Search results

Addiction's primary definition involves compulsive physiological dependence. Eg, substance abuse. Will you rob a store to support your habit? Or are you obsessively doing something that you prefer to do at the neglect of other things? There's a big difference.

It must be the meds! :D

ROFL Say it isn't so! Now where am I going to get my weekly dose of daytraders are losers because brokers are shilling the naive for more commissions???

Well gollee, if you believe it's an anomaly then it's an anomaly. I really don't think it matters if it is or not or whether historically there's another decade like this or not. This is the current pattern and if one wants to trade patterns, there it is.

It depends on what your defintion of addiction is. Traditional, it meant habitual use of psychoactive substances w/o the ability to stop. More recently it has been applied to behavioral issues, eg. food, porn, posting regulary on Elite Trader. I think a more relevant description would be...

I don't think it's an anomaly. I think is merely a function of long periods of grinding up slowly and shorter periods of collapsing quickly. That's the basis of the high win rate of this pattern. A 60/40 win rate is a really good ratio over the long term/ As for the viability, I'm a...

All very true unless your backtesting program offers the Fudge Factor indicator. :)

I've never utilized a Martingale but if I was faced with doubling down (or some variation) after a losing month or two, I'd slightly ratio the long side, willing to take a little longer to breakeven to the upside but assuring me of lesser loss to the downside if a buzzed by a multi-month...

On a similar note to me, I real time traded a system in 2008 and 2009 that yielded returns that anyone here would be thrilled to achieve but as of today has yielded only 8% this year (real time). Time to look for a new pattern? :confused:

About 15 years ago a former neighbor who was a broker at a boutique :) firm asked me about trading options on the SPX. It's not that I knew so much about options but that his office group of 3-4 brokers knew so little. Someone had tipped them to a monthly expiration pattern on the SPX that...

Thanks for the reply. I haven't read this board for awhile so I missed it. I do not have AUTOMATIC UPDATE enabled. So when I open a sheet, there's an OPTIONS box and after opening it, I click ENABLE which opens the link. Other than extra clicks, getting this far this is no problem. When...

Three repliers inferred different strikes so your explanation wasn't clear. Implicit understanding isn't alsways a given on ET :) Be that as it may, the inference was wrong so my bad.

Yes, dividends are priced in. I didn't mean to imply that they were a special situation. Since you're on the learning curve, for ease of understanding I was just trying to keep the number of variables to a minimum. For most, conversions and reversals are not realistic because under...

Options are complex. If you don't know much about them, the best thing to do is to avoid them. But since you asked, I imagine that you want something more than an interminable recitation on personal behavior. :) As mickmak explained, buying a straddle (put and call with same strike) or a...

I don't think a conversion is what you want because simplistically, it locks in the carry rate, if you're lucky to get it (I'm ignoring dividend situations). And given today's carry rate, what does that get you? More practically, if you add up the cost of the position (buy stock, sell call, buy...

You're welcome. I hear that a monkey and a tin cup works fairly well :)

As I understand it, he has stocks in his account and wants to use that for margining (aka lodging) a calendar spread on another stock. So you need to take the long stock out of your equation. If the stock in the account was being used with its own options, what you have suggested would be a...

Unlimited loss is the boogeyman that the establishment tries to scare peeps with. Reality is, you can have a significant loss with either method but hardly a trader practicing good money management rides to infinity or zero. If the calls are deep enough ITM to have a delta of one, they're...