Karen the "Supertrader"
- Thread starter drmark27
- Start date
Actually, it is also an advertisement for her and her funds, and that is her upside. Since you can't really advertise HFs, giving an interview and describing your returns and strategy is as close to an ad as it can get. I am sure if I had 10mm and I wanted to invest it with her, I could find a way to contact her.
I thought that was pretty obvious:
PT Barnum: tasty trade and Karen's fund
suckers: subscribers to the website and investors in the fund.
By the way the website just rised its subscription from $90 a year to $90 a month...
Relevant info from another site:
http://community.tradeking.com/foru...706-karen-the-super-trader/forum_posts?page=2
"FWIW, I'm a tastytrade member and watched this story and the ensuing discussions about it over the past couple weeks.
When she says she "doesn't give the money back", she's referring to staying mechanical with her winning trades. Even though she sells strangles, she rarely lets them go to expiration because of the increasing rate of Gamma risk. Her strategy allows her to profit simply off of Theta (or time decay), and she buys her strangles back as soon as they hit her profit target (whatever it is). Because she's always short Theta, her trades are always at some point winners - what matters is when she takes those trades off (the fact that she rarely has a losing trade is simply a reflection of the probabilities she bases her trades around, but her meticulous trade management is what keeps her in business).
Tom has stressed in later discussions that it's not as easy as she makes it seem. He says she does ladder-in to her positions (e.g., if your max is 10 contracts, you might make 5 trades of 2 contracts each over several days, rather than one trade of 10 contracts in one day). He also said that she doesn't always stick only to strangles in indices; if one side of her trade is being challenged she will consider an offsetting trade in another underlying/strategy to offset the Delta risk on her overall portfolio. And if I remember right she does consider "legging-in" to her trades (or sell one side of the strangle before selling the other) as the market dictates.
She likes indices because of their liquidity and the fact that they allow her to get very wide with her strikes without the same sort of dividend/earnings risk you might get with individual equities. By staying 1-2 months out she's able to collect a fair amount of premium (though small because of the probabilities) while still giving herself enough time for her trade to work. She also stays relatively small in her trades relative to her buying/margin power, so if she is wrong she doesn't give all her profits back in one trade. And of course she stays completely mechanical not just with adjusting her trades when she's being tested but also in taking off her trades before expiration after capturing some of that premium decay. The management part of her strategy - not necessarily the strategy itself - is the key.
Tom has mentioned that he'll have her on again in the near future where they will delve more into the nuts and bolts of her strategy, but for that you'll need to be a tastytrade member. For now he just wanted to introduce her story to his audience because it reflects a lot of what they're trying to do with their network. Her story is incredible but it was only possible thanks to a lot of intensive (and unemotional) trade management and a boat load of trial-and-error when it came to learning the markets. As Tom said in the interview, he's seen floor traders pull off what she has but rarely do you see a retail trader who is able to do that. And the fact that she was able to continue growing her account with outside capital (allowing her to do more with her trades) didn't hurt, either."
http://community.tradeking.com/foru...706-karen-the-super-trader/forum_posts?page=2
"FWIW, I'm a tastytrade member and watched this story and the ensuing discussions about it over the past couple weeks.
When she says she "doesn't give the money back", she's referring to staying mechanical with her winning trades. Even though she sells strangles, she rarely lets them go to expiration because of the increasing rate of Gamma risk. Her strategy allows her to profit simply off of Theta (or time decay), and she buys her strangles back as soon as they hit her profit target (whatever it is). Because she's always short Theta, her trades are always at some point winners - what matters is when she takes those trades off (the fact that she rarely has a losing trade is simply a reflection of the probabilities she bases her trades around, but her meticulous trade management is what keeps her in business).
Tom has stressed in later discussions that it's not as easy as she makes it seem. He says she does ladder-in to her positions (e.g., if your max is 10 contracts, you might make 5 trades of 2 contracts each over several days, rather than one trade of 10 contracts in one day). He also said that she doesn't always stick only to strangles in indices; if one side of her trade is being challenged she will consider an offsetting trade in another underlying/strategy to offset the Delta risk on her overall portfolio. And if I remember right she does consider "legging-in" to her trades (or sell one side of the strangle before selling the other) as the market dictates.
She likes indices because of their liquidity and the fact that they allow her to get very wide with her strikes without the same sort of dividend/earnings risk you might get with individual equities. By staying 1-2 months out she's able to collect a fair amount of premium (though small because of the probabilities) while still giving herself enough time for her trade to work. She also stays relatively small in her trades relative to her buying/margin power, so if she is wrong she doesn't give all her profits back in one trade. And of course she stays completely mechanical not just with adjusting her trades when she's being tested but also in taking off her trades before expiration after capturing some of that premium decay. The management part of her strategy - not necessarily the strategy itself - is the key.
Tom has mentioned that he'll have her on again in the near future where they will delve more into the nuts and bolts of her strategy, but for that you'll need to be a tastytrade member. For now he just wanted to introduce her story to his audience because it reflects a lot of what they're trying to do with their network. Her story is incredible but it was only possible thanks to a lot of intensive (and unemotional) trade management and a boat load of trial-and-error when it came to learning the markets. As Tom said in the interview, he's seen floor traders pull off what she has but rarely do you see a retail trader who is able to do that. And the fact that she was able to continue growing her account with outside capital (allowing her to do more with her trades) didn't hurt, either."
Speaking of recognition, how about my investigative journalism achievement? Since I like a good challenge, I thought, there is no way I can't figure out who she is using the info provided!
Sure enough, thanks to Bing and Google, I have her name, bio, where she lives, even her list of books recommended....
" Karen ...... received her bachelorâs degrees in math and Accounting"
I guess a good education doesn't hurt....
Edit: Damn the internet, there is no privacy anymore. Now I have her phone number and address too. Surf, do you want to call her for an interview?
See my previous post in response to unclebond555. You don't know if her alleged returns are authentic. You also don't know Tom Sosnoff's net worth. I'd encourage you to watch a few episodes of _American Greed_ to see how believers get duped all too often.
If this is a carbon copy of cramer/dykstra, then you're actually saying her returns are completely fake.
Go to http://deadspin.com/5224796/the-myth-of-lenny-dykstra-completely-unravels and start reading with this paragraph near the bottom:
"Bottom line is â Lenny Dykstra is a reprehensible human being. He lives, as Fish says, in a fantasy world. And he's been very successful at deluding people into thinking that they too will become millionaires if they stick by him. Some people have made money, but many have not and have not been paid and have lost precious time working for that stupid magazine to take off . Hopefully, for the rest of his life, people will finally realize that Dykstra is every bit the fraud he's always appeared to be."