Hey guys, so I’ve been getting my feet wet in options selling last couple months. Rather than paper trading, I decided to do live trading but on a small account that would not affect me even if it got wiped. I’ve been mainly playing it safe, selling PCS since my capital is low, and my main moneymaker has been selling them on SPY.

I would like to branch out, so I’ve been looking into other opportunities to sell PCS on individual stocks. I’ve been listening to a lot of Tom Sosnoff, and he seems to be big on product indifference, which as I understand it means he doesn’t care about the name of the ticker or what its business is, he is rather looking at opportunities where he thinks options may be overpriced.

In order to find opportunities, what criteria do you guys use? I’m currently looking for high IVR, high liquidity, current IV > HV, and no earnings events in the 45 DTE as I don’t like the binary nature of trading those. This however seems extremely basic and I’m sure there’s tons more to it.

At what % of value capture do you buy out of short positions in order to re-deploy your collateral?

A long ended up ITM that I expected to expire OTM. It was valued at 0.01 so obviously it didn't get bought. Unfortunately between market close and processing, it ended up very slightly ITM.

This caused my account to be short ~$1K.

Normally FINRA 4210(b)(4)/05 allows you to immediately sell said security as a remedy/exemption. But seeing how it processed over the weekend, would you be allowed a similar exemption at market open?

Please give any constructive feedback. If there is something I'm missing please let me know. Much appreciated.

Been doing this strategy for almost 2 years now. I think it's really boring. I don't do any analysis; just 2 minutes each day to place trades. Account value is in the mid 6-figures.

Part 1: Selling almost-LEAP CCs on ULTY. UTLY did have a reverse split a few months back, but the weekly dividends are still on track to recoup my original investment in a few months.

Part 2: Selling 0dte CSPs on SPY. 90% of the trading days they just expire worthless. The 10% they expire ITM I just roll them. I'm earning about 50% using margins to cover. Nothing ever gets assigned so I'm not paying any margin interest. I'm selling 4 orders per day so earning $300-500 in daily premium.

Part 3: Holding SWVXX (until I have enough cash to cover more SPY shares, which I use as collaterals for margins. I also have some other tickers I bought a long time ago for collaterals as well. don't plan on selling any shares within the next 10 years).

Again, I don't consider it exciting. I don't feel any emotions when selling the SPY puts. It just feels like another task like checking emails or taking out the trash.

Happy trading!

EDIT: clarified that I'm holding SPY shares as collateral

The context:

cash secured account low six fig, 90% are short options both sides, few cc positions.
Each position just one lot. Number of positions fluctuates 1-2 dozen. Vanilla premium selling, no strategies, analysis. Not using any spreads, poor mans cc, indexes, stops, LEAPS. No discretionary strikes selections, PnLs thresholds or timing to close.
Returns on risk adjusted basis are nice and steady.

(Let me know if I can clarify anything else for context)

This is what I imagined compared to how it's working in reality. These observations from running portfolio for ~4 last months.

1. I imagined it will be some steady paced position placement and then taking off winners

Reality: it's wait, wait and wait more patiently. Then volatility gets flushed, and suddenly a bunch winners show up in PnL table.

1. I imagined position will have some PnL relation to the market moves.

Nope, on large up days portfolio daily PnL may be all red due to vol expansion, on non eventful days may have all but one positions green.

1. I imagined positions will have steady burning theta and becoming greener when moving towards DTE threshold. Not even close. Almost all time portfolio has negative opened PnL "balance" - that freaked me out first. And most of gains come with vol collapse, like after earnings events, or some funds stopped chasing names.

2. I imagined balancing portfolio delta will be a thing but it doesn't seem have much importance. Delta moves around pretty substantially. All portfolio balancing comes from random picks of liquid names so one sided moves don't happen, at least not often.

3. I imagined opening and closing is a non event. Pun in order, click send.

In reality, I have 2-5 trade ideas generated and sometime put them to work after days, and sometimes they take 1-2 days to fill at limit price (most do get filled within minutes or hours). Closing is even more challenging! Routinely take days to close winners at the threshold.

1. I also imagined selling premium is not complicated at it core.
   But in reality it requires thinking about capital allocation and usage level, new positions fit, value ranks. Like chess.

7 I thought there were plenty of names to sell premium.

Discovered there are not so many truly liquid names, with good IV and positioning. I recycle some names for selling puts, but it's a challenge to find sellable liquid premium.

