Trading Options

I sell puts weekly, its great income but im not gonna lie to you and say everyone can do it. The cliche it takes money to make money exists. I can make .5% thats half a percent not 5% almost weekly trying to buy stocks i want long term for less than their current price. If your goal is $500/week you're gonna need $80-100k

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And futures, good luck bro. I've never lost money quicker than having an open contract in Nat Gas during inventory announcements.

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I was trading ETF's and ETN's instead of futures, but events like that made me realize how bad of an idea it can be to trade binary events, especially considering how fast computers can react as soon as the reports are out. So I prefer to either follow the trend or get in front before a reversal.

I just do weeklies on stuff I was gonna buy anyways. Im constantly just selling them on starbucks over and over and over and basically when Im put shares i turn around and sell weekly calls on them till im called away. Its just rinse and repeat with the names i want long term in my portfolio.

the margin requirements go by name, like apple is 10%, starbucks/google are 25%, gilead today i sold some 30%, and tesla is 50%

so not sure how they're calculated but im assuming its by risk, tesla has 2018 $20 puts trading for .50 id love to sell those but im long the stock and dont wanna sell those in size and it goes bust on me lol

Gilead I bought a buncha stock today im gonna wait till the day before ex-div day in 10 days and then sell calls vs it and get a double dividend.

no I use etrade, im etrade platinum not sure the minimums for that but no my fees arent quite that high but selling that many contracts is not cheap. FYI if you're selling 100 puts you're taking on 10,000 shares lol. Im not executing $570,000 weekly put sales on starbucks lol. I do like 10 contracts on a couple different names i like.

That's certainly more conservative than me trading index futures during Yellen's speech!

I should probably just bite the bullet and become a responsible adult, put more money into my account, and be an investor and not a trader.

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Selling options definitely takes money to make money. That's why I'm always on the buy side

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Statistically, most puts expire worthless.

That being said, I only sell cash secured puts and covered calls.

I've been put shares and have had shares called away. In general, if you sell a out of the money put of a company that has a sustainable business, you probably will do ok most of the time.

Options expire. Most expire worthless. In general, selling options is the better option.

selling 100 puts would be very expensive you were assigned the shares. I Mostly sell JCP puts. I buy sell about $0.50 - 0.70 below the monday price.

ok... Actually this week I did not sell any.. I was on vacation. butttt looking at JCP right now its at $9.67. The Friday puts are going for $0.06 @ the strike of $9.50. I could sell 10 contracts (1000 shares), collect $60. If it stays above 9.50 on friday at the close, I don't get any of the shares and I keep my $60. If it closes below $9.50 I'm assigned the shares at $9.50 x 1000 = $9,500 - $60 I collected.

If that happened I would probably sell the $10 calls for the next week and collect again for a few bucks.

But I like JCP long term, so if I picked up the shares I would have been bummed, but happy.


Edit: TD Ameritrade

2nd edit: You can close out of the option a few minutes before the close of trade on friday and collect as much Theta as you can, or just take the shares.