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
“Milking” an Options Trade
Every properly designed income options strategy should have both a target profit and a maximum loss. Both are extremely important in order to maintain a realistic annual return target for a particular strategy. The skilled income trader is both disciplined at exiting when a trade has hit the maximum loss threshold and skilled at what we alluded to in my last … Read More
Sittin’ on the front porch sippin’ iced tea
It’s funny how non-directional options trading differs from many other kinds of trading. For example, most forms of trading require price change to be taken advantage of by the trader. Day traders salivate when they look at charts that are vertical, in either direction. Directional options traders are the same way. But, non-directional options traders normally do best when … Read More
The key to winning options strategies is how well you handle the losing months
All great options strategies will have losing months. There is no getting around this simple fact, and it is critical to your mindset as a successful options trader that you accept these months as part of the game. While non-directional options spread strategies are also known as “income options trades” (giving some traders the mistaken idea that the strategies will produce … 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
Is it Possible to Day Trade AND Employ Non-Directional Options Spread Strategies?
On the surface, the intraday trading strategies of equities and non-directional options spread trading would seem to be mutually exclusive. Day trading depends to some extent on strong directional movement that allows the day trader to get long or short a stock at at the right time and then ride that direction until an opportune time to exit emerges. Non-directional … Read More
What I love about options trading
I’m sitting here this morning in the offices of SMB capital in downtown Manhattan, making some notes in anticipation of a blitz I”ll be doing this week, recording the majority of the videotapes that will form the core of our options training program. It brought me back to my first days as an options trader and the intense excitement … 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