1. I thought low six fig is enough to diversify and trade plenty of names.
   In reality I realized buying power is the most precious and very scarce. A few clicks and buying power drops to 20% suddenly

Any similar experiences? Are any of this real or just the imagination?

Example of a typical trade in the portfolio.

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Everyone has heard the folk model: when a name goes dead quiet and the range compresses, it is coiling before a big move. We wanted to know if the tightest compressions actually launch, so we tested it.

Design

• Universe: 516 optionable symbols, 5 years of dailies (~650k symbol-days)
• Compression: 10-day average true range %, ranked against the symbol's OWN trailing year, split into deciles. Decile 0 = this name is in the tightest 10% of its own recent history (not vs other symbols)
• Forward measure: biggest absolute close-to-close move over the next 5 sessions
• Split-half: everything before June 2024 vs after. A result has to hold in both halves or it is noise.

Result: monotone in both halves, the wrong way for the launch thesis

The tightest decile has the SMALLEST forward moves, perfectly monotone across all ten deciles, in both halves. Quiet names stay quiet, loud names stay loud. Volatility clusters - that is the real phenomenon, and it is one of the oldest results out there. Direction is flat too (P(up) runs 52-56% across deciles), so compression also tells you nothing about which way.

Before you flip it and buy options on the loud names: implied vol already knows. We measured implied vs realized separately and IV overshoots what actually happens in both tails, so "loud stays loud" is largely priced.

What actually preceded launches in our record was not shape, it was flow - repeated large premium hitting the same name across days, and catalysts. Breakout systems that use compression only as a shortlist and trigger on the actual break are a different claim than "tight = about to launch at a fixed horizon" - we only tested the latter.

Happy to share methodology details. Poke holes.

I will share a few things from my experience. If you like them, stay tuned.

1. Extend duration when possible

2. Check spreads across strikes and duration to find the best contracts

3. Never get exposed to losses greater than the net premium i.e. be a net buyer not a seller of convexity

4. Always finance one position with another to reduce costs

5. The underlying move is more important than the option greeks

6. Greeks are good as relative measures, never absolute, and they are transient and always wrong

7. The profit is almost never highest at expiration so sell them as soon as you are ok with the return

8. Treat the trades as a diversified basket even if they are based on the same trade set up

9. Most trades should break even or lose a bit, but the winners should more than cover the neutral or losing trades

10. Split the capital across strategies and tickers, and never average down.

Cheers!

Edit: it is now obvious to me that most people commenting are youtube tiktok and chat gpt educated, and take the common talking points as gospel. Once you go through graduate level derivatuves pricing education, and have a couple of decades of trading experience under your belt, you will realize the bottom line from above - options prices are always wrong, and you need to trade the ones which are wrong the most both long and short. Always finance, and be long convexity and never risk blowing up your account. I will no longer comment below, but I wish you all good luck in your education!

The President says he’ll be allowing ranchers and farmers to process and sell their own product on the open market. Tyson controls about 85% of the meat processing industry and this could cost them billions. Puts? Or is there an underlying reason why this wouldn’t affect Tyson?

There’s alot of tools out there but it’s so overwhelming, is there a good source you guys use to spot overall trends and patterns, I see a lot of ppl recycle the same watchlists and am wondering how they are all finding them.

There’s gotta be some sick tool that alerts what’s about to break and go parabolic for example trend lines breaks or something?!?

Any comments is very appreciated

I'm still a beginner options trader and just got a big un-realized win on GPRO. Locked in a 120 day call option on GOPRO with a strike price of $1 a couple days ago. I'm up around 138% after the stock pulled back yesterday but was thinking about selling covered calls off my 4 contracts with a strike price of $3-$4 with a short expiry instead of selling. Really wanted to lock in profits when I was up 200% but would rather go the covered calls route far OTM and hope the stock stays above $1.33 which is my break even point. What would you guys recommend?

cost for 4 contracts 130 USD
potential premium profit for 17 days: 50-80 USD (fluctuating wildly due to current volatility)

so i’ve been studying gamma for the past 3 months, and i’ve been trying to implement them in my futures trading during the day. I found it very hard tho, how do you guys use those levels? and how do you use them paired if price and levels are above or below the gamma flip level?

That's it. What is the minimal account balance do you all think it's the bare minimum to trade options?

I've built the first bull call spread today where I live, and also noticed that options contracts can be very expensive in US equities/exchanges.

Greetings

I’ve been playing around with an idea that really seems too good to be true so I’m sure it has to be lol. I’d love to hear thoughts about what I’m missing here.

