Yessiree,Gunter

Just say you are sorry and show remorse.

Never sold one and have bought only a few. Mild success but not my bag.

Straight futures on a small scale.

Yeah,I know,what am I thinking?

MTP seems to favor that strategy.

A long time ago some hardened poster here during a debate about this stuff stated

"Options are for weenies"-still laughing when I think about that.

John

 I've never been short options. Scary with often only gradual gains. No thanks.

Thanks Gunter!

I deleted the exact same copy of this post on the NTR forum that you must have initially posted there by accident(that happens to me somethings too).

I rarely sell naked short options.  Once in a while I dip my toe in a small way when they get wacky expensive.  Haven't been burned ....  (yet)  Leading up to the gulf war back in '91 options on oil, bonds and Stocks got wacky.  I made some money selling out of the money puts and calls in the bond market.  The day after the war started Oil crashed and bonds exploded but the premiums got crushed and I did just fine.  But it's scary to execute (for me anyway) so I always go small.

Just an x Allendale broker. Wait I'm and x Allendale broker. Cordier and I were there at the same time. He was in Milw. at the time. Holy SHT Batman lol

Once, a long time ago, I listened to Peter Borish talk about this at a Foundation for the Study of Cycles conference.  I'm guessing it was in the early to mid 90s.  I believe he was trading for Paul Tudor Jones at the time.  I remember his saying that he never sold options.  When he used to, he would make money nine out of ten times, but he would get his head handed to him on that one time in ten.

That's been my experience. Theta works in your favor,  but you have a clearly defined and limited potential gain with an undefined and unlimited potential loss.

Edit note:  Yes, there are several methods of defense for the downside. 

I was an option buyer for over 30 years.  Never sold an option once.  Your downside is theoretically unlimited.  As an option buyer, your downside is contained to the price you pay for the option plus commission.  Overall not an easy way to make money.  Stopped entirely after concluding the Hedge Funds were too big and could control whole commodity market's and almost never regulated by SEC.

I tried my hands at selling and could never win. I will however sell a naked put in a stock I want to own. When I do that I then sell calls against it once I am put the stock it seems to work out in my favor. But you folks have much more knowledge than me when it comes to options, only been doing it a couple of years. 

Writing puts on stocks you're bullish on is a great strategy.  Something I probably don't do enough of.  Worst case is you get assigned on a stock you wanted to buy, and probably at a lower price than had you gone for the outright while pocketing the option premium.

Yep, that’s a wise way to open a long position. It is exactly how I plan to return to trading when my affairs are properly arranged to trade again. If called then I’ll own the underlying to hedge against. 

SAJ turned us on to LEAPS,  a book by Harrison Roth. 

In it Roth describes whole stock option writing system that begins this way.  I really enjoyed watching Stu trade real time. His own book describes a very smart WTBOOM ratio writing strategy.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Barefoot write tranches when prices were most volatile as well as when prices (not necessarily IV) calmed. Watching someone make millions of dollars a month like this is an experience I’ll never forget.

The catastrophic risk of writing options is no worse than the catastrophic risk of a locked limit market for naked futures in my view. Both of those risks even play out under similar scenarios. There are more risk management strategies with options imho.

Hiya Lar.  Good to see you. Especially on a subject where we both agree :-)

Hi Tim New,

Amen. The most useful value of being here for me is trading related.

(I’m thankful  to have had the other conversations too but too many became toxic and simply not worth the aggravation. Right or wrong.)

Happy trading to you. 

It is wonderful to have you back lar!

I like what you’ve done with the place. Nice sleek design, TR and NTR sections, cool text formatting controls... just missing leather bucket seats and Dolby!

Thanks,

You can thank Alex and mostly Chris the tech guy for all of  the format. There were some monumental snafu's the first numerous months early this year that caused alot of people to bail.

I took over in April, after it had died to just a few posts a week. Been growing back slower than ideal but going in the right direction to keep you guys happy.