Recent content by dethkultur

Try a collar. Sell a higher priced call to finance the cost of the put. Often, you can do it for no cost if you go out a number of months. This limits your upside also, but those are the breaks. Always a trade off.

There's never been a war between two mature democracies. (Mature defined as - a peaceful change in power when a party loses an election) Theory is, there never will be, for many reasons. Between democracies, instead of engaging in war, competition is economic. Free cookie for whoever...

Trading is brutal, and it seems like everyone rejoices on ET when anyone loses big. Keep that in mind. "Get right back out there kid" is not the best advice. It is funny though. I'd advise some serious self analysis. What did you do wrong? Can you identify it? Have you gone and looked through...

Ok I'll answer directly, your quote is above this. On reading what you said - you said someone has to pay social security on gains through an LLC. You don't pay social security, or medicare, on capital gains. So yes, what you wrote in your post was not true. On Expenses - they also...

First of all, that's not true. An LLC is a legal entity, but profits and losses get passed right through, and you pay taxes on them as if there was no LLC. So, capital gains are still your capital gains. Your suggestion to just say you are unemployed and soldier on ignores the advantages of...

I haven't used their service, but their book is gold. Tax Guide For Traders, I can't imagine trying to be a trader in the IRS' eyes without having reading it.

Amen. Start with something, anything. Hell, I'd say start with Google Spreadsheets, all the GoogleFinance functions that is. You can trick some things out. Then learn a language with low entry barriers. Preferably one that is used by a friend of yours so he can show you some tips. Perl is...

That's probably the #1 nugget of wisdom so far. It's the same when you startup any business that is asking for tens of thousands of dollars based on "trust." Materials, preperation, sales skills, etc all help a great deal but won't change the above fact. There's really only two ways to deal...

What GermanTrader said. Here's the line of thinking... The IRS says that person or entity doing the trading must have trading as their primary activity to deduct expenses. The secret is the "entity" part. You create an entity (LLC or S Corp) and that entity (not you) does all the trading...

Here's two: Some scholarly stuff from the President's Press Corp (more recent stuff toward the bottom): http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp And here's some more empirical data: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113455 Statistics are damned lies so I'm sure...

It's the press. They do have a huge influence on how things are quoted, what gets quoted and the context it is provided in. Many surveys show 80%+ of the "mainstream press" are registered Democrats. You bet that gets in the way of how things are edited and reported. An example - I lived in...

I got the book recently - it is what you need. It goes into what is deductible and what isn't, and like anything having to do with the IRSit has some head scratchers. Such as - health insurance premiums ARE deductible if you trade through an LLC. Other health expenses (like insurance...

Not exactly... quoted delta is the change in premium for a one point move in the underlying, not a 1% move. You can do a simple ratio to get an approximation (take the percentage move that a one point move in the underlying would be, and divide the delta for the option by that ratio (x 100)). It...

Whoever wrote it is just getting a little fancy with his math. Short answer to your yes/no question is "yes." 1.37 = 1/.73 reward/risk = 1/(risk/reward)

I'm not sure copying the raw files will work... I would test it first. It used to work with outlook and outlook express but Outlook 2003 has some "security features" that can prevent that from going smoothly. For a sure thing, use Export under the file menu. Then in your fresh Outlook, import...