Hey guys, my name is Brandon, and I am a sucker for following poker players trying to build up a chunk of money playing poker... I love poker, but don't have the time to do one of those challenges. Instead I wanted to see if I could put some goals together on here, and see if anyone was interested in watching as I begin to see if I can take $500 and turn it into $10k by trading stock options.

Background: I have my degree in Theology and I am a Youth Director at a church for Middle school and high school students. (I know, not the typical poker player or stock option person lol) I am self taught with all stock/investment/and options plays. I do subscribe to an unbelievable service with a guy I won't currently name that teaches me a lot.

I paper traded for several years learning the ways of options and the ability to just learn setups and all the ins and outs of Trading.

I was going to begin this thread on Wednesday as that is when I started, but I couldn't find the right place to begin... but after the last couple days, I looked harder and hope this is the right place to post this.

I started with $500 in my account, and know that my Bank Roll Management (BRM) will start with a very unrealistic approach realizing I need to win quick. I will rarely play weekly options, but will do so with a very small amount of my cash flow. I will mainly buy a couple weeks out, or over a month out for expiration. If you don't know much about options, look it up, or I will feel free to answer any questions you might have.

This week: first update is that I bought calls in $SUNE on Wednesday morning as it gapped down hard, then volume started coming in... I bought 2 calls for $43 each, and then sold them the same day for $173 each. This was a huge win as it was my first day back... I say 'back' because of how tough the market has been, I took a month break after getting beat up pretty bad.

I did several other buys, that I am holding, but I don't want to share every single trade... but the thing that really got my juices flowing was that I saw $GMCR coiling big time and thought it was time for a big move... so I bought a weekly expiring the next day for $45, and one call that expired next Friday for $120... If you didn't see, $GMCR went bonkers half way through the day. I sold the one expiring Friday that I bought for $45 for $370 (if I would have held another 20 minutes I could have sold for $750, but I am not complaining) Then right before the close, I sold my other one for $700.

So at the end of the day I ended up with $1,396 in my account. For next week I have $SWPR, $TSLA, $QIHU, and $YELP. I am looking to buy another solar on Monday morning, maybe $SUNE, or $FSLR.

Follow if you want (PS: I am new to this, so be patient with me and please feel free to ask any questions and let me know anything I can do differently)

if you want people to take you seriously, you can't "hold things back."

Blogs aren't allowed here according to the moderators. Try the blog forum, maybe the mods will move it there for you.

BTW, "zeek" (and Brandon, for that matter) is a suprisingly good name for a youth pastor/2000% return challenge blogger.
Umm...
People with any intelligence doing honest challenges don't start the thread when they (claim to be) up over 150% already. Seriously man, WTF? This - and you - are seriously dodgy.

Post all your buys and sells in real time with the price paid and amount bet at that moment. Anything else, you're just a bull**** artist. Did I tell you that I made 236% ($33.6K!!) last week trading camel futures? And 436% the week before that?

I'm surprised you don't realize such a simple requirement if you claim to profitably trade options.

Anyway, good luck man! A handful of people can make very good returns trading options, and they're the kind of people who don't need options trading to make money. Your average poker degenerate is going to get raped. Options trading requires high intelligence and a bunch of unusual skills. You need strong math skills/math intuition, creative intelligence, excellent reading skills, off-the-charts evidence weighting skills, business savvy, extremely well honed rationality, strong caution, and an understanding of how various participants think and react.

Ha, well I guess I got a nice welcome... lol Sounds good, I will maybe move this, or just not do it at all... I will do real time trades from here on out if I keep going with this, but since I started it late, I obviously couldn't do real time trades. I can be specific and not keep anything back.

I have read tons of books, studied other traders and so on. This is a crazy stupid challenge in the sense that I know it seems 'dodgy.' but up that big of a % isn't all that much when I put like 20% up on one trade... this is not sustainable and obviously would scale back as I get a bigger account.

I hear what you are saying about not being able to believe me... (nice job trading camel futures lol)

So, I own 2 QIHU June 21 $90 calls, 3 SPWR June 13 $35 Calls, 2 TSLA June 13 $215 calls, 1 WDAY June 21 $82.50 calls, and 1 YELP June 21 $70 calls.

I still have $450 cash.

Maybe this is my last post about this as I am not supposed to do this here, sorry for your time if so...

What am I holding back? Want more details I take it? Like I said, super new to this.

PS. I wanted to post a screenshot of my week with the trades to prove I am serious... how do I do this? I try to post a picture, but says I have to post a URL. Any easy ways to do this?

