The "daily Call" From Option Alpha: Options Trading | Stock Options | Stock Trading | Trading Online

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. Today’s daily call was one of my favorite topics and we’re going to be talking about the two things that you need to be successful. I have 100% mentioned these numerous times on webinars, probably on podcasts. I don’t even know. Probably on this daily call before because I don’t remember all of them that we’ve done exactly and what I’ve mentioned before. I know we haven’t covered this topic specifically, but I might have mentioned it before. But the only two things that you need to be successful are consistence and persistence. I firmly believe this. I really, 100%, true to my core, down to my gut, deep inside of me believe that those are the only two things that you really need to be successful at whatever you do because I didn't say successful at trading, I said successful. I’m a geek… Many of you know this. I’m a geek, I’m a nerd. I totally geek out on studying people who are successful and companies that are successful an

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. It is very early in the morning, so if my voice is raspy, I apologize, but my kids are sleeping. I usually record these in the morning anyway and today, I want to spend a little bit more time talking about a long call option strategy and just the basics around what a long call option strategy is. When I think about options trading, I think about options trading being building blocks. If you're a science guy or if you understand science or maybe way back when if you go back to your science class in high school, I think about long calls and long puts as basically those first elements on a periodic table of elements, helium and hydrogen. That’s what they are. They’re building blocks that we then start building other strategies off of or start using. When you first get started at options trading, you might first learn about a long call option strategy because it's the best transition or the easiest transition from stock t

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, I want to answer the question – “Why did my option move as much as the underlying stock?” This is a popular question actually. In fact, I think it’s one that’s just very common if you're new to trading options. But honestly, if you’ve been trading options for a while, you still might question this and here’s where this really comes from or here's the setup that this comes from. Let’s say that you are long a call option on the stock at $50 and your strike price is at $50. Naturally, most people think that because your strike price on your long call option is at $50 and the stock is at $50 that any move higher in the stock is going to see an exponential or at least a 1:1 move higher in the option contract that you’re long. The next day happens and the stock moves $2 higher. The stock moved $2 higher, but now your call option drop in value. This is where people go crazy. They literally start pulling out their hair, they have no id

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about what I’ll do different in the next bull market. First of all, I just got back from a three day event, the mastermind group that I’m part of. Many of you maybe have heard me talk about it before or if you haven’t, maybe this is the first time. But I’m part of a mastermind group that’s been going about two and a half years now which has been really, really good. I pretty much cut back on all masterminds and coaching except for this one group which was a huge change for me because it was an insanely expensive one to get in and to maintain the relationship. But it's been a really good thing for me just personally, like businesswise, development wise, running this business, being an investor, being a trader. It’s been great. I met great people. The lesson for today is also that I wouldn’t shy away from paying a lot of money to be part of the right mastermind group. If you’re a part of those or the right mem

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we are going to answer the question – “How can I tell if I’ll be assigned trading stock options?” I think this is a big fear for people especially when you get started in option selling which is mainly what we do where we sell straddles or iron butterflies or iron condors. People often fear being assigned stock. Now, first of all, it’s not as bad as it seems. Yes, it will happen. It’s going to happen at some point in the future if you do want to be in this business long term which I assume you do if you’re listening to this podcast and you just have to realize that it is going to happen. Now, we’ve got a lot of case studies on the website, we’ve got a lot of training on how you can manage it and some examples of positions where we’ve been assigned and we’ve managed it. It is not always bad. In fact, a lot of times, it ends up being really well being assigned the stock. If you can deal with it, it’s definitely something that wor

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call today, we are going to tackle the topic of trading options with technical analysis. Now, I wouldn’t say that this is by far, the most requested topic or a big topic that we get a lot of questions on, but it’s definitely up there. I think that people often find technical analysis first because they start their journey with stock trading, they learn a little bit about technicals, they think it’s a magic pill to solve all their issues with directional trading and then eventually, maybe they transition options trading and they think that the married combination of this is the holy grail basically and obviously, that’s not the case. We know that nothing is a surefire thing. It’s all high probability. It’s all based on math. But the way that I think about trading options with technicals – I think about technicals first as like… Well, I’ll talk about it first in this call because I think it’s important to cov

Hey guys. Welcome back. On today’s daily call, I want to answer the question – “Can I trade options in my IRA or a retirement account?” The simple answer to this question is – Yes, of course you can trade options in your retirement account or IRA, but only (this is the asterisk that you usually find at the bottom of a page and it’s like, “see defined print”) if your broker allows it. You will have to check and make sure that your broker or whoever you’re using for your IRA or a retirement account actually allows the ability to trade options. Now, there’s a lot of brokers out there. I just used the word “broker” but it’s really just an investment firm that don’t allow you to do it. They either place a restriction, they don’t have the capacity to trade them, so it’s just a function of having the technology available to actually trade options in that account. For example, like my wife’s 403B account that she has through a local provider because she’s a teacher, they just don’t even have the capacity to trade opt

