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

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, Show 40 which is crazy that we’re already a little over a month into this, I need your feedback and insight from this podcast. Now, I truly, truly ask please do not skip this. Don’t just think that this is a different type of show and I’m just literally asking for a feedback because I am. But I think you should really give me a bunch of feedback on different topics and questions that you want answered in the show because we’re literally doing this every single day. For me, it’s first come first serve and I also want to know what types of topics need to be covered because we can quickly cover them over a very short period of time. We’ve already done 40 episodes which is crazy and we have lots and lots of plans for the next basically two years worth of content and I want to try to fill those gaps and fill in places with your questions, your topics that you want to see covered, your insights that you want commented on, but I

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha. On today’s daily call, I want to talk about why hope and pray is a terrible investment strategy. Oh my God. I don’t even know where to begin with this, but I just realized that so many people have this hope and pray, cross your fingers behind your back investing strategy. I think what drives me crazy about this is that when things go bad, they blame everybody else. You know it. Deep down, you might be one of those people who believe in index investing or believe in just buy and hold strategy, but you know deep down inside that if things go really bad, you’re going to blame somebody else. It’s the banks, it’s the real estate, it’s this country or that country or what the North Koreans were doing or not. But ultimately, it’s your fault. That’s what I’ve realized a long time ago thankfully through a lot of good mentors and people who I’ve met and books that I’ve read and seminars that I went to and everything that I’ve learned, is that anything in life especially in

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about portfolio rebalancing thresholds and when you need to adjust your overall portfolio. Previously, we’ve talked about in other shows why balance and Beta weighting your portfolio is really important. Now, the question is when you start to get unbalanced or when you start to tilt one direction too far or the other, when do you adjust? I’ll say it comes in two stages. I’ll take the least aggressive stage first and that is that you should be monitoring your balance at least once a week. By doing that, if you just do it once a week which literally takes you 30 minutes to do, if that, then you have a really good idea of when you’re starting to get unbalanced. It should not be a surprise. Every week, you should be monitoring this and one week, you might notice the markets made a big move higher or lower and now, because we took off position X, Y, Z or we’re past expiration or whatever it is, no

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha and on today’s daily call, I want to talk about why limiting beliefs are like weeds in your brain. This is really relevant because I think that we all fall subject to this or pray to this that these little tiny seemingly impossible things that could just blow up and just ruin us and decay our belief process and our confidence are these limiting beliefs that we set on ourselves. Actually, a good friend of mine and I was watching a webinar that heeded on real estate, Brandon Turner from BiggerPockets, he even said in his webinar which is why I thought of this today, is he said if you just ask the question or whenever you hear somebody say something, so if somebody said, “Wow! I made $100,000 in real estate.” or trading or whatever the case is, most people start by saying, “Wow! I could never do that.” That’s a limiting belief right there. That little comment that you just made to yourself is a limiting belief that you can’t achieve it. Instead, you have to turn thin

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. Today, I want to talk about why people hate me at first for pushing them outside of their comfort zone. This is a really relevant podcast for me and kind of a daily call and message because yesterday, we had a lot of our trades… Not a lot. Two of our trades that we’re trading, two ETFs that we’re trading were coming up on dividends, dividend dates, so X dividend dates and because we were trading at the money iron butterflies in these two particular instances, every single broker obviously sends out a message to their client that says, “Hey, your position is at risk of assignment because these short calls have a dividend coming up, etcetera, etcetera.” If you’ve been trading with us for a while, if you’ve been trading for a while, you know the story. But the reality is that I got a flood of emails from new members in particular, not old members and it was mostly new members because I went in and check dates of when people sign

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, I want to talk about trading from a different time zone. I often actually do a lot of traveling. In fact, I’m going to be coming up on like a little travel season here. I’ll be going back and forth between the East coast and the West coast a couple of times towards the end of the year for mastermind groups and meetings and stuff like that. For me, I experience a little bit of this. It’s not nearly what maybe some of the internationally experienced as trading the US markets, but I think that when you’re trading in a different time zone, the best tool that I found for myself was just to set an alarm. I set these different alarms on my phone because the markets open and close at different periods and oftentimes, if you’re jet lagged or moving around or jumping from one time zone to the next, it’s really hard to remember like, “Am I three hours back today or two hours back or two hours forward?” or whatever the case is. Just

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha. Welcome back to the daily call. Today’s call, I wanted to take a break from my early morning. As I’m recording this right now, it’s about 4:30 in the morning and I’ve been up for a little bit now, just couldn’t sleep because I was busy working last night and tonight on just some new changes to the website. I want to take a break now because I thought something popped in my head as I was grabbing my second cup of coffee already this morning at 4:30. But I wanted to talk about just leveraging your best assets and strengths. Something just came up recently as I was trying to figure out some new page, layouts and trying to figure out how in the heck to get one of the pages on the website to look the way that I want it to. It doesn’t seem overly-complicated, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t figure it out. At the moment, I couldn’t figure out how to get this one column to line up and everything to look good because I’m pretty much a big stickler about how every

