Guru's pursuit of the Holy Grail

[guru]

The Pursuit of the Holy Grail in trading delivers 10% a year?
Something as Holy...as The hOLy Grail...should deliver 10% per week.

10% with max 2% drawdown is unachievable by mere mortals. The best RoMad I've ever heard of was ~3.
And yes, 10% is what Madoff was promising and was given $billions, so for those investors Madoff with his 10% was the Holy Grail.
While my actual performance will be better, so is yet to be seen. It's people who aim at 500% that fail miserably.

Also, this isn't my main account, but an account trading just a small set of strategies that aren't very aggressive.

(I've also updated my previous post to explain that 10% can be scaled, though this should be obvious to any trader, while investors perfectly know this and ask for non-volatile 10% that they can decide whether to scale)

 

[guru]

Lol, Universa strategy in action, on my new & relatively small $200K account at TDA yesterday, with just a small market pullback

I actually bought free hedges on indexes (using complex option combos on index options) at vol equilibrium where either the vol going up or down would be (and is) profitable. Just much less profitable when vol drops.
But as vol spiked, market makers wouldn't let me cash out, and really the options were quite mispriced, so the value wasn't exactly true. I could even see MMs adjusting prices only on the illiquid portion of the options chain I've traded, and temporarily widened their spreads literally 10x.
Anyway, it was fun to watch my account go up, first 5%, then 10%, but with no ability to get out. If the vol regime changed and stayed up, then quite possibly I'd get a nice profit.

Right now I'm more realistically up 5% over last 3 weeks, with the goal of minimum 10%/year.

 

[AKJ]

That's impressive. I'm sure there are plenty of folks who would love to see what it is you're doing.

 

[traider]

Lol, Universa strategy in action, on my new & relatively small $200K account at TDA yesterday, with just a small market pullback

View attachment 268822

View attachment 268823

I actually bought free hedges on indexes (using complex option combos on index options) at vol equilibrium where either the vol going up or down would be (and is) profitable. Just much less profitable when vol drops.
But as vol spiked, market makers wouldn't let me cash out, and really the options were quite mispriced, so the value wasn't exactly true. I could even see MMs adjusting prices only on the illiquid portion of the options chain I've traded, and temporarily widened their spreads literally 10x.
Anyway, it was fun to watch my account go up, first 5%, then 10%, but with no ability to get out. If the vol regime changed and stayed up, then quite possibly I'd get a nice profit.

Right now I'm more realistically up 5% over last 3 weeks, with the goal of minimum 10%/year.

Did you find a solution to TWS slowing down when you have a huge inventory of options on your book? I'm running into similar issues.

 

[guru]

Did you find a solution to TWS slowing down when you have a huge inventory of options on your book? I'm running into similar issues.

Nope. TWS is not only slow when having too many options, but sometimes completely hanging and freezing when I have too many options & combos on my watchlist. I had to split my larger watchlists into smaller ones.

 

[AKJ]

Hey guru - I assume that the combos you are putting in your watchlist are not covered by the predefined option strategies you can choose from when selecting combos in IB TWS (I am using Mosaic).

Are you manually entering each of your combos into a watchlist using "Generic Combo" or did you write some script to automate the process of populating a watchlist with a bunch of different but related combos. Say for example, you wanted to populate a bunch of 1-3-2 flies where the strikes are 50-points apart. Did you write some sort of script to automate that process? Any guidance on what you did there would be greatly appreciated, as I waste loads of time just manually entering these sorts of things in.

 

[guru]

Hey guru - I assume that the combos you are putting in your watchlist are not covered by the predefined option strategies you can choose from when selecting combos in IB TWS (I am using Mosaic).

Are you manually entering each of your combos into a watchlist using "Generic Combo" or did you write some script to automate the process of populating a watchlist with a bunch of different but related combos. Say for example, you wanted to populate a bunch of 1-3-2 flies where the strikes are 50-points apart. Did you write some sort of script to automate that process? Any guidance on what you did there would be greatly appreciated, as I waste loads of time just manually entering these sorts of things in.

Currently I also enter option combos manually in TWS, and spend countless of hours doing this. Though I don't use generic combo, but select options from the options chain into the Strategy Builder, then clicking "Add to Watchlists". Just made a quick example:

 

[guru]

Here is how the Universa strategy may work. These is the option graph of my current options positions in AMZN, waiting for it to explode in either direction.

This is not an every-day strategy, just a way to create a powerful hedge as the market is dropping, as it did last week.

(this is at Interactive Brokers, I just exported my positions to ToS to plot the chart and review potential adjustments)