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I'm going to stop trading and posting about this strategy for now until I can do it with real money, but I WILL be back! Might as well go ahead and close out this first week though. The 20∆ short strangles account (TDA paper-money) on high IV stocks returned 12% in 1 full week, with no...

Thanks again for the challenges. Before I respond to your individual points I'd like to make a statement to all that might help clarify where I'm coming from in general: Part of my psyche is that I find it difficult to just blindly accept "conventional wisdom." For good or bad, I sometimes...

Thanks for doing all that work, and for including "normal" stocks. Those actually seem to make money over time using this strategy, aside from the March 2020 drawdown and the constraints of fills at Midpoint and no commissions. Does the backtesting software allow you sell at the Bid? Or does...

The account is up 10% at the end of its 4th full day, but of course that may only be because lax margin requirements allowed me to put on too many trades. You can see in the Filled Orders section that CLF came off and I immediately did it again. Same with BB. I put MARA on as a new trade...

Magic, thanks again for your insights, though I still don't understand a lot of what you say. As for having an edge, or "alpha", I certainly don't and don't pretend to, I'm just trying to figure out if this thing I'm doing has any merit, and then maybe tweak it to be a bit better. The...

So even though this whole thing might not work out as I'd hoped, I'll keep posting daily updates. Screenshot at the end of today: You can see from the positions panel at the bottom that 3 of 6 trades are ITM: BBBY, BLNK, & PLUG, all on the Call side. In the Filled Orders section starting at...

Caroy, thanks for the encouraging words. You're right, the returns I was seeing were indeed "other worldly," I should've recognized how crazy they were. But your AMZN trade results and the fact that you're going to try it again does give me hope. On the AMZN trade you collected $835 against a...

I tried it in a TW acct a few weeks ago and was seeing margin requirements 2 to 3 times as large as the TDA paper-money acct, so I bet that's what you'll find. Maybe I'm too naive, but I just can't believe the BPE would be so different in TDA paper-money as it is in a real acct. Especially...

Well crap. If we're comparing apples to apples then this blows my strategy all to heck. Taking just the FCEL trade, a net credit of 7.70 with collateral of 548 is an ROI of just 1.4%, and that's over a 10-day trade only 0.7% per week. The collateral in your FCEL trade is 6x that in my...

Rainmaker1, welcome to the thread and THANK YOU for doing that, that's exactly the information I've been looking for! I asked TDA that question on 6/23 and got this response: "We do try to make our simulated accounts mirror the live trading platform as closely as possible so the margin...

Day 2 EOD. Three trades placed yesterday closed at 50% profit: Snapped at 4:38 Eastern. RIDE closed automatically at 9:31, so I did it again for this week. FUBO & FCEL came off later in the day, but there wasn't enough BP left to trade them again. That's something I'm still trying to get a...

Pretty slick, wasn't it? A 1-day trade. My RIDE position closed at 50% profit at the open, just did it again for this week's expiration.

What does "5 Delta as high value SN" mean? Great PoP on that btw. You'd expect "about" 90 with 5 delta legs, but you got much better than that.

Thanks for asking, but I explained earlier that TDA didn't give me Tier 3 options approval when I first applied, so I have to wait 60 days to apply again. That's mid-August, so by early Sep I should be doing this with real money. But I want to keep paper-trading it so I can learn from...

Trades set up Sunday for execution at the open on Monday. I set the prices at the Natural price (they default to Mid), counting on TDA to give me market-price fills. All except PLUG filled at the open, which I had to lower a bit to get a fill. All are for expiration this Friday, 7/23. BB...

Thanks! Here's the initial 8 trades I loaded up Sunday. ~5k per position, 40k overall for 80% invested: That just shows the symbols of course, but I'll list the trades in the next post. Here's how the account ended Monday, up 4.4% after just the first day: The first day of a trade is...

20-Delta Short Strangles Campaign starts today 7/19 In a TD Ameritrade Thinkorswim (ToS) paper-money account I was mostly selling Short Strangles (SS) with the strikes at about 20-delta (20∆). I was using high-volatility stocks whose option premiums implied returns of >1% per day (Premium ÷...

Sorry about that, didn't realize all the html code was going to come with it when I copied from my blog. Deleted and re-posted.

Nice. You went all the way out to 5∆, huh? Looks like the trade is doing well for you so far. Did you happen to note the BP/collateral when you placed it?

Tayte, you give me WAY too much credit for knowing anything beyond the merest basics about options. I guess you don't use ToS, but you can add a column to the option chains they call "Prob.ITM," and that's where I got the 6.7% from. I think TastyWorks has a similar number. No Black-Scholes...