Binary options are a part of your toolbox? I was always under the impression that this was some bucket shop crap. What are your thoughts on them?
No, binary options are NOT a part of my toolbox. My impression is that most outfits DO constitute bucket shop crap. But on the other hand, I traded with Binary dot com when I lived in the United Arab Emirates and found them to be legitimate. I understand they will be changing their brand from "Binary" to "Deriv," but I have no idea when they will finally switch over completely. (When I first started with them, they were called BetOnMarkets.)
I like them because, at this point in my development, I can make money with them
EASILY! My trades are profitable roughly 85% of the time, so if my stake is $1 and I turn out to be wrong, I'll recoup my loss—with a little icing on top—by making my next stake $2.
(I can manage my available funds in such a manner as to make it almost impossible for me NOT to turn a profit, adjusting my trade size from just $1 on up, depending on the statistical probability of a given contract being in-the-money at expiry.) Unfortunately, now that I'm residing in the USA again, I can no longer trade with them anymore.
NADEX is also legit, and is licensed to operate legally in the USA, but I HATE them. For one thing, each contract is a whopping $100, and the way they've designed their risk-to-reward structure (from my point of view) totally SUCKS ROCKS, making it almost impossible for me TO make money, unless I am working with a massive trading account—which I'm not.
To be profitable with NADEX (in my experience) it takes money to make money...
I traded with NADEX when I was making money hand over fist in the Middle East, but the only way I will trade with them AGAIN is if the system I "finalized"
just this morning turns out to work virtually 100% of the time. Sure, with NADEX, I can DOUBLE an initial $100 opening balance with just seven consecutive winning trades,
BUT THERE IS NO ROOM FOR ERROR, and the initial in-the-money trade will put at risk something like 85% of my equity when
it should only be one percent!!!
In other words, I will not be surprised to find that I NEVER trade a live account with NADEX ever again. On the other hand, I will DEFINITELY trade with DERIV again should I, for example, move to Uruguay at some point in the future.
So then, why mess with Nadex at all? It's because it forces me to take my trading to a whole new level, so that, were my standard trade size 1 Lot instead of 0.02 lots, I would have made like $764 this morning instead of the $181 I would have made when I initially "finalized" Numerical Price Prediction back in August of 2018.