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re talking about options trading in emerging markets. I think there’s two sides to this topic that I want to talk about. First thing I’ll talk about is actually just physically, I guess location-wise, trading in emerging markets or maybe trading overseas is really I think what people are trying to get to at this question and then we’ll talk about what you can actually trade in emerging markets because I think there’s a lot. The first part of it again is physical location. If you are abroad, you can trade any emerging market that you want. In fact, you can pretty much trade any market in the world depending on the broker that you have or really, where you live. Some restrictions are typically found in different countries like for example – I know that a lot of our members… I pray for you guys all the time down in Australia. You guys don’t really have that many choices of brokers you can use versus in the US or the UK or

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today’s question is – “Do I have to exercise my option contract to take profits?” This is a really good question. Before I even get to the question and answering this question, I have to remind you if you do have a question because I haven’t really actually talked about this a lot on the show which is my fault. But if you do have a question, the best way to get the question answered is to either shoot me an email, kirk@optionalpha.com, post on our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram or wherever else you follow us online or you can head on over to optionalpha.com/ask and you can leave me a voicemail there. There’s a big red record button there and you can leave me a voicemail. Again, we’ve got a lot of these shows coming up. It’s all first come, first serve. If you have a question or even a list of questions, I love those emails the best because that helps me get new content out there, helps me figure out what questions you guys have and puts

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, I think this is going to be an interesting topic for you guys. But if you really want to be successful in trading options, then you really have to hear what I’m saying here when I say – Options trading is not easy. It isn’t easy, but it’s very, very simple. What does this mean? I actually heard somebody say this a little while ago and I thought, “Man! That is so powerful.” Because they weren’t saying it about trading, but it’s really about anything in life obviously that sometimes they aren’t easy, but they’re simple. It’s really simple, it’s not complicated too much, but it’s not easy to actually implement. Options trading is definitely not easy. You actually have to do it every day or every week, whatever works out for your schedule. Now, I know that might not fit in with most people’s style of investing and I get that. I think people realize eventually how much work it does take. I’m not saying that it takes all of your day, but it does t

Hey everyone and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, I want to talk about how you can back-test your option strategies in 18 seconds. Now, I know that that sounds crazy you can do it in 18 seconds, but it’s true. You can totally do it in about 18 seconds. Now, the reason that I want to do this is because we haven’t really talked that much or haven’t really promoted that much our back-testing and trade optimization software. Although a lot of people grab that software every single day, I still see people all the time that are making very, very simple mistakes in how they trade because they just don’t know that it’s available. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why somebody would not want to back-test their option strategy or try to optimize their option strategy before putting hard-earned money at risk. You wouldn’t buy a piece of real estate if you had no knowledge of how real estate worked or real estate prices or real estate valuations. But yet, all the time, I see people trying to enter

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, I’m very happy to announce that we are having baby number three. OMG! It is about to get crazy in our house. It’s actually been out there for a little bit now with our family and just publicly with our friends and stuff like that online, so you may have seen stuff. If you have, I appreciate all the nice comments. But I just wanted to add something in here because we do a daily and we can talk about it. But for me, this is insanely like… I’m happy about this for sure. It was definitely a surprise. We were not trying for number three right now. Not that we weren’t looking to have more kids in the future. We just wanted more spacing between those. But I mean, look. We obviously have the means and are definitely more than happy to have another baby in the household. I think that our girls are going to be insanely excited about it. They know and we’ve told them, but they really don’t know yet. They think it’s like a toy that’s coming, like a baby

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, we’re going to give you five great reasons why you should trade options versus trading stocks. I think this is actually very easy for me to explain, but if you’re new to options trading or if you are trading stock right now and you’re considering trading options, this might be great for you. My top five reasons are the following. Number one is that options give us non-directional trading. Probably the biggest one for me is this ability to trade markets in any direction. I think people actually are surprised when they get started trading options, that they realize that they don’t always have to be long a security, meaning the only way they know how to trade or the only way most people know how to invest is to buy things. You buy this stock. You buy that stock. You buy the indexes. All you can do is buy. But the reality is that you can sell and go short things and you can go bearish on some things and you

