1. Selling options randomly may result in about 80 percent winners, but one or two in the 20 percent of losers could end up with substantial losses.
2. properly managed option writing portfolio should allow its owner to sleep well at night, should be low maintenance, and should be predominantly absent of heart-pounding, gut-wrenching decisions.
3. It has often been said that selling options is similar to operating an insurance company. Buyers of car insurance pay insurance premiums to an insurance company to insure their vehicles. They pay these premiums month after month. ...
4 ... In most cases, the driver never has an accident, and the insurance company keeps the premiums as profit. If a driver does happen to have an accident, the insurance company must pay up.
5. An insurance company tries to weed out drivers that it deems to be prone to accidents. Some of these may get insured at higher premiums (to account for the higher risk the insurance company is taking on them), and some may not get insured at all.
6 TIPS FOR ANALYZING SPREAD TRADES
Tip 1: Know the Difference between Potential Profit and
Potential for Profit.
Tip 2: Focus on Managing Risk, Not Limiting Risk.
7 We tend to advise against positioning in spreads that leave the trader net long options (although these
spreads can be more exciting for the action-seeking trader).
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1 Just because an
option has high volatility does
not mean that it is a good option
to sell. And just because an
option has low volatility, it
does not mean that it is a poor
option to sell.
2 Unless you love
to gamble, buying options is a losing proposition.
1 It is estimated that anywhere from 75 to 80 percent of all
options held through expiration will indeed expire worthless.
Furthermore, it is estimated that only 10 percent or less of all options
will ever be exercised.
2 "Option selling has unlimited
risk” is all that most investors know about the concept. The term
unlimited risk is enough to cause most investors to cross it off their list
of potential investment strategies without further exploration.
1 Skin in the Game is about four topics in one: a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (both practical and scientific, assuming there is a difference), or in less polite words bull***t detection, b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility...
2 ...and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world. That these four cannot be disentangled is something that is obvious when one has…skin in the game.
1 There are two major memory systems:
Working memory—like a juggler who can keep only four items in the air.
Long-term memory—like a storage warehouse that can hold large amounts of material, but needs to be revisited occasionally to keep the memories accessible.
2 Spaced repetition helps move items from working memory to long-term memory.