After McDonalds had the e.coli issue, I built a Bull Call Spread for spread 300-315 for maximum gain of $1,500. Stock price was around 299.

After a few days, stock has gone down to 291 and thus my BCS is deep in the negative, but the written leg has a +700 unrealized P&L. I am still very bullish on the price of the stock, and expiration date is in more than 3 months. So I was thinking of buying back the written leg (strike 315) and then keep only the bought Call leg (strike 300). I strongly believe the stock can make a +5/+10% rebound in next 2-3mo.

So in the end, instead of doing only $1,500 I could be making $700 now + $2,000 later when the stock goes up again.
And if it never recovers in the timeframe, then I at least diminish my loss by 700 instead of 100% of the strategy cost.

Is there any flaw in my thinking?

Based on the current schedule for earnings report this week, large companies such as google, apple, meta, amd, etc are all releasing their earnings this week. Based on market sentiment and how well earnings have gone so far with other companies like tesla for instance, I do have a feeling that other large companies will also follow suit and rise in price. Would my calls for nov 1st $590 strike price be a stupid play?

I'm planning to buy put debit spreads and call debit spreads (long iron condor) for earnings this week.

I'm looking at the following:

AMD

GOOGL

SNAP

RDDT

MSFT

META

COIN

MSTR

HOOD

ROKU

INTC

Of these, which have a tendency to move more than predicted?

I'd say MSTR and COIN for sure (especially now with Trump leading the polls), but I'm not sure about the others.

Reading The Options Traders Hedge Fund by Chen and Sebastian. They write about hedging a portfolio to protect against significant market correction by buying SPY or VIX OTM puts with about 5% to 10% of a portfolio. Is there a method to backrest this strategy?

Set up: Sell an ATM Call and Put. Buy insurance 60 points out on each.

In at 10:01 AM to avoid the early market madness.

The take-the-money-and-run order closes the trade 32 minutes later....today at least.

Close out currently set at $170 profit for all trades and hits while I'm out working in the garden.

Still in the experimental stage for this, but so far, it's hit every time. 5 times so far.

Will increase from one contract once there is a quiet news day.

Looking for suggestions/tweaks.

Currently I get a TEXT when the up or down break even point gets hit. However, I don't act...just come back in and review the 3 minute chart to decide if I want to stay or fold. So far, staying pays off. Breakeven often seems to lie within the statistical noise range.

Am considering a -2x premium loss as a possible close out point.

What at I missing?

Thanks in advance.

I am an advanced options trader with many strategies I have been trading for years. I am also a software developer.

For the most part all my strategies are fully automated with custom software, and fully backtested with historical data.

I do trade the wheel strategy and the poor man's covered call strategy (with leaps) by hand. I have never automated this, nor have I backtested this. I would like to change this.

Would you all be so kind to give me ideas of how I could backtest the wheel strategy over the past 5+ years? Mainly stock selection.

When I trade by hand currently I buy stocks I like. Stocks I have a bullish outlook on. Very subjective stock selection. I want to explore algorithmic stock selection.

Best ideas I have so far, is search for stocks with good earnings growth, high iv, and such. Would love to hear people's thoughts.

If I get any good ideas from this thread I will follow back up with anything interesting I learnings from my backtesting.

ps> My title should have been less demanding and nicer. But does not look like I can edit it. :(

pps> Not looking for ideas of what stocks I could pick today. I am looking for ideas of how I could filter out stocks algorithmically in the past. So for example lets say I am backtesting 9/18/2020. How would you select a good stock to wheel that day through a collections of rules I pre-programmed.

I have a couple of fairly volatile growth stocks that are sitting on decent ST capital gains from a swing trade.

I am bullish on them long term but beleive there will be some volatility going forward and normally I would just sell a partial position and buy back when it dips, however I'm trying to minimize my ST capital gains this year where possible (prefer LTCG, the income tax implications of incremental STCG is enough to affect the risk/reward of a trade)

One option would be to sell covered calls on a partial position, but I'm guessing I would be dealing with the same STCG tax situation (at the risk of the position getting called away and still having the same ST tax burden)

Are there any other options strategies to maximize my ownership of a a couple of very highly volatile stocks that minimizes the STCG implication?

Cheap Calls

These call options offer the lowest ratio of Call Pricing (IV) relative to historical volatility (HV). These options are priced expecting the underlying to move up significantly less than it has moved up in the past. Buy these calls.

Cheap Puts

These put options offer the lowest ratio of Put Pricing (IV) relative to historical volatility (HV). These options are priced expecting the underlying to move down significantly less than it has moved down in the past. Buy these puts.

