I was at dinner last night with a highly successful manager. She had just landed the top account at her multi-billiondollar financial firm. Over fettuccine noodles and chicken Pad Thai she continued that the firm contemporaneously placed her into a special training program for their star performers. Her boss warned that the program would be difficult, expose her weaknesses and uncover uncomfortable things about … Read More
SMB Radar Update for June 1, 2011
The Weak Today column ranks stocks based on the price change relative to the stock’s opening price. These stocks tend to have weak opening drives and continuation moves. The idea here is to find opportunity in the weakest stocks in the market. When looking through the column, we always take note at how In Play the stock is to gauge … Read More
Maximizing Profits: Legging Out of a Winning Options Spread
Nothing is more frustrating to an options spread trader than working a trade for 30-60 days, using all of your skills and knowledge to initiate, adjust and improvise to position the trade for a nice win and then, on the day you have decided to exit and pocket that profit, you run into execution problems. There is nothing quite like … Read More
Options Tribe – Free Webinar
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 SMB’s Options Tribe is an online community of options traders dedicated to sharing successful options trading ideas with all of our members worldwide. Each week the community will meet online for the primary purpose of watching live presentations made by outstanding veteran options traders and experts in the world of options trading. This week we’ll be … Read More
Take your gifts when you get them
For butterfly traders like myself, there are scenarios that occur where a trade can appreciate very quickly. This can happen for several reasons. One of the very common causes of this phenomenon is when the trade is initiated in a high volatility environment and then the volatility is removed from the market rapidly. In other cases the market simply channels for the … Read More
A trading day ruined
Ever go from having your best day ever to negative? Below is a recap of one such experience. Big Baby did a wonderful job of analyzing his trades from yesterday. He was frustrated that he went from his best day ever to negative. I thought we would share his post trade review. The only way to get better as … Read More
SMB Fundamental Trades: #1: EP May 25th 2011
Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial post yesterday regarding the setup in EP. I think this series of posts is gonna be a lot of fun and we will hopefully continue to see a large amount of community feedback on how YOU would trade various setups. Because ultimately we each must develop a trading style that suits our … Read More
What is your “bread and butter” options trade?
Yesterday we held our second Options Tribe webinar on the subject of an SPX butterfly trade that I was involved in developing. This trade has become my “bread and butter” trade –the approach that I am comfortable trading under almost all market conditions and which provides a stable pattern of returns. Almost every great options trader that I know has his … Read More