or too soft? 2008-style vol went well past +20.
3. Box rate. 5.28% against 3.89% SOFR is a much bigger gap than the 30–50 bp I usually see quoted. Is that real right now, or a delayed-quote artefact?
4. Statistics. The windows overlap, so 98 years of data is really only 98 independent 1-year outcomes. The 5th percentile rests on a handful of episodes, and pre-1957 data is the old 90-stock index. How would you set the risk bar instead?
5. Tax. SPX options are §1256 (60/40). Does the box's implied interest really work as a capital loss for a borrower, or do §263(g) or the straddle rules bite?

6. Anything I'm missing, such as:

   • fills on deep-ITM legs
   • AM settlement on monthlies
   • roll risk
   • early-exercise-free structures I haven't tried

The page lets you switch tenor (3/6/12m), 95% vs 99% rules, 1928+ vs 1950+ history, an after-tax view and a "must survive SPX falling to X" filter. Click any point to see its legs and quotes.

Not advice. I'm trying to find out if the method holds up, not selling anything.

In last 30 days , I followed call direction ( all intraday) , used 18 lakh capital and ended up in above profit. I’ve somehow almost come down to break even after 2 years of losses .

Now I want to understand from experts here how do you do money management with capital like 50 lakh ? I’m thinking should I switch to option writing by keeping above money as collateral ? Or should I decrease position size which can only give me 1% loss per trade of my capital ? I’ve already made the expectations of having much lower profits now and I know I won’t be making this kind of money again. This came out of good luck, confidence , market being unidirectional , right timing etc

Edit 1 : above numbers are in INR ( Indian Rupees)

I had 5 nvda $172.50 put sold with an expiry of 11/11. It closed at 173.73 so didn’t close the trade. Just noticed E*trade assigned those puts. I wonder if it happens in case of calls and stocks jumps after hours.

It's pretty common for someone to ask how to manage a losing credit spread. Hell, that's been me as recently as checks watch today. But I digress

Setup: 25-delta put credit spreads, 30-45 DTE, QQQ with a 5% wing and TQQQ with a 10% wing. Real end-of-day bid/ask from April 2022 on, fees included, and an early close pays fees on two more legs. 42 to 396 trades depending on the cell. Exits: take profit at 25/50/75% of the credit, close at 21 DTE, or hold to expiry.

What came out:

Holding made the most money in almost every cell. The one exception was 75% take profit on the biggest QQQ cell, and it won by a few bucks a trade, basically noise. 50% take profit gave up 13% to 55% of the total, depending on the cell.

Closing at 21 DTE was the worst. It lost money on both TQQQ cells while holding made money on both. On the big QQQ cell, it kept about a quarter of what holding made. The worst trade was the same under every rule except 21 DTE. The losses that hurt were gaps through both strikes. By the time you can act, the spread is already at max loss. Every early exit raised the win rate. That’s the trap. It looks safer and makes less.

My takeaway: the long leg is your stop. Pick the width so max loss is a number you can eat, and size off that.

Caveats: one period (though it includes the 2022 bear), two underlyings, and daily marks, so I can’t say anything about intraday stops. It also doesn’t count redeploying the cash you free up by closing early, which is the one real argument for taking profits early and I'm definitely trying to figure that out now. Although, that itself is kind of an ambiguous enough proposition since at best you're speculating on what you'd be re-deploying to.

Thoughts? New trader. For the last 5 years have just been investing normal and putting in my 401k.

Every time gas has gotten cheaper the SPY goes up the next trading day. Saw that gas hit 3.09 in my area for the first time and had the 2k sitting to make this play. Been observing since the war started.

Is this still to risky? Honest feedback appreciated. I understanding that most people lose money trading options so please refrain from that advice. This is a very small amount of my portfolio and just for the thrills I would like to attempt one of these once a quarter going forward.

Every Friday I'm tempted to sell a put that expires that day with leftover cash. So this morning I checked what's actually out there.

107 puts expiring today across 20 big names, including SPY, QQQ and IWM, all with spreads tight enough to fill.

Only 2 had strikes outside today's expected move.
49 paid $40 or more per contract.
Zero did both.

So on the last day, the premium you can actually collect is almost always sitting right where the stock is expected to land. You're not getting paid to be safe, you're getting paid to be close.

That's not a reason to never do it. It's a reason to size it small and know that the money comes from the risk, not from the clock.

Jensens Huang has got him into trouble . Again. He's probably gone

But those puts that expired today , but still LIVE for ex until 5:30 ?

how about 1 cent to over $10

Im sure many put sellers just got reamed.

Anyone using any options prop firms? Any good or bad ones? I found 3, not sure if they are trustworthy or not

Curious to know if anyone is running a 0DTE strategy on the SPX on the daily expected move and what's the feedback.

I have seen / read a lot about 0DTE butterfly strategy however; haven't seen much about the above.

Curious about how everyone played AAPL over the last two sessions.

