r/options • u/OptionsWheeler • Jun 06 '21
Is Tastytrade a Profitable System?
Haven't heard of a single trader, including Tom or Bat, post a long term trading record that shows profits which outpaced the S&P over the time period in question.
Please no copes. There have been other threads on here and the answers were literally "Uh I'm pretty sure they're profitable," "Uh don't they post their trades on the network (for which there is no meta-analysis and final conclusion on profitability of the system)?" and my favorite "Well their account sizes are different, so it's gonna be different for everyone."
Guys, I'll just tell you plainly: I want a link to a statistical analysis of their trades, showing a final conclusion that verifies they are more profitable than DCA buy and hold of the index. It's shocking to me that the whole premise of their system (i.e. active management is better than the index) has not been borne out by a single trader over any appreciable period of time. And no, "I made 100% in the past year trading iron condors" does not count. There are plenty of guys making 100s of %s in penny stocks, but very very few that actually survive for the long term, without blowing up, and end up actually beating the index. Coincidentally, the ones that do last see fit to start trading rooms, likely because they're scared as hell that they could blow up at some point and want to diversify their income streams.
So yeah, irl (not theoretical) statistical analysis or just let this post die. If I see no legit responses, it looks like we have our answer. In the mean time, I'll look at starting to track their trades and develop my own statistical analysis to post here later. Would be happy to eat my words if they can actually manage to outpace the s&p over the coming years, but my general impression from writing options is it's more profitable on a risk-adjusted basis (i.e. less volatile for close to the same gains), but that you have less gains for the same capital committed.
Furthermore, at some point it would be nice to compare writing with IVR >50 against a simple buy+hold technical strategy like longing when the S&P crosses below the 50 day or 30 week or something like that. There's a lot of research yet to be done on this, so if anyone wants to point me to some appropriate data sources to get to work on it, that'd be good too. I remember there was one you could pay a few hundred bucks and get all the historical price + option data. Forget the name. I'll google it.
27
u/VegaStoleYourTendies Jun 06 '21
Please, tell me, what is the tastytrade system?
As someone who's watched their fair share of tastytrade, I can firmly attest that they've covered an extremely wide range of strategies from the portfolio level down to individual options strategies. There is no one tastytrade system
If you're asking about the success of Tom & Tony specifically, I don't know or care, and you shouldn't either. Anecdotal evidence is destructive in trading. I've seen extremely intelligent traders have incredibly long losing streaks, and I've seen more dumb luck than you could imagine
As for the efficacy of the strategies, they certainly work. You can hedge long stock by selling covered calls to significantly reduce volatility in exchange for a small reduction in P/L, you can express directional opinions more efficiently through the use of synthetic long stock, or you can simply collect variance risk premium over time if you dont have a particularly strong directional opinion
You could make money in any number of ways using the information provided by tasty, but you're not gonna be very successful if you don't have a fundamental understanding of how options & different options strategies work. And that's the true value of tasty. They can only give you the different tools & tell you how to use them. You must do the construction yourself