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today’s call I think will be a little bit fun because I often get questions about this topic and I wanted to address it in a short little podcast really because I don’t think it takes too much time to address. But the topic we’re going to discuss is how to trade options with $1,000. A lot of people who get started in options trading, options newbies, want to get going really, really fast. They’re excited, I get it. They see potentially the income that you can generate with options, the non-directional approach to the markets. They love everything about it, but they just maybe don’t have enough capital to start. A lot of times, I get emails from people saying, “Hey, I’ve got $1,000 saved up. How do I get started?” Let me first say and state that I don’t think $1,000 is enough to start trading options. What I typically tell people to do is I typically say, “You need to save somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 to really get a good start at this.”

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re just going to talk quickly about this concept of confusing smart with a bull market. The old saying is… I don’t know if I get this exactly right, but I hear it often and it’s, “Don’t confuse being smart with a bull market.” That’s really fitting because I find a lot of times that people especially in this industry, especially in the trading industry, when everything is good and the skies are clear (if you will) and everything is up, up, up, up and away, then options trading gets a really bad rep. We get a really bad rep because it’s easy to be complacent and let’s face it, just lazy and invest in indexes or really, you don’t even have to invest at an index because you can invest in anything in a bull market and you’ll see your account go up. That to me is interesting because then, people start to act like they’re smart, like they did something smart by just actually just investing in those stocks. I’m not saying that you

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about the one thing that you have to do if you want to grow your portfolio faster with options. This is probably a hard concept for some of you because I know the type of person that you might be. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re usually well-educated, you’re usually well-motivated, you’ve got a lot of high ambition, you’re very much probably like me because you’re listening to this and you’ve gone this far in our training or in our courses, etcetera. But here’s what you’ve got to do and this is what a lot of people I think still miss in this business or really, just in life in general and any area that you want to interchange options trading in. But you’ve got to slow down to speed up. That’s a hard concept to understand. I want to try to explain it maybe with an analogy that might help out with like a little case study. But back in school, what we learned all the time (you often do learn this) i

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about when is an options contract expensive or cheap. This is all relative. That’s the first thing you have to understand about being expensive or cheap. It’s all relativity. I use the real estate analogy all the time when it comes to option pricing. But let’s say a one bedroom apartment in New York, if I told you that that piece of real estate was priced at $25,000, you would say, “Holy crap! That is insanely cheap!” Because houses and apartments in New York are really expensive, so if you find one just randomly for $25,000, not that it would happen, but just to prove the point, you would say that that’s insanely cheap. Now, in my area where I live, in Pennsylvania, if you find a house for $25,000, it’s not necessarily cheap, but it’s not expensive either. It might be the middle of the road for some areas because we just live in a low cost blue collar area and that whole concept of being cheap or expensive

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha. In today’s daily call, I want to talk about why I think running Option Alpha actually makes me a better trader. This is a topic that I often think about all the time because frankly speaking, I don’t need to run Option Alpha and I have not needed to run Option Alpha ever. It’s always been a love endeavor for me. It’s a passion endeavor to talk about trading and to teach trading and to help people out and see people become successful and quicker jobs or whatever the case is, pay for a college or pay for a wedding. I’ve seen so many different case studies in the past, almost 10 years now that it really helps still motivate me. But I definitely believe that running Option Alpha and everything that goes into it has made me a better trader for sure, not only because… I’ll take it maybe in two stages. That might be the best way to go about this in this daily call because it’s a topic I think about a lot. I’m probably sure I could probably rant for like 25 minutes on th

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about trading options with Thinkorswim. I think it’s just a big topic that a lot of people search for and so, I want to give my feedback and advice on Thinkorswim platform. I’ve been with Thinkorswim just as a background for a long time, pretty much since they opened up. I dare to say I was probably one of the first 50 customers that they had. I literally signed up when they had three web pages. It was like a homepage, the sing up page and then the legal description page. I’ve seen a lot of iterations. I’ve gone through Thinkorswim going public, getting bought out by TD Ameritrade and all of those changes. At the end of the day, I still think that the Thinkorswim platform is by far the best one for options traders. Now of course, this only really benefits you if you’re in a couple of different countries and mainly the US. I think that the technology is great. I think it’s pretty fast. The mobile responsiveness of their app is r

