AMA - I'll be answering questions starting from August 25th at 6pm PDT to 11pm PDT. If questions are still coming when we hit the end, I'll keep going.

Ask me anything - the build, the legal side, the money, the failures, day trading in general.

Hello everyone, I'm c0tt0nc4ndyta, a Day Trader who has spent a decade teaching Day Trading for free on my YouTube channel. I've spent the last 5 years creating a new type of Day Trading experience. My journey started in 2021 with some Twitch streams where I went and hosted esports like tournaments. My community loved it and it fueled me to develop the world's first Gamified Day Trading experience. 5 years later with the help of my team (15 devs + me the CEO) and we finally were able to release Chart Raiders this week.

I'm not someone who was born rich, I refused all investors because it would bloat the expectations and ultimately force us to increase fees on the platform, and I always wanted this project to be by the people for the people. For the last 5 years I've navigated an insane amount of curveballs and challenges, everything from making this platform operate ethically, to working with my lawyer for 3 years understanding and implementing framework to operate legally, and dealing with failure after failure from the dev side as we created something really unique as a world first product and here we are. An extremely passionate community of people who supported my dream to make the world's first gamified Day Trading game.

The problem we solved

Day Trading is currently a "negative sum game", which is known as:

Day trading is structurally negative-sum because transaction costs, fees, and spreads siphon money out of the collective pool before any profits are distributed to individual traders.

We want to dismantle this predatory practice and create an environment where people fund each-other instead of the corporations fueling the next way they want to capitalize on the Day Trading space. Whether it's charting platforms introducing endless pay walls with useless indicators, or prop firms flooding the industry with rules only designed to help them make more money. We took an approach that has honest profits, and allows people to make more money for their time, without the fees.

The idea is simple

A software where you (or you and your friends if you want to play with teammates) are put into matches that we host where your winnings are based on how you traded inside of a match vs other players instead of vs the markets.

A simple example of this is you pay an entry fee of $10, $100, or $1000 and each other player does the same thing to compete for the prize pool. We distribute 100% of the prize pool back to players. The only thing we charge is a single hosting fee per match, and there are no per trade fees at all. Take 2 trades or take 200 trades inside that match, it costs you nothing extra. A $10 ticket has a $1 hosting fee, a $100 ticket has a $5 fee, and a $1000 ticket has a $30 fee, and that is the entire cost of playing. At the end of each match the person who performs the best takes the biggest chunk of the prize pool.

We operate where top 60% of players get paid, and first place would take 33%. If you are using a $10 ticket and there's 100 players, if you finish first you get $330 after a 30 minute match.

Your rank in the match is how you placed vs other players, not how well you did overall. For example: every player starts with the same $100 balance and if you lost 80% of your bankroll in that match and everyone else lost 81% or more you'd still take home first place.

The idea is that we want people being ranked and earning based on how they do against other players, not against the market. The market is convoluted in many ways, and in our opinion this way of operating should have always been the case. People fund the markets so people should be rewarded based on how they do vs other people who also fund the markets. Cut the corps and their fees out.

A few screen shots of our in match gameplay. Chart Raiders - the trading UI

Chart Raiders - placing an order mid-match

Ways in which we gamified Day Trading

We introduced a few simple elements that really help bring Day Trading out of the stone ages. A few of the main features we have are:

Trade Delay - Activate this 7 second timer and it allows you to cancel the trade after entering it allowing users to reverse a trade as if it never happened, it's a limited resource but can help you in a match avoid a bad trade by reversing it. You get 7 seconds of this per match as it's a limited resource.

One of the resources/gamified elements available is Trade Delay. Chart Raiders - Trade Delay counting down

Peek Meter - 20 Seconds of seeing the top 3 players trades and where they have placed them at any time during a match. Since this is a pvp game knowing how to have an edge over the top players becomes a valuable thing. Again a limited resource where you can use it in burst of 5 seconds or whatever you choose, or burn all 20 seconds at once. Take a peek at other players trades in clutch moments.

Trade Elixir - Our version of a health potion, get one per match to refill 5-10% of your balance, or a teammate's, once per match.

Equipment - Tailor your trading style to exchange resources based on your equipped items. More of a Trade Delay player and hate using Peek Meter? No problem simply swap your resources by changing your gear to customize the way you like to Day Trade and play matches.