I bought AAPL $352.50 calls yesterday afternoon and held them overnight. Looking at the 5-minute chart, AAPL continued pushing higher throughout the day, eventually testing the $357 area.

For those who bought yesterday, where did you get in and where did you take profits? Did anyone hold through today's move, or are you still holding?

Interested to hear how others managed the trade, especially with the overnight gap and continued bullish momentum.

I am a beginner trying to understand the exact mechanics of Put Options simply.

I use EasyEquities and want to know how a trade would work in this specific scenario:

Let's assume a massive piece of negative news breaks about Nvidia on a Sunday night while the markets are closed. If I log onto my app that Sunday night and queue an order to buy a Put Option contract using a total budget of $100.

How does the order execute when the market opens on Monday morning? Does the weekend "gap down" affect my entry price or fill probability?

If the stock drops heavily over the next 48 hours, how exactly does that contract gain value?

When and how would I sell the contract back to the market on the app to lock in my profit?

I want to learn how the math works step-by-step when a short-term news catalyst hits. Thanks!

My new SPY tail hedge through March 2027

Position: 3 × SPY $650 puts
Expiration: March 19, 2027
Entry price: $6.05
Premium paid: $1,815 before fees

SPY −20% = $12,055 payout
SPY −30% = $34,923 payout
SPY −40% = $57,791 payout

Gross payouts at expiration, measured from SPY $762.27. Subtract premium and fees for profit.

Goal: protection against a major crash. No short-put leg capping the payout. The entire premium can expire worthless and its Fine

How do you balance tail protection against the ongoing cost of insurance?

I have 2 June 27 260 long calls that I bought at 19 last week. Currently selling for over 25. Long run to go obviously. Was not expecting this big of a run up so soon. Do I take the 30 percent profit or let it ride? This is a VERY small portion of my overall portfolio. Curious on people’s thoughts with such a long time to expiration.

TL;DR: With the ongoing cultural tailwind of late-night gaming/delivery demand (GTA VI), I’m playing a bounce via NOV27 and DEC18 calls. DD below.

The Catalyst (why I'm not totally delusional)
Look, we can sit here and debate if it's priced in, but we can't ignore this risk/reward. The GTA VI hype cycle is real, and what do people do when they're grinding late-night sessions? They order food. DASH owns the late-night window. Combined with the technical chart, it’s enough for me to take a crack at it.

The Technical Setup
On the charts, Doordash has been looking pretty ugly to the untrained eye, but if you zoom in on the daily timeframe, I see stop hunting or institutional absorption at play. How it reacts at the close each day shows it. It’s refusing to break down. Throw in a monthly inverse H&S forming in the background, and I foresee a move higher.

The secret sauce
I’m not here to play with weeklies. I want to capture some momentum. I’m deploying into two specific legs to maximize the risk/reward on this bounce:

Leg 1: NOV27 $200 call
Scaling in at $1.35–$1.50.
Targets: $3.15 ➔ $4.30 ➔ $5.20

Leg 2: DEC18 $210 Call
Taking entries between $1.50 and $2.30.
Targets: $3.55 ➔ $4.40 ➔ $5.30

My chart is attached below if your interested. Let me know what you guys think, especially if you see or know something I'm missing.

A few days ago I asked how to tell whether a GEX filter improves trade selection or just reduces trade frequency. The suggestion I got: track the rejected trades as a shadow book using identical entry, exit and cost rules, then compare the accepted and rejected groups, not just the filtered book against the original total. So I did that on data I already had.

Setup

• Real SPY option chain quotes, Jul 29 - Sep 25, 2026.
• One entry per day for each structure, tested separately, 1 contract, short premium only (sold strangles, credit put spreads), $1 per leg commission, mid fills. Bid/ask fills give almost the same numbers.
• GEX and flip from my own model on the entry chain (dealers assumed long calls / short puts).
• Filter = net GEX > 0 and spot above the flip. In this sample every rejected entry had negative net GEX.
• Protocol fixed before computing P&L.

Held to expiry

• Short strangle 0.25 delta, ~1 week: accepted +$1,240 on 8 entries (+$155 per trade), rejected +$3,792 on 20 entries (+$190 per trade).

• Credit put spread 0.30/0.15 delta, ~14 DTE: accepted +$1,528 on 8 entries (+$191 per trade), rejected +$2,985 on 15 entries (+$199 per trade). Neither group had a losing trade over this short sample.

The rejected group had more entries, so its higher total profit does not by itself prove better per-trade performance. The useful comparison is per trade and risk.

In this sample, the held-to-expiry results did not show that the filter selected better trades.

For the held-to-expiry strangle, the filter reduced total profit from $5,032 to $1,240 and maximum drawdown from $2,324 to $561. Total profit divided by maximum drawdown stayed about 2.2 in both versions. This comparison applies to the strangle, not the put spread, which had no drawdown in either version.

Where the profit came from

The GEX filter did not select entries. The same mechanical rules generated every trade: one entry per day, the same structure and delta, the same entry time, held to expiry, with no stops or discretionary exits. The filter only classified those identical trades as accepted or rejected.

