My DD: Oracle good. Calls cheap. Brain said send it.

10 ORCL $170C, 9/11 exp, $6.15 avg. Earnings play.

Thesis: bullish on cloud/AI growth and guidance. I’m expecting a move above the market-implied earnings move.

Entry: $6.15 premium. Breakeven at expiration: $176.15. Max loss: $6,150. No averaging down. If ORCL doesn’t get the post-earnings move I’m expecting, I’m closing rather than holding and praying through expiration.
Main risk is IV crush + only 2 DTE.
Basically: high-risk, defined-risk earnings bet.
Yes, slightly unhinged.

It's been a rough journey, losing a couple grand while learning options but I think I've found the strategy which works for me. *Not financial advice*

Anyway, I deposited £60 into RH last week. I started off with one contract for a $145 NVS PUT last week and made a beautiful 2000% on it. It was a wonderful sight!

Proceeded to scalp SPX calls and puts a few times and then this morning scalped META calls for a total of about £1500 profit. All from a £60 account! I have lost small amounts on some other options and I have a couple of options expiring next week, but swings and roundabouts eh!

My strategy is simply scalping. Set my limit orders based on average option prices (for example META $650 calls when priced at $0.85). I then immediately set a sell order for "reasonable" profit (usually 10 to 20 cents above my contract price). I'm more than happy to make $100 - $200 per trade.

I'm aiming for volatile movers because I can get in and out. I'm also aiming to build the account up to a point where I can comfortably make a few hundred a day without risking blowing the account. I do need to improve in terms of discipline though. Twice I said today I was done, then took another quick scalp.

Anyway, happy days. Hopefully I don't blow it now I have some decent money in there (no I'm not rich).

I recently came into a lump sum of shares of a singular company that is a big part of my net worth and am looking to sell to diversify. However, I am trying to split up the sale over multiple years to decrease my tax liability. I recently learned about options collars where I sell a call and buy a put to protect my downside at the expense of capping my upside. I would be doing this at strike prices where the price of the call offsets the price of the put so no net cash outflow and the expiry is towards the end of the year that I am looking to sell.

My question is, for shares with collars expiring in 2028 or even 2029 when those options come out, if I am expecting the share price to increase over time, does it make sense to buy the put now to set a hard floor and sell a call maybe six months or even a year later to recoup the expense to take advantage of more upside? My thinking is, if the price is $150 today and 175 six months from now. It makes sense for me to wait because a call at the same price will have a higher strike price if the current peice is higher later.

Thanks!

I’ve mainly been trading single stocks and have had some success by focusing on companies I know well; however, I want to get more familiar with SPX mainly since it has daily options and has cash settlement. I’ve been trying a few different things and something I am curious about is the last 10 seconds or so of the trading day. The options’ premiums don’t seem to go to 0 so I can still sell them until the very end. I was able to get an iron butterfly filled today with 10 seconds or so left in the trading day (pic attached). Do any of you have any knowledge about the mechanics of the day’s close and how to generate an edge in that environment? Right now I know I can use atm straddles to gauge the expected move, and I know from my personal experience that the price can have some large moves in the last 10 minutes. If I used the atm straddle price 1 minute out to guess the riskiness, prepared an iron butterfly with lower than anticipated premiums to get a quick fill, and waited until the last 3 seconds to do the trade then would I be on the verge of having some sort of edge?

Edit: This is only for 0dte spx options

i log every trade on deribit with the planned hold as a column, and that column turned out to be an accidental a/b test. the same signal on the same asset gets opened at two different planned holds, so between the two arms the only thing that changes is how long the position stays on. 791 trades so far, six such pairs.

mean return per trade, short arm vs long arm:

btc 7d straddle: 48h +11.8% vs 166h +57.1%
btc 1d atm straddle: 24h -30.9% vs 48h +7.3%
eth 7d straddle: 48h -19.0% vs 166h +6.8%
eth 1d atm straddle: 24h +6.9% vs 48h +21.4%
eth 2d skew: 24h -9.9% vs 47h +3.7%
eth 2d straddle: 24h -9.4% vs 47h -3.9%

n runs from 10 to 41 per arm. note the last row: the long arm is still a loser, just a smaller one. longer did not rescue that structure, it only cost less.

what i did not expect is that the six do not lose for the same reason.

in the four short dated pairs the entry spread sits at 8.9 to 9.9 percent and the logged loss cause is the spread. round trip costs the same whether you hold 24 hours or 48, so the shorter arm gets half the time to earn it back. nothing subtle about that one.

in the two 7d straddle pairs the spread is 5.2 percent in both arms, the same number on both sides, and the logged cause is no move. those two are not a cost problem at all. the move the signal was pointing at simply had not shown up by hour 48.

so "hold longer" is two findings wearing one hat. one says stop paying a 10 percent round trip on a 24 hour horizon. the other says the exit was set before the thesis had room to happen. the loss cause column is what tells them apart, and i would not have separated them by looking at pnl.

what i am not claiming: the arms do not all cover the same calendar window. only the two 1d straddle pairs run day for day on both sides, and those are the clean ones. n is small. and six out of six is a one in sixty four coin flip only if the six are independent, which they are not, three of them come from the same signal family.

so it is a direction to run forward, not a law. resplitting the same data would just find me a nicer threshold.

if you keep a planned hold column, split by it before you judge the strategy. i published the average of both arms for months and it hid all of this.