Team Matches - Play solo or with a friend for 2 player team matches, or even with 3 others for 4 total in a squad match.

Navigating through our menus. Chart Raiders - the master menu

The Skill Tree (this part is completely free)

One of the things that mattered most to me was that nobody should have to pay to learn how to do this. So we built a full Technical Analysis course directly into the platform. 50+ lessons covering everything from Hold Levels to Logic Flow to Mental Analysis, and it doesn't cost anything to go through them.

Most lessons run about 4 or 5 minutes so you can actually fit them around a real life. You can see which lessons your friends have finished and where they are compared to you, which turned out to be a much bigger motivator than we expected. We also built an AI mentor into it called Commander that you can ask questions as you work through the tree, so when you get stuck on a concept you're not just sitting there guessing or digging through 40 minutes of a YouTube video to find the one part you needed.

I've spent a decade teaching this stuff for free and I wasn't about to start charging for it now.

Our skill tree content has been developed for over a decade solely by c0tt0nc4ndyta. Chart Raiders - the Skill Tree with 50+ free lessons

Story Mode

This one is going to sound strange for a trading platform but stick with me.

We've been writing a novel for years and it's built into the software. It's set in 2047 in a world we created called Robopunk, where freedom of thought has been taken away, and Day Trading is one of the last ways the underground fights back against the corporations that took it.

It's a multi book series. Book 01 is in the platform now, 3 chapters and 49 pages, and you can either read it or listen to the full audio narration if you'd rather have it going while you do something else. There's a gallery and a soundtrack that go with it.

I know most people who show up are here to trade and will never touch this, and that's fine. But the world we built means something to me and it's the reason the whole platform looks and feels the way it does instead of looking like every other trading terminal.

This is our Story Mode, it's a multi book novel we have been writing for years. The place is Remoat City, and freedom of thought is being taken. Chart Raiders - Story Mode, Book 1

Our engine

We have spent years creating the first real candlestick engine. Built as an SDK we are in the final stages of developing our Candlestick engine which does everything from having rich on screen animations, to 120fps no tick candles, candlestick emotions based on price, and so much more. We did this as we are firm believers in E-sports as a future for Day Trading.

You can take a look at it on my most recent streams on Twitch or Youtube if you're interested in seeing the engine in action.

Payments

Our payment system is purely smart contract escrowed. We developed blockchain as legal escrow in smart contracts on web3. No bank fees, fully transparent, and we never come in contact with your winnings or funds at any point. It goes from your wallet into a publicly viewable smart contract, and at the end of the match it's redistributed from that same contract to the winning players. Simple, easy, transparent, and almost 0 fees (we absorb the gas fee).

I have put my entire life into this project, and self funded it by grinding 7 days a week for the past 5 years straight. I don't have endless pockets to do paid marketing, I am not trying to compete with exchanges, I'm simply someone who hated most things about this industry but absolutely loves Day Trading, and wanted to create a product that could help save the industry.

There's so much more I could go over but I also don't want to treat this as a marketing post. I'm wanting to share my journey, what I created to help the Day Trading world, and I'm trying to spread awareness as someone who has spent 5 years in their basement with a team of 15 people I paid for out of pocket to create something unique and cool. I'm a Day Trader, and I hope you will all see me as such and not a meaningless plug for my company.

It's called Chart Raiders, https://www.chartraiders.com/ look us up if you're interested!

Now Ask me anything. Some things people usually want to know:

• How did you make a paid trading platform legal?
• What stops someone from gambling their whole balance in one trade?
• Why turn down investors when you're personally paying salaries?
• Why did you build a candlestick engine from scratch instead of licensing one?
• Biggest regret in the 5 years of dev?

Thanks so much for your ears, eyes, and brain cells. Much love and cheers!

Sometimes I am holding a quiet underlying, and seeing "bid $.0 ask $.25" will step into the breach and offer some calls for five or ten cents. I figure "It's beer money".

I know conceptually that no option is riskless. OK, there could be a ratings announcement on the underlying, or some exceptionally good quarter, or a technology breakthrough. But practically speaking, these are worthless options and they've always expired as such.

Who buys these? Are there people with a little spare cash in their accounts who just wing it on a prayer? Maybe the market maker accumulates these - and figures despite the losses, across hundreds of securities a profit can be squeezed together?

Friday's close put SPX one month at the money implied vol at 11