All of you that trade SPX have probably noticed this but since the advent of the daily expirations the market makers try to hold onto that time value until the last day/minutes. They also manipulate IV of the individual options. We watch it on the algo.

1 of my SPX butterflies is solidly under the tent and has huge profit potential. I have been in the trade 20 days but until today it was showing negative. 6k of that theta decay finally transferred today but there is still another 11k sitting there.

The way to force the time value in SPX is to hold into the close and force them to pay you the time value. Unfortunately since Schwab took over TOS they will not let me hold until the close. I get messages throughout the day saying if you do not close it their risk department will. Often at a market order.

Tastytrade allows me to do that as long as they can tell I am watching it. In an ideal world I have taken my profits long before this but occasionally have to carry one of these into expiration. But if you do watch the gamma, it can flip your profits to losses quickly.

Not an issue with stock or ETF options as you can just force exercise to keep all the time value. Only an issue in the indexes because you cannot really own the index other than through futures but with futures you can force exercise of the futures.

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I have posted but have been watching from the side lines. I joined the professional side of trading a while ago but resigned recently. Have one trade left to close then free and clear. Won’t bore you with details but from the publishing side I could not trade how I wanted, it was a lot of work, others made a lot of money off me but I did not get much in return, and it took up most of my Fridays off.

I can trade my own accounts (7) in about 1-2 hours per week but for the service with trade write-ups, answering questions about trade write up, answering questions about why people put the order in wrong (even though it was very specific) took up several more hours. Took away my day off which was not what I wanted if not being paid well for it.

Anyway, I love the group trading idea. We all make better decisions, more money, and share ideas that some of us may not have thought about. Plus with multiple eyes on the market we can all benefit from others seeing opportunities we may have otherwise missed.

Not going to post daily, still working as busy family nurse practitioner but I have boiled my trading down to about 13 tactics and they are all very effective. Some better in high volatility, others in low, and some are all terrain.

Butterflies/dragonflies (my name for them in the service and I am taking it with me), asymmetric iron condors and box cars, Jade lizards, Strangles/straddles, 211 trade (basically a ratioed jade lizard with a hedge), diagonals/calendars often multi strike, ratio spreads, synthetics (straight up and hedged), ZEBRHS (zero extrinsic back ratio hedged synthetic straddle, and Time Zone/time twister trades. Took a few years to tweak these so they worked for my style of trading and perfecting them with real money, no paper trading. I had to feel the pain when I lost to figure out how to repair it.

90% of these trades are hedged so no SVXY blow ups like in Feb 2018 and if they do go against me easy to adjust/hedge.

I also trade everything except Forex and Crypto (basically money laundering device). No offense to those that do but crypto is only supported by the next sucker who will buy it. Although a friend just cashed in 15 bitcoins for about 1.05 million so lucky him as he mined them early.

I am still working with Quant Culture on the professional side but I don’t have any trading rooms at the moment and if I ever do again it will be alert only service. Not going to waste time trying to fix trades others messed up. If they want to put their own twist on it fine, but don’t ask me to fix it when it blows up. But I resigned from Traders Reserve. May still collaborate with them but not running a trading service again unless I get at least 50% royalties.

Hope everyone is doing well financially and is also healthy. Catch up soon!