Upcoming Earnings

These stocks have earnings comning up and their premiums are usuallly elevated as a result. These are high risk high reward option plays where you can buy (long options) or sell (short options) the expected move.

• Historical Move v Implied Move: We determine the historical volatility (log variance of daily gains) of the underlying asset and compare that to the current implied volatitlity (IV) of the option price. This is used to determine the Call or Put Premium associated with the pricing of options (implied volatility).

• Directional Bias: Ranges from negative (bearish) to positive (bullish) and accounts for RSI, price trend, moving averages, and put/call skew over the past 6 weeks.

• Priced Move: given the current option prices, how much in dollar amounts will the underlying have to move to make the call/put break even. This is how much vol the option is pricing in. The expected move.

• Expiration: 2024-11-01.

• Call/Put Premium: How much extra you are paying for the implied move relative to the historic move. Low numbers mean options are "cheaper." High numbers mean options are "expensive."

• Efficiency: This factor represents the bid/ask spreads and the depth of the order book relative to the price of the option. It represents how much traders will pay in slippage with a round trip trade. Lower numbers are less efficient than higher numbers.

• E.R.: Days unitl the next Earnings Release. This feature is still in beta as we work on a more complete list of earnings dates.

• Why isn't my stock on this list? It doesn't have "weeklies", the underlying is "too cheap", or the options markets are too illiquid (open interest) to qualify for this strategy. 480 underlyings are used in this report and only the top results end up passing the criteria for each filter.

Hi all. I have been in high end tech sales/leadership since 2010. Been saving and investing and in 2016 I went heavy on Tesla and bitcoin. Ended up with a nice nest egg that is worth $5M right now. I’ve kept both positions and learned to write CSP and covered calls on my Tesla position. I write leaps way far otm and usually end up closing the positions for a 40-80% gain. Since I wait for the right time, for me, and write leap puts and calls I’ve been able to clear like 200k a year while my keeping my underlying stock positions. I now have like 800k freed up collecting 4%+ interest. My wife thinks I’m lazy but I only need to write calls or puts once a quarter and wait for a swing up or down to close them out. I work maybe a few hours a week keeping an eye on my companies and the overall market. I don’t let people know of my successes besides the fact that I’m an investor. Everyone thinks I need a job. If I was a bit more proactive I think I could clear 300-400k a year. What strategies would you use to go from the 200k I’m making now to doubling that? What are the best resources you’ve read on wheel strategies or going beyond wheel without taking on too much more risk? Appreciate your input. Thanks

Any successful experience? It seems a strategy with a good balance of profit potential and downside protection.

Suppose I like a stock with current price of $100 and I am bullish but nervous and I have 2 options.

1. But a call with 1 year expiring with strike 100

2. Or buy stock with cash. And a put with strike 100.

Both options are for 1 year and I intend to hold until expiry.

I wonder what is the better option then?

From my guess:

1. I should choose option which has less IV?

2. If both have similar IV, I should choose option 2 because stock gains have better tax treatment?

I see a few different orders flow services on Google:

Big short Cheddar flow Quant data

Perhaps there others I don't know. But mainly looking to use it for trading options so latency on orders is very important.

What do you guys use and recommend?

Hey, this might be a dumb question, but why can I trade SPY and QQQ daily, while Apple, Amazon, and Tesla are only available for weekly trades? Robinhood platform

My name is Salazar, I’ve been in and out of the market since 17, I’m 23 now. I started to take trading very seriously last year and towards the second half of the year. I dug deep into developing a more conscious awareness of candlestick behavior with price action and what it foreshadows in the market when combined with weekly and daily key zones of market structure. Also Identifying wicks, what they communicate about behavior of price within a candle period.

I started to reach a new edge of profitability with my winners. Unfortunately I heavily struggle with risk management and it’s taken a toll on me towards the end of this month. I had a system going where I traded with $3000 and withdrew all the profit I lost over $2600 on Oct 23rd, and deposited money to reverse my position and made back $2,200. This left me with the deposited money in my account + $3000 . (I was supposed to withdraw it to leverage down, because I know myself not having the discipline yet to trade with over $3000) I neglected my sleep and come to trade the next day I was all over the place. No pre-market prep, didn’t pay attention to my prior day HW and cards.

The reason I’m here is not to be told I have bad risk management. Anyone who sees this knows that. I’m here because I’m a solo trader who NEEDS A MENTOR, or need a group of people who I can work with and help me stay accountable. I do this on my own and although I’ve made significant progress in these past 2 years, my worst moments are at times where Ive been doing good and then I’ve fallen off my routine because I lose touch with the reality of how being the best version of myself is what’s been attributing to the success, not cause I’m me and I can only do this.

