Articles for: Strategies

I’d like to use the opportunity to share some of the insights I gained in my Iron Condor trading on the Russell 2000 Index (RUT).

After most bear markets, we usually see a period of the market trending sideways. But what does ‘sideways’ really mean? A sideways market is one that goes neither strongly up nor down, but just drifts along more or less in a channel. There are however periods within the channel where the market goes up or down strongly, but when you average out the gains and losses over a period of time, perhaps a couple of months, the market hasn’t made or lost much ground.

In this week’s article I would like to share with you some ways to construct a trade plan that I have found very helpful - helpful in forcing me to know exactly what I'm doing and what moves I'm going to make, when.

You may remember back in December we looked at a Calendar trade on Woolworths (WOW) based on our outlook from Kevin Rudd’s bonus payment.

In the current volatile market conditions the spread on the bid/ask of options has widened to reflect the uncertainty that traders are feeling.

I have just spent the last 2 days at the February 2009 Optionetics 2-day seminar in Sydney. Most of the room were new students and I found it really special connecting again with people who are at the start of their trading careers.

Gold has certainly had another nice little run up over the last few weeks and maybe we have to ask ourselves, did we miss an opportunity to profit from this?

A question I’m constantly asked is, “how do you trade this type of market?” Well, if you must trade in this market then do it safely and yes that is possible.

What an amazing year we had in the markets in 2008.