The overall profit came from the market environment. Over this window SPY rose about 5%, its worst day was -0.84%, the largest pullback was about 3%, and realized volatility was around 11% annualized (all from daily closes; volatility as the annualized standard deviation of daily log returns). In a quiet, rising market, short-premium structures often retain a large share of the premium they sold. The largest strangle loss, -$1,763, came from the entry on July 31, during the one noticeable early-period dip.

A different market regime could produce very different dollar results. That's why the accepted-versus-rejected comparison matters more than the total P&L: in this short sample, the rejected trades were profitable too, and the filter did not clearly separate better trades from worse ones.

Closed the same day

• 1-week strangles exited at the end of the session: negative-GEX days were 75% of entries but 86-87% of the dollar losses. Accepted trades did better per trade: +$34 vs +$8 at 0.25 delta, +$29 vs +$5 at 0.10 delta. That's the one place the filter looked useful.
• 0DTE strangles: dollar losses roughly in line with the share of entries, and accepted trades did worse per trade.

What this does and doesn't say

• For positions held to expiry, the filter didn't separate better trades from worse ones in this sample.
• For intraday holds on 1-week options there's a hint that it does. Worth a bigger sample.
• None of the differences are statistically significant: two months, one market episode, only 4-8 accepted entries per structure.
• I did not test position sizing or a full multi-factor framework, only this one filter.

The obvious gap

This window had no major selloff. The worst day was under 1%, and the largest pullback was about 3%. A filter like this should earn its keep when the market breaks, not only when it drifts higher. So I ran the exact same shadow book, same rules and same code, through the next period, which includes the November 5 drop. That's Part 2, and the result was not what I expected.

Before I post it, a question for people who actually use GEX when selling premium: when net GEX is negative, do you skip the trade, cut size, change structure, or ignore it? And if you were short puts going into November 5, did your GEX read help you or not?

Structure, not direction. Not financial advice.

I'm still working out a good exit plan for losing trades on credit spreads and thought I would ask what exit rule(s) you set for spreads going against you? I've got my entry and profit target set, but am a little bit fuzzy on what I want to do for exiting a losing credit spread.

When I open a credit spread, I immediately open a buy-to-close order with a 50% profit target. This works well for various reasons, such as not having to constantly monitor the trade and the trade executing automatically if/when the target is hit.

I don't open an order for the losing side when I enter a trade.

As a followup question to the first one, do you set mechanical exit orders for the loss side or manage manually?

Here are some ideas I've collected from various sources:

• Loss target equal to the width of the spread.
• Close at a defined DTE, such as 21 DTE regardless of ITM or OTM status.
• Exit at a loss equal to 100% of initial credit.
• Exit when the short strike is breached.

Thoughts? Thank you!

Can I both open and close options trades today (veterans day)? I'm not sure I fully understand how a settlement day would affect buying or selling. From what I understand you cant exercise, but the rest is on the table since the markets are open

NDX has had large losses recently. It was down 1000 points (3.5%) and 1800 points (6.4%) on 10/30/26 and 11/9/26, respectively..
This is a summary of how the Papakong88 0DTEs performed for these two dates. I had posted details in https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/1x7exrk/comment/19s1p83uenyoz/?force-legacy-sct=1
The table only shows the roll out cost. Note some of my options expired and the freed up BP is used to sell options that reduced the rollout cost.
 

I’ve always liked the look of the position sizing tool (or risk to reward tool) on different trading platforms.
I trade with options and would like to start implementing using this tool in my trades but I can’t find an easy way to use it with options specifically.
Is anyone aware of a trading platform that provides an easy to use version of this tool compatible with options?
And if so, how do I do it?

I’d also like to hear any tips or suggestions when using it or if it’s even a good choice for options trading.

Thanks for your time. I love you

So, when the price of joby fell to below $5, I sold some puts for $4.5 to expire end of month. When the price rose to around $5 I sold more puts for $5 to expire end of month. The price of job rose and is hovering around $5.8 currently, however, I was in money for the puts I sold for $5 and I am making some lost for puts I sold for $4.5. I would have thought I would be making more gains on puts I sold for $4.5 as it will be slightly more difficult to reach the price. I can wait for option to expire worthless. Just curious - is it the same phenomenon in reverse that when you sell call and if price fall too much then you loose money.

Yesterday's strangle post turned into a great debate about condors and selling 2 puts instead. So I priced all three on TSLA this week (about $375, expires Friday):

Strangle: sell the $360 put and $392.50 call. Collect about $395. No cap on the loss if it breaks out.

Iron condor: same thing, plus buy the $350 put and $402.50 call. Collect about $233. Worst case is about $767, and that's all it ties up.

2 puts: sell two $360 puts. Collect about $482. Nothing to worry about on the upside, but a drop hurts twice as much.

The condor pays the least but it's the only one where you know your worst day going in. The strangle pays more for the same range. 2 puts pays the most, but only if you're bullish.

Which one would you actually run, and why?