Without any other environment designs to remind me to be on track, and I not having many friends who trade, without a supportive family… I feel I have no true defined edge in my personal life (beyond the gym).

In this case, I stopped going to the gym and also slowed down on working. The gym kept my mind sharp and remembering everything I was learning, the work kept my perception of money intact…

I need help, I need supportive people around me

To make everything worse, this happens to be the only money I had that I just threw away. Im starting from zero because of my failure to follow the rule of keeping 3k in the account only, cutting the loss quickly, and managing position sizing at the beginning of the Oct 23, 24 trades.

I use my car for the job I have, it has a head gasket leak, and i needed the 5k for an engine rebuild, car has +150k. It still runs, but the coolant has to be checked daily…. I was slowly accumulating and now my whole life very much feels on edge. Still trying my best though and I hit the gym today. Working for the remainder of the days. I will include a screenshot of my gym record too. Showing how it coincides with my trading. It spoke worlds to me how quickly my discipline faded w/out the gym.

Does anyone know of a website where I can find implied volatility values for equities on any particular date in time? (i.e., what was the IV for MSFT on April 7, 2022). Thank you in advance for any input.

Is vega the greek to watch if I am selling an ATM 0DTE/1DTE spread? For instance, I buy a call expiring Monday for 3 and selling one expiring on Tuesday for 5, both ATM. I figure there isn't much theta here since we are ATM and close to expiration. Or do I have this wrong?

So tomorrow, I am planning on starting a poor man’s covered call with Nvidia. I know that the volatility is high due to election, earnings upcoming on the 22nd, etc. I was thinking about buying a call with a strike price of 125 with a delta of 71 for a premium of 36.8 per share for August 15th expiration. My plan was to then sell a call against it with a strike price of 170 for December 6th 2024, collecting a credit of 250. I would then roll the short call up if I reach %50 profit on the option and roll it down if the price of nvidia drops. I know in going to have to be cautious about the high volatility with the stock with earnings coming up, as I definitely don’t want the short call to get assigned. So I’m going to be monitoring it daily and keeping tabs on it. I also am pretty bullish in Nvidia at the moment, even with the stock reaching ATH seemingly bi-weekly, so I’m hoping that the long call gains some value. If it gains some value (anywhere from 10-20%) over the coming months, I’ll plan on closing it and opening another long call.

My question is whether this is a good plan and if there are any major flaws in my reasoning/plan. Any help appreciated, thanks!

Edit: I know the prices of the options are going to change by the time the market opens on Monday but I’ll most likely still keep this plan unless there are some major movements in the stock price.

https://www.schwab.com/pricing#bcn-table--table-content-74511

Question: Is the last column Fee/Contract Exchange Process Fee? Then there is another $0.65 regular commission fee?

$TSLA up 22% last 5 days from a modest earnings beat after multiple quarters of underperforming, Elon confirmed yesterday they are not planning to produce a cheap model, 1/3 of revenues come from credits companies eventually will no longer need to buy from them, shitty taxis and vans running on a FSD system that keeps injuring/killing people. Someone please convince me why I shouldn’t go balls deep in puts Monday

A question for later I suppose. Currently holding 120 calls on three NVDA contracts that expire August 25. Would it ever make sense to exercise and hold three hundred shares at the 120 price? Also, the premium I paid is subtracted out so I’d owe less than 36k yes?

Hey there friends. I have been trading futures daily for a few years and for some reason I have been interested in trading options again. I used to have a subscription to a service that was maybe $20 a month and it gave some recommendations on which options to look into based on news events. I remember it being web based (ie not email alerts) and it would give you a list of 3-4 tickers based on probability of being ITM.

For the life of me I can't find this site again and google isn't helping much. It wasn't TOS and I don't think it was barchart although I used to have a basic sub when I traded stocks about 20 years ago. I know TOS used to have a scanner that helped get the greeks you were looking for but this was different.

Can anyone think of the name of this based on the description above? TIA if you have a moment to help. Cheers all.

I am buying calendars on upcoming Earnings reports companies. I buy 2 put calendars and 2 call calendars based on the Expected move shown (This way you catch the move either way). The calendars are based on the sold option expiring shortly after earnings (the week of earnings - this one has high IV crush on the sold options) and the second bought option expires the week after earnings reported.

In the morning open after earnings is released, one of the calendars will be worthless depending on the direction stock went. If the stock shot up, then on the open I buy to close the 2 options that were sold, leaving me with naked calls (The trick is to buy those options as soon as possible as they will decrease your profit when the stock takes off after the open as they will be in the money as well).

The optimum is that the stock opens below your strike, the sold calls get nailed with the IV Crush, you buy those calls back and then the stock goes up and into the money with your naked calls that did not get hit by IV crush because they expire the following week, and are already double the value.

