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Yah. That's a solid truth. And you just might find out you're not suited to it. In fact, that's really the only way to find out. I came in thinking trading was just (or mostly) a matter of being smart and being able to learn quickly; these days, I think of it more like fine carpentry. Sure...

.sigma said it, albeit in a rather funny manner. Look up "Derman delta"; the paper isn't very long or complicated. ...at least on the surface. Getting sticky delta and how it applies in different situations is a horse of a different color.

Sounds like I wasn't too far off, then - I set mine up (in sim, of course) using 100 point wings. I'll add another lot with 200s; it's marking ~18 right now. Should be fun!

If that's @.sigma-speak for "cover me, I'm going in", I wish you luck. I roughed it in on my options platform, and it's well outside my risk parameters for a single trade. So, as much as I believe in @destriero's ability to read the tea leaves, that's a "no-go" for me. Analyzing it/setting it...

I sorta suspected/called it that. I don't know if you remember, but one of my first directional trading experiences, right after I started trading futures, was trading /CL in sim; 80%+ wins over a set of 50 or so trades - easiest money I ever "made" since I started trading. I even tried /NQ and...

Thanks. The above is something I've often mentioned to people who get seduced by the appeal of "look, here's support and here's resistance - it's easy!", but it's rarely well received when someone is in the throes of a newly-acquired religious belief. Me being me, I had to find out for myself -...

That's all? Sign me the fuck up. I'm here for the long haul.

Price/volume is actually one of the few directional things that makes sense to me. I haven't yet found an edge in it, but at least it seems like something more than apophenia. I've caught enough reversals in trading micros straight from the chart - ones that I knew were going to happen - to tell...

My diagnostics equipment must be down, then. I think I've tried damn near every TA method out there, and not a single one of them has been better than a random pick. Either I'm missing some key, or there's a magical Bad Luck fairy following me around when I do this. I've looked into FA as well...

Much more of that, and you're going to need a pentacle and an athame.

I've been struggling to learn directional trading ever since I saw a post of yours saying something like "you'll never amount to jack in this business unless you learn to trade directionally." Unfortunately, none of my experiments have worked out - they were break-even at best. Any suggestions...

Banks, for one, can't really carry a lot of equities on their balance sheet; see the Volcker Rule. Plenty of other toys they can play with - bonds, swaps, CPDOs, market-making, etc. - but it would take higher-quality sources than anything available to us retails to track it. But yeah, it's a...

I don't know if you intended it this way, but that's really encouraging. I've been trading for about 20 months now, and am more pumped about the results than I could possibly explain. I'm not boasting - my account, and thus my returns, are so small that you'd laugh your head off - but I've...

@.sigma - Here's an example of a fly not filling at nat. I've had an offer of 0.09 out for the past half an hour or so and have seen nat momentarily drop as low as 0.06; still don't have a fill. Just tried it in TradeStation - same behavior. P.S.: It filled about two minutes after I posted...

If anything, it would be the opposite. If IV is low, so is the premium - so you'll be selling low and (later, when IV reverts to mean) buying high. And vice versa. If you wouldn't do it, why would anyone else? Toss in the fact that the big boys like to hide their tracks, add in synthetics, and...

Yeah, that would be the sticky wicket. :) I recall destriero mocking someone because they had no idea of how to get good fills (which sent me off to learn how to do that, and has put a metric assload of money in my pocket since then), but other than legging in - which seems more like a coinflip...

COOL!!! Since we're talking butterflies... So excited! Can't wait.

I'm not sure how that would work... de la Vega was a contemporary reporting what he saw (albeit in somewhat flowery language), and we have no written record of "prior art" (except the Thales of Miletus / olive presses story). Much of what I know about history - availability of venture capital...

Now all we need to do is somehow tie in a TV show hostess and a shitbox Russian car, and we'll be set for vol terms. The interesting part is that they started from nothing - no "previous art" - and worked out a complex, sophisticated system, the entirety of a stock market and all its...

Have you read de la Vega's "Confusion of Confusions", describing the first stock market - including options trading? Wonderful read; gave me a hell of a shock to realize just how little has changed from those beginnings.