The Option Alpha Podcast

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show231

This week we explore the latest and most pressing challenges emerging for investors who have embraced autotrading.

As automation revolutionizes the financial markets, traders find themselves navigating uncharted psychological territory. From trusting bots and algorithms, coping with reduced decision-making control, and the novel complexities of autotrading that demand a ...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show230

This week I explore a deep and philosophical viewpoint into the world of automated trading and its inevitable rise for investors. I explore the evolutionary nature of human decision-making and its limitations in complex financial markets by examining cognitive biases and their impact on manual trading.

I’ll also discuss the technological advancements driving this shift...

AI is the hot new buzzword these days, sparked by the release of ChatGPT a few months ago. Since then, it seems everyone has used OpenAI’s software in fascinating (and sometimes scary) ways.

So, I jumped into ChatGPT and asked it to come up with the top questions that new and advanced traders ask about options trading.  This week's podcast explores the 15 questions - and answers - that options trades want to know.

How long does it take a stock to get back to even after a large daily move down? And does the magnitude impact how long it takes the position to recover the loss?

We’ve all been in losing trades and wondered if we should hang on to the position for a little longer or cut it loose. So, to help answer the question, we studied the short-term performance of stocks and ETFs after different daily loss totals.

The study ...

Stocks have been described as a rubber band, and we often assume they will snap back and revert when prices become overextended.

So, we wanted to know: How likely is a security to continue or reverse its momentum above and below major moving averages in short, medium, and long-term timeframes? And does the security’s proximity to a moving average impact its performance?

We researched 20 years of data on 286 symbo...

"The trend is your friend." It’s a popular saying amongst traders, and we hear it all the time. But is there validity in the statement?

We backtested directional option selling strategies with a long-term trend filter to see if there is a significant impact on performance.

We used Option Alpha's backtester to review the data for  SPY, GLD, and TLT short put spreads and short call spreads. Short put spread tes...

This week we take a look at the performance of the Monthly Iron Condors ($3k Portfolio) bot template. You might recall that we previously did a deep dive on this template back on Show 214, walking through the strategy setup, the scanner and monitor automation setups, etc. But now that we’ve had it running for a little over a year, we thought it would be help to take a look at how it has weathered this year’s market volatility and e...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show224

Option spreads are a simple and flexible, yet powerful strategy for traders. And while spread strategies come in many forms, shapes, structures, and durations, some core elements are present in spread trading generally that new traders should pay attention to. On this week's show, we'll once again slow things down a bit and focus on understanding what option spreads are...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show223

What if you could build an automated strategy that navigates all market conditions? And while we know there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, we believe you can design a bot strategy that assesses the market trend and proactively adapts to current conditions. This "trader's dream" finally manifested itself in a bot template that become the collective “brainchild” o...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show222

Option strike prices are an absolutely critical concept to master if you're going to seriously trade options at any point in the future. Without a holistic and firm understanding of what strike prices are, how they work, why they are different than break-even prices, you cannot be adequately prepared to safely trade options. And therefore, because we want to help all traders...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show221

Starting to trade a covered call strategy is a popular "bridge" for traditional stock traders or investors transitioning to the world of options trading. It's a logical, bolt-on options strategy that has numerous benefits over traditional long stock positions. Today's show digs in one extra level and explores the different setups and ways to trade synthetic co...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show220

In today's show, I'll walk through four clever, dare I say "wicked-smart", ways to leverage our proprietary SmartPricing technology for routing orders intelligently to the markets. If you're already trading with us at Option Alpha then you'll learn some new techniques that will help improve the efficiency of your bots and automations. If you're ...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show219

Calculating break even prices for different option strategies isn't as complicated and overwhelming as it might seem. Yes, you do need to perform some basic math functions to find different break even prices but it's certainly not rocket science. Plus, it's an invaluable concept to master because it's critical to your success as a trader. In today's show,...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show218

In life there are three things that are certain; death, taxes, and bear markets. For many new options traders, the current bear market we've found ourselves in might just be your first. An inconvenient reminder that risk is present when trading, particularly when trading options. But alas, as the old saying goes, "It's just part of the game..." and my goal tod...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show215

On this week's episode, we'll present a collection of questions custom tailored for digging deep into your psychology and mindset around trading. These are questions you should ask yourself, ones that trading coach might ask you, on a recurring schedule to help uncover and keep a pulse on the potentially harmful subconscious "self-talk" that tends to consume y...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show214

New traders with small accounts are constantly on the hunt for option strategies that help them get started but intelligently allocate their money without blowing up. And so back on Show 159 of the podcast we outlined a framework for building an options portfolio with just $3,000 which become of our most popular episodes. But when we recorded it, almost 2 years ago, we didn'...

Show Notes: https://optionalpha.com/show213

Last year during the beta launch of the autotrading platform, I decided to take some time off from trading so that my full and undivided attention was appropriately on supporting groups of beta users during the launch of the autotrading platform. Plus, my live accounts were the proverbial "guinea pigs" for lots of critical testing and bug hunting that could only be foun...