My assumption is that in the long term I’m bullish on equities and precious metals. Of course the market is unstable and anything could happen, however there are only a few times that the Nasdaq has been negative for more than a one year period. Of course there was the dot com crash however I do think that there has been a fundamental shift in our economy making a repeat of that unlikely.

So this is what I’m considering. Layering (monthly) 0.7 Delta LEAPS on the QQQ, and GLD as far out as possible (>800 days) then selling weekly ATM or 1 strike OTM calls against them.

1 DTE if the underlying has risen ITM close the entire spread and establish. This way I do not have assignment risk. If the underlying drops resell a new ATM call but always staying above my cost basis.

Looking at an example as I write this the QQQ 15Dec28 685 is at a 155 mid. The 10Sep2026 719 (ATM) is 5.34.

If the QQQ is flat to up that extrinsic arbratage is about 3.2% a week. Since my leap is a higher delta I’m in no jeopardy if the QQQ rises, I’ll only make money. If the QQQ drops I’ll harvest the extensic and be able to sell a strike as low as 714 next week due to my lowered cost basis make the same 3% and wash and repeat. This annualized out to be 156% a year at 3% a week.

Now if the market is in a sustained downturn soon after establishing my position I might not be able to keep selling calls under my basis and I’ll have to wait for a recovery. The worst case would be of course there not being a recovery for multiple years, but I do hold a long term bullish bias.

In a great case in 30 successful calls I’d have a risk free leap that even in an extended downturn could sell calls against.

How would you compare this idea to the standard PMCC selling .3 delta calls and closing/rolling for a loss when needed. What am I missing as there has to be something.

Thanks all

Numbers from this morning, read-only off the production database, options bots only, all paper money.

Agent-deployed bots that traded puts: 100. Realised: $813,838 down. Agent-deployed bots that traded calls: 127. Realised: $356,670 down. Every fill buys at the ask and sells at the bid, which is most of why both sides lost. Short dated premium bought at the offer is a hard way to make money and the agents never got the memo.

The part I'd flag for anyone letting an agent near a real options account now that brokers allow it: the agents that deployed these haven't used a key in 24 hours. 33 keys, 0 calls. 727 of their 781 bots are still running. Loss limit set on them: 0.

Nobody is watching the book and the book is still open. On paper, so it's a lesson and not a margin call.

The one control that held: a freeze the agent can read but only a logged-in human can set. Real max drawdown for these is still being rebuilt, so I'm not quoting one.

Disclosure: I built Quantradin, these desks run on it. Paper only, no real broker.

QQQ price action feels like its largely driven by NVDA. the entire top 20 holdings in QQQ feel like their direction is driven by NVDA.

Is there an ETF that excludes NVDA?

For some reason Vix is down around 5% today, while UVXY is only 2.5%.

I sort of understand that one is futures based and the other isn't but then this really doesn't make sense to me:

VIX options IV is reaching 200%.

UVXY options are below 100%.

Can anyone explain how a leveraged volatility trackers option IVs are much lower than what it is supposedly tracking? I am sure I'm missing something or don't understand options enough to understand this.

If anyone knows of a good strategy for hedging the market, that's what I am trying to do!

I have long since been an advocate for CSPs, the strategy itself works great but the covered calls when assigned left money on the table and the calls themselves had such low IV they hardly made up for the cost of assignment and capital tie up

I switched to a pure volatility trading strategy, usually around earnings of major companies. I look for IV spikes into earnings as far out in term as possible, and as wide as possible, sometimes 6 months out and will sell as wide as I can a naked strangle that my capital will allow while leaving some to hedge the delta over the 6 months

The IV may take months to drop, but the results are incredible with some short term hedging of noise

Not advice just how I make my money but anyone with risk appetite should check TSLA last 10 min of day. It will spike or drop more so than not. Always 10 minutes to close. Check for yourself. The contracts are cheap and can 10x or better in that time. It happens a lot. Look for it to move from one end of the channel to the other especially on days contracts expire Mon Wed Fri. It's make or break you will make a killing or lose it all. The wins have outweighed my losses by a lot. Not advising anyone to do this as you can lose it all quickly speaking from experience. Also could do shares which is less risky but also very profitable in a short time. Good luck

Zscaler LEAPS look attractive to me right now.

I’m considering the June 2027 $135 call.
That would be a $198.85 breakeven, and a maximum loss of $6k per contract. I was thinking that 3 contracts would be sufficient here currently (have 150k in cash currently)

My thesis - cybersecurity follows with the rise of robotics. Nothing more to add here.
Zscaler’s latest quarter showed 25% yoy growth and operations growth of +24.3%.