Hopefully the mods will let it stay, it'll be entertaining. They shot down the blog idea earlier and said we had to post in the blog section.

Nothing dodgy about your challenge, just about posting it for the first time when you're already up 150% (selection bias FTW), and not posting real time trades/volumes/prices.

What you're trying to do is doable, if you're multi-faceted genius. If you're not, it's going to be lucky or broke. Best advice I can give (as a fellow options trader) is not to scale down as your bankroll gets larger.

Most of those trades are dead money. I won't give away my secrets, but suffice to say, options overprice typical activity because to first order they represent an average over all scenarios. With the bid/ask and commissions added, they severely overprice typical activity.
A screenshot is meaningless...do you know what selection bias is?

Thanks for the encouragement. And advice. Makes sense on how it started being a bit unbelievable. Lol. I don't know what that is...

Why you worried about giving away info into your plays/approach?....no one in this forum has the liquidity to affect your edge.

To the op, why did you waste so much time paper trading?

That's a good question... I have to say I didn't spend the full time paper trading... I dabbled in and out of paper trading for several year... wasn't that I was doing it solid for that long. But mainly really didn't know what I was doing, and life happened a lot during that time so I couldn't really spend time with real money doing anything.

Start up tomorrow again, I will do this where I record each trade as I do it this next week, and see if anyone is interested in following or not. Just thought it would be fun, and I love 2+2 forums.

once again feel free to ask any questions you want.

zeek

i kinda like watching gamblers degen it up. it's educational to hear the thought processes.

if you can 20x your money on options by following a trading algo vs pure dumb luck then a large number of people would suck your dick at halftime of the superbowl

Then you can be the first... lol

What if I told you... BFI isn't your personal blog?

I agree. We should be more quiet about it though.

Bought 2 June $55 calls in $DDD for .59 ($59 each if you don't understand options)

**** just got real. GL man! You might have a really great Superbowl...

Include some reasoning whenever you feel like it, makes it more entertaining for the railbirds.

LOL, thanks... Lots of these "momo" names as I call them (big names that move a lot) have been destroyed over the past 2 months. I never thought we were in a topping pattern, because even though Russell and Nasdaq got destroyed, S&P and Dow were always barely off all time highs, and money was obviously not rushing to bonds or Gold. So I think it was a major money divergence. Now that those 'momo' names have put in a decent bottom, and lifted off their recent lows with volume, I think there is a huge opportunity to the upside in the next couple months. the 3-D area got destroyed, and $DDD looks the best out of all of them.

Same as $TSLA, $WDAY, $YELP, and $SPWR which I also own... 100% committed right now, but will look to take quick gains.

Oh, and $QIHU...

$TSLA to $220, $WDAY to $85, $QIHU to $92, $DDD to $56, $YELP to $75, $SPWR gets past $37 and could FLY with a Huge volume pocket above!... those are my targets.

Out $TSLA at .51... -$200... broke below $205 which I think is significant... will re evaluate if it holds here a while.

I think this will be fun, and i'm subbed to this thread. I hope you get there OP!

Thanks... I agree... I think $TSLA gets moving, but I have my trade plan before I enter, and have to stick to it. So it could take off here, but oh well, there are lots more trades out there.

Well kind of a boring day... I know I am down some today, especially with having to sell the $TSLA that I bought to high this morning, and my other holdings are down a little bit, but probably not too much.

I choose to not look at my account balance until the end of each week (Except for available funds), and that helps keep the emotion out of it and so I can focus on the individual plan and setups.

You watch, tomorrow $TSLA is going to rip off the open and fly to $220... lol

Anyways, I still like my positions, and with $DDD have an Analyst day tomorrow, could get some fireworks going in that thing... let's hope.

Additional info: I trade at TD Ameritrade, and got them to lower each trade to $7.99 rather than $10.99 or whatever it is supposed to be. I use the Think Or Swim platform during the day. I had this idea and took money that I made playing poker actually to do this for fun. Hope you can enjoy it, and if I am not supposed to have this here, then I will just stop posting.

Have a good day. Back tomorrow.

Oh, I forgot, I took my $100 from selling $TSLA and bought some insurance... I bought one $TNA put as a "just in case" measure. The hope is that my other options make up big time for this small PUT, but with such a small account, I would rather have something in place just in case we get fast to the down side for whatever reason...

This is like playing 50c/$1 NLHE with a static rake of $3. GL though.

What is the minimum account size at IB? He badly needs to go to a casino with lower rake.