Hey everyone, Kirk here again from optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, we’re going to answer the question – “How much money do you need to start trading options?” This is actually very simple, so I’ll simply answer the question right now and then we’ll talk about it. I think to start trading options, you should at least start with somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. I do not believe that you can really successfully do anything with under that. If you have less than $3,000 or $5,000, then I think you should sell some stuff around your house, get a part-time job, do some online work for somebody. There’s a bunch of different places where you can just like do this project-based work with whatever skills that you have, generate a little bit of extra cash to really start. Now, even with like $3,000 to $5,000… I always give that range because look, it just means you should have a little bit more than a couple of thousand dollars. But even with like $3,000 to $5,000, I think t

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call from optionalpha.com. On today’s daily call, we are going to talk about how to track your option trades and why you should keep a trading journal. I will first say this. I realized 100% that tracking trades is a big problem in this industry. In fact, I’m surprised and very happy at the same time because we have an opportunity to fill this gap. But I’m surprised that a lot of brokers are pretty bad at this. Now, most brokers have the ability to track trades like your open profit, your total profit, your daily profit, etcetera and they still keep a very nice ledger for you at the end of the year of all the trades that you’ve done. But what we’re talking about here is actually tracking associated trades and tracking trades that are associated together with adjustments, with different strike prices, with different tickers, different strategy types, etcetera. Like for example: My broker right now is Thinkorswim. Thinkorswim has a really good tracking

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about option strategies for small accounts. Again, this is a big topic that a lot of people have I guess challenges with, is choosing the right option strategies or the best option strategies for small accounts. I can tell you that I think the standard here is that it has to be for a small account, it has to be a defined risk strategy. Most of the time, if you’re trading under $25,000 which I consider to be a small account, then you want to start trading with defined-risk positions, meaning credit spreads, iron condors, iron butterflies. You can also trade debit spreads if you want to. That’s a directional option-buying strategy. But when we’re talking purely about option selling, it’s credit spreads, iron condors and iron butterflies which effectively are one in the same. They’re all basically cousins or related to one another. An iron condor is just two credit spreads. An iron butterfly is just two credit

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to ask the question or basically propose the question – “Should you start meditating in the morning?” Now, this is a topic that I think I’ve been interested in talking about on the show here and it’s definitely not necessarily related to options trading or to investing, but I think it helps out in really, all areas. It’s something that I’ve actually done for a while now and I’m not 100% on doing this every morning. No doubt, I do get thrown in the morning by either my kids waking up early and so, I don’t have a chance to actually do it, but I do try every single morning to meditate for at least like 10 minutes and I think it’s actually been really helpful for me. I’ve been doing this now for a couple of months. I’ve started a little while ago and then fell off the bandwagon on that and then got back on here just a couple of months ago, but for me, I think it’s just a good time to just clear your h

Hey everyone. It’s Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about how to calculate profits and losses when trading options. I think this is actually pretty easy, but I think actually, people overcomplicate this a lot when it comes to options. The easiest way to calculate profits and losses is literally credits and debits. I often get emails from people who get confused when we start adjusting trades because there’s just a lot going on. I get that. I mean, there’s strike prices and contract months and we’re rolling this strike to that strike and there’s debits and credits. They get really confused on how everything works. What I always try to do… You can see a lot of these videos if you want to see this visually. We’ve got a lot of videos where we’ll go through and there’s a lot of case studies added to YouTube and even our website, so you can just search a bunch of these case studies and that might help out or just scroll back through our recent YouTube videos.

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about how you can setup price target or technical alerts if you can’t actually get to the markets or actually trade. Where this topic comes out of is that I realized obviously that people have really busy schedules and your work or your work schedule may not allow you actually to monitor the markets every single day. Now, first thing I’ll actually say on this is if you have the ability, the easiest way to actually monitor things is actually to download your broker’s trading app or your mobile app. Of course, we’re all carrying our phones around, it’s glued to our ears or glued to our hands pretty much every day and so, that’s the easiest way to monitor positions. That’s how I generally do it. If I’m traveling, I’ll still have my phone with me obviously. If I’m speaking or at an event, I’ll still have my phone with me. I don’t have a situation where I don’t have access generally to the markets. I real

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the daily call. On today's call, I want to talk about why we should take what the market gives us when trading directional. We actually just finished up a trade here in EWZ that we sent out to members. It was a directional trade I guess by nature because we got a technical sell signal in EWZ using our indicators from the signals research which have actually been working out really well on a lot of trades. Now, they don't generate a lot of signals which is a good thing I think, but when they do, they've actually been very consistent and very good at predicting turns or stops in the market. We got a signal recently for EWZ that it was reaching a level of maybe overbought and it was going to turn around. We did a directionally bearish trade. We sold a very tight call credit spread. We didn’t sell far out of the money, we sold just a little bit out of the money, give ourselves a little bit of wiggle room in case we're wrong, but still, we want to collect a pretty decent premium. This