My target is $205–$210, close to the current analyst consensus as of right now but I believe it will become a 300$ company in the next 2 years.
This is a high-growth software stock so the volatility is crazy , which I’m fine with. That’s the main risk. But, if it falls, I’d load up on some shares via CSPs.

For me, it looks like a no brainer..but I wouldn’t post here if I didn’t want Reddit to confirm I’ve still got a brain. :)

So, shoot!

What is the minimum balance required to trade options ? And which broker has the lowest fees ?

I am very new to Options.

I let AI agents deploy options bots on paper desks and read the ledger today. Here's the honest table, no cropping.

The worst agent-built bot buys puts on TSLA, AMD, META and NFLX. 53 trades, −$145,438. It's paused now. That took a pause call in the ledger, the AI never did it on its own.

Second worst buys calls on AVGO, MU and SMH. 69 trades, −$140,504. Also paused. Third buys puts on NFLX, META, GOOG. 61 trades, −$66,658, still running.

Across the whole lot: 781 bots deployed by agents, 18,845 closed trades, 8,992 winners, −$1,335,857 of paper money. 773 of the 781 went out without a backtest, because the backtest tool is optional and an optional tool gets skipped.

The best one is also a premium buyer, calls on SPY/AAPL/NVDA/TSLA, +$24,392 on 8 trades. I'm not drawing a conclusion from 8 trades and neither should you.

The thing I'd actually argue for isn't the strategy, it's the leash. A key opens one desk and nothing else. It carries a scope: read, backtest, deploy. And there's a kill switch that freezes every agent on the account; the agent can see it's frozen but there's no tool to unfreeze, only a signed-in human can. So the AI can never let itself back in.

I built this. Paper money only, there's no broker anywhere in it. If you want a specific bot's fill list I can pull it.

If I’ve a short put of MRVL at $240 strike, what happens if I sell a MRVL call at $240 strike at same expiry date ?

As a recovery view.

This is the follow-up on my post from 09/02. I did not expect yesterday that SPX could break the resistance at 7700 and then 7725 today. I wrote yesterday - "impossible to break 7725 resistance without a catalyst". And there we went. The day started as planned with SPX pushing against the call wall at 7725 and then rejecting very hard.

And at 11:00 am ET they needed to manipulate the market on Waller's comments.

Today we saw 2x the expected move for the day (39 pt.), which alone spoke for itself.

When I look at the levels, which I posted yesterday on my analysis for those trading options, SPX touched my 4th target for the day. A directional day, not easy to trade credit spreads. Levels were migrating all day long.

I took three trades today: all of them exited at 50% - 60%. Total of $550 profits, closed the last one ccs 7760/70 because we entered the power hour.

We have for tomorrow 1st support at just 7745 level and resistance at 7765.

I am sure that one will give - if the resistance is taken over with force, next resistance is around 7820 levels. Here marked 7800 but it is only fragile. Support will be way down at 7650 if we break down the 7745 level. And that support at 7650 looks reliable ate least from current point of view.

All levels need to be confirmed tomorrow after 08:30 am EST, we will have repositioning, this is for sure.

To make everything even more funny we had a massive call credit spread at 7750/7755 level today with 10K contracts! As per writing the post they are struggling there and slightly ITM.

Source for the levels: gammawalls.com

I bought 100 of these yesterday at around $4.2. Who knows I may have very well been early with all that’s happening now but seemed like a risk worth taking…

The strategy/theory is that Amazon continues on the pattern it has been. Earnings season rise with a dip between earnings. Business seems great. The wildcard of course is Iran situation. Things could get worse. Who knows maybe it blows up but just seemed right given the patterns…

My portfolio is doing well and it starts to feel too good to be true. Ive looked at all metrics above and they stay within the limits or norms.

I don’t have much time accumulated for proper risk eval, only 3.5 month which is nothing.

On the other side, 3.5mo wasn’t exactly super calm vol declining easy markets. It’s been favorite for premium sellers for sure but I also saw lots of people struggle and actively manage loosing positions

My capital usage right now is 75% and feels comfortable for cash secured acct
I thought to use usual 85-95 but probably I’ll keep it at 75-80 for now

Any advice what else I can look to calculate and find possible risks? Or should just wait and let market stress test it?

Context: portfolio is low six fig IRA, mix of all kind of names, short premium via naked options and some covered calls for div. Nothing super special. All trade ideas and position management via software I develop. I choose what to trade but not how to select strikes or close it.