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha. On today’s daily call, we’re going to talk about why most investors actually act like toddlers. This actually came out of just (I don’t know) being a parent. I often relate investing a lot to parenting. I think actually, parenting has taught me a lot about being patient, being calm the long haul basically because you can’t get them back obviously and a lot more stuff about investing in life obviously by being a parent, especially if two girls I guess right now, I’ll learn even more when they become teenagers. But I do think that most investors, most traditional investors (we often probably find ourselves in this mode a lot) act like toddlers. The reason is because we overreact and for some reason, when it comes to money in the markets, we can’t control our emotions. It’s like my kids. My two girls are young. I have one who’s almost four now and then a toddler who’s like 18 months. Our toddler, our youngest, Anna, she has a really tough time right now controlling

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about examples of options trading. This is a topic that comes up often and I get some variation of this when I get emails from people, when people leave me voicemails, but they want to see more examples. What we actually did a long time ago and we’ve continued to update this pretty much every other week, we add just another batch of trades to it, is we’ve had this board of live options trading videos. Although I don’t want to ever do, nor do I have the time to actually consistently every single day say between 11:00 and 12:00 or whatever the case is, I’m going to make live trades because I just don’t know if I’m actually going to get filled, I don’t know if my kids are going to be sleeping or whatever the case is. What I have done though is I have just started to hit record on my screen and then I just go through a trade. I make a trade start to finish, from analysis to picking out the strikes, the month, pricin

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today’s call, we’re going to talk about average preparation yielding less than average results. I do have a bone to pick with some people who say average preparation yields average results. I may have even misspoke before when I said that, but I truly believe actually that when you do something average, it actually yields less than average results. I’ll tell you why I think this is so important because I think too many people… Myself, I’ve been caught up in this before and I try literally every single day. I read the same list of affirmations every day and thought processes in the morning before I do anything else. The reason I do this is because I want to elevate my state to a level or an understanding that I want to be more than just average. I want to be way more than average as far as a trader, as far as a business owner, a guy who runs a website education company, a dad, a father, etcetera. I want to be way more than average in all that. B

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about trading options near expiration. Now, I have to warn you, as I probably will in the future for a lot of these calls that my kids are sleeping right now, so this is done literally in the middle of the day and if you hear random screams or movements, that’s just her in the background waking up because she could wake up at anytime and it’s like a time bomb going off when they do. Those of you who are parents, you know that. Trading options near expiration, I think there’s a couple of things that we want to just touch on with trading options near expiration. One, we know that as we get closer to options expiration which is usually the third Friday in the month for monthly expirations, weekly expirations expire every week, that as you get closer to expiration, your risk of assignment especially if you’re in the money goes way up. Really, it’s that first couple of days. Actually, expiration week,

Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about trading options in an IRA. I think the real quick synopsis around this just to answer this as quickly as possible really because we don’t need to really harp on it too, too much. But trading options in an IRA is definitely something you can do. You have to get broker approval to do it and that means just getting the required options level for brokers to be able to do it. Most of the time, they’ll allow most people at a level one or two which means you can trade some covered calls, some covered puts. But you do want to try to get those higher option approval levels that allow you to do spreads and even to do complex strategies, iron condors, iron butterflies. The thing with any IRA or retirement account is that most of it has to be risk-defined. You will probably never find a broker who will allow you to do naked trading, meaning a single short put option or a single short call option in an IRA or retiremen

Kirk: Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again. On today’s daily call, I just invited my wife over and I want to ask her a question. Emily: Oh, okay. Hi. I did not know that this was happening. I thought you wanted to show me something. Kirk: Yeah, I want to show you that I’m doing a recording now and you’re going to be part of the podcast here. Emily: What’s up, Option Alpha peeps! Kirk: That’s so ridiculous. Okay, let me ask you this. When it comes to investing, what’s the most important thing? Like any investing, what’s the most important thing somebody can do? Emily: Something that they can do or something…? Kirk: I don’t know. When I say to you like what is the most important thing in investing because you had invested in real estate. You do all of our real estate stuff and I soundboard all of my stuff from you, so what’s the most important thing that people can do in investing? I know. You got a show on the spot. Emily: I’m nervous. You have me on the spot because I want to be Switzerland and not make any

Hey everyone. Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about the dangers of trading options. Now, for full disclosure and of course, I probably have to say this legally, it’s all over our website legally anyway, but of course, options trading is risky because it’s a leveraged asset and when you use leverage, leverage can hurt and leverage can help. I often relate this to actually driving a car because a car is leveraged, leveraged to get from one point to the other point faster, but if you use leverage in the wrong direction or too fast, too slow or incorrectly, it can be dangerous. If you drive a car backwards down the highway at 70 miles an hour, that’s not what it was intended to do and therefore, it can cause harm. It can be very, very risky versus just like for example, walking from point A to point B. But in options trading, the same concept proves and that is if you use it the right way, it can help you get from point A to point B much faster