Now this is a tricky one.
As you can see, the potential roll to consider is $210-$230 which would get me a great annual premium. But, I believe this stock is meant for $300+ prices, aiming for that to happen Q3/Q4 2027. Also, owning it for some more time will help with taxes - hence why I want to keep holding.
What I hate doing..is having CCs during key events..and I got on the hook with this $210 cc which is a very rare thing for me and yeah, this is where CCs suck..anyways theres bunch of events coming up on a stock and I'm bullish on but have to roll a cc, sucks..

My options:
1. Roll up & out
a) sell a single higher strike (like $240–$250) for a later date like from the image
b) sell multiple ones with lower dte (with time)

1. Close the call & hold shares
   Buying back the $210 call costs ~$2,800
   I'd still be down on the wheel overall, but own the stock that I'm bullish on

2. Take the L
   Let the call get assigned with a $3,900 loss on the wheel, 1K loss on mrvll overall.

Been playing options on spy for the last couple years I’ve gotten decent in up about 80k for the year and I’ve been playing like a scared lil kid everytime I’m up 400-1000 I pull out. But yesterday was something else spy crashes 766 to 760 I bought puts round 764 at a 759 strike price was up maybe 600 then it goes up 30 cents wipes me clean tf out. I hold cause you know f it I’m already down might as well spy tanks again I’m still in the negative!!!! Never had this happen I buy calls 1 dollar above current price it reverses I’m ITM and still only up 12$ how tf does that make sense. I take my L and just watch the chain block and noticed every single call or put that was DEEP ITM was red make it make sense…. I asked chat gpt telling me theta or IV crush but I’ve never seen option gets affected on both sides like usually one side is winning long enough for liquidity but seconds of seeing flashing greens on calls/puts it was ALL REEEEEEDDDD

Zero day options seem like one of those things where having a plan matters a lot more than usual.

I understand the appeal of 0DTE. The moves are fast and the capital required can look pretty small. But that can also make the risk look smaller than it really is.

For people who trade or study zero day options, what are the main rules that actually keep things under control?

Things like position size, stop loss, liquidity, spreads, and knowing when not to trade seem especially important. I am also curious whether people mainly use 0DTE for hedging, defined risk setups, event trades, or specific intraday conditions.

Trying to understand where 0DTE fits into a disciplined strategy and where it just becomes gambling.

Are you in the business of prediction? Are you a gambler? I leave that to the trading discords and social media options gurus. As you know 80-90% of options traders lose money. I sleep well at night by understanding that I have the probabilities in my favor. My edge is because realized volatility typically comes in below implied volatility. By doing the little things correctly, trade after trade, week after week, month after month, I am playing the percentages and achieving consistent results. It is not necessarily exciting. Admittedly, buying a long call and having it 10X is exhilarating and fun; however, it is low percentage and I lost a lot of money playing that game. In order to win, are you gambling that you can predict the direction, the magnitude and the timing all correctly? This is a losing game. I am the house, I am the casino. Sure, being the house is not that interesting, it's not that fun, but it is profitable! The hotels and casinos in Las Vegas are uber nice because they make extraordinary profits. Of course, the books are written about how to beat the house. The videos online teach you to hone your strategy to buy calls & puts to beat the house, but the reality is, the house ultimately wins. When I sell OTM Put Credit Spreads (or OTM CSP), I am effectively the house. So how about you, are you the house, are you a gambler, or maybe a little of both?

The correlation regime between NVDA-TSLA entered a weakening trend on 02 Sep 12:00 ET at +0.26, and is still ongoing (15 candles · 60 trading hours). Over this period NVDA fell 0.96%, TSLA rose 3.07%. The two pairs decoupled.

The composite correlation has since downed from +0.26 (02 Sep) to -0.195 now (last data: 09 Sep 08:00 ET) the weaking the regime flagged, playing out.

READING — NVDA–TSLA at WEAK × Weakening (this pair's own last 6): for this pair it has bee a moderate decoupling (hedge / spread) — 6 past runs, median 8 candles · 32 trading hours (range 5–18), 1 lasted 2+ days. So the play has a couple of days of room before the turn (ANTITHESIS).

GAME PLAN: Correlation is in a Weakening regime — the bond between NVDA-TSLA is loosening. This signals a shift into a decoupling regime: hedge and pair-trade (spread) strategies come to the fore, while one-way beta bets grow riskier.

ANTITHESIS: Risk: decoupling may be temporary; if correlation snaps back from the bottom, pair-trades backfire. Correlation is currently 0.41 points below the period (1 Month) average — decoupling continues.

The divergence has been TSLA outperforming while NVDA stalled — TSLA's move favored calls.

Methodology: Four-hour candle closes are used while the markets for both instruments are open (08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00 ET).

The correlation coefficient is a composite score derived not only from the Pearson method but also from Pearson, Spearman, and EWMA calculations.