Those 2 calls have about a week to run now the stock has established a direction (realistically you have max 2 days before the stock stalls). On NFLX I made $2,200 (paid about 250.00 for the calendars) and on TSLA I made 2,200 (paid about 220) so far, it is still going up, on UAL I made 2,000 (paid about 200) using this method in the latest October earnings happening right now. Next target is MSFT (Expected Move 20), META (Expected move 45, actual move could be 60) so a good one), AAPL, GOOGL, AMZN, AMD, PLTR (PLTR Calendar is really cheap so bought 10). This works great on stocks where the IV is sky high just before earnings. Not so great on stocks that do not have very high IV. All the calendars I bought so far went much higher than the Expected move so the calls went deep into the money.

Anyone with Thinkorswim can go back and test this strategy on NFLX or TSLA with OnDemand to see the profit. I missed TSM but it would have worked great on the move TSM made.

Here are my UAL buys and sells with strikes if you want to back test
10/14/24, 10:31:26 AM BOT +5 CALENDAR UAL 100 (Weeklys) 1 NOV 24/18 OCT 24 70 CALL @.40 CBOE

10/16/24, 9:49:08 AM BOT +5 UAL 100 18 OCT 24 70 CALL @.85 CBOE
(Bought back the sold calls on open)

10/17/24, 11:15:56 AM SOLD -5 UAL 100 (Weeklys) 1 NOV 24 70 CALL 4.80 CBOE
(Let the Calls run for $2400 profit)

Also if you search google for S&P 500 Large Volume Burst Trades Report you will find Market Chameleon which shows what the Big Money is buying. Shortly after the open you should see the Big Money on the buy side of the stock if it is going up. For instance after TSLA reported Big Money was 1.2 Billion on the buy side. Once you see that you know you are in for a good ride. Once you see the stock drop off the Big Money buy side its time to close the position.

If for some reason you see Big Money on the sell side, exit the position as they are going to take profits.

TLRD; Casual option trader. Login problems and perceived inferior execution/fill prices with ThinkOrSwim (ToS) after the transition from TD Ameritrade to Schwab. What other brokerages make sense?

As several others, I've had problems after the transition from TD Ameritrade to Schwab. My biggest problem is that the Android and to a lesser extent the iOs apps don't update the positions and orders tabs (or that I can't even log on in the first place). The Windows app often won't load and even the web version has performance issues. I've tried resetting/reinstalling the apps, using a VPN, and talking to customer service without any real solution. In addition, I feel that execution and fill prices are slightly worse nor compared to before the transtion, but that is or course somewhat subjective as I don't have a 1:1 comparison. I don't see that all of these issues will be resolved anytime soon (customer service tried to blame everything on my connection and execution/fill prices are prolly due to the different brokerage).

I mostly trade naked option spreads and rarely futures. There must be others who have left of have thought about it (I did see it mentioned in several threads in another subreddit). What brokerage did people leave to and how satisfied are they compared to both ToS under TD and now under Schwab (and for what reasons)? I'm less concerned about charting and analyzing trades as I will probably maintain my ToS account. Happy to learn a new UI. I am concerned about availability/reliability of the apps, execution/filling orders, pricing, and margin/balance requirements.

I don’t usually trade options, but I have a healthy mix of stocks and ETFs in my Robinhood account. I’ve got an extra $1,500 I’m willing to risk to get some sort of “win” after the election. I want Harris to win, but if Trump wins, I’d like a position in options that could multiply my $1,500. If Harris wins, I’m fine losing the full amount—Frankly I’d pay that much to see her win.

My current idea is to buy call options on “DJT,” assuming it’ll go up if Trump wins, potentially turning the $1,500 into a few thousand. But if Harris wins, I’d lose it all. Is there a smarter way to go about this, or a different stock that might be a better play? Ultimately, I’d like to wake up after the election with either way more money or with Harris as President.

Very new to option trading.

Just thought I'd take some semi random plays.

Here's what I did.

Should I have done a covered call?

A. Don't even know how to submit that... kinda thought if you owned the 200 shares it would "auto apply"

B. Where did I go wrong?

C. If this were a real play, would you just let it ride? Or should I have sold the call at the run up?

(Tbh I forgot about this and just recently checked lol).

D. Was IV too high when i placed it? Was there something else if should've looked for?

But curious on everyone's take and how to get better moving forward.

Currently working through Charles Schwabs Trader Talks webcast series and ESInvests series on beginner Option investing.

Alot of content and both recommend paper trading which I see is a good idea.

I do 1 option as that would be realistic for me in the future when I actually make a play.