Introducing the SMB Options Training Program and the SMB Options Tribe Our webinar will introduce SMB’s brand new Options Training Program-a 12 month program designed for novice and intermediate level options traders who are seeking an intensive training process to learn how to trade options spreads for monthly income. Then we will launch SMB’s Options Tribe– an online community of … Read More
Decoding Market Volatility: Navigating the Heck Out of Options Trading with Dan Harvey
When I first started trading options a number of years ago, I became very friendly with a great options trader, and an even greater human being by the name of Dan Harvey. Dan, a retired medical doctor, is one of the finest options traders I have ever met. He is very analytical, very calm and a very flexible thinker. … Read More
The sun never sets on the SMB Options Training Program Beta Test Team
In the very near future we will be launching the SMB Options Training Program which we’ve been working on intensively for months. We have had a fair degree of interest in the upcoming program and it occurred to us that it might not be a bad idea to invite a few trainees into the process before our formal launch, … Read More
Traders Ask: Does Every Options Strategy Work with Every Stock or Index?
One of our readers, Cecelia, sent in the following question after watching our SMB Options Trade of the Week which, covered the bearish butterfly trade that has become popular recently: “Will this trade work for indexes only? Do you recommend this for individual stocks such as AAPL?” We get this question a lot and the answer is important for many … Read More
Insights from Wharton School’s Investment Management Club
I gave a talk in Philadelphia on options strategies to the Wharton School Investment Management Club last Thursday. My daughter Halima, who is an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia, sat in on the the talk as well. In addition to wanting to be a supportive daughter, she was my intern four summers ago, backtesting options … Read More
Monthly Options Spread Trading is a Twelve-Inning Game
Imagine a major league baseball game, where your favorite team gave up no runs for the first eight innings and then twelve runs in the ninth. Are you happy if the opposing team gave up one run in each inning of that same game? Of course not. The opposing team won 12-9. Yet the opposing team “lost” each of the … Read More
Irrational Pessimism
While being irrationally exuberant over a short winning streak of options trades leads many traders to recklessly ramp up their capital levels leading to devastating, or even fatal, losses, there is an opposite problem, which is not necessarily fatal, but certainly leads to futility. “Irrational pessimism” is when you lose confidence in your trading strategy when there is no good reason to … Read More
Avoiding Pitfalls: Safeguard Your Options Trading Journey
In a speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute in late 1996—in the middle of the formation of the dotcom bubble of the 1990s—then Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan coined the term “irrational exuberance” to describe an illogical optimism about the economy that was pumping up stock prices well beyond any reasonable level. History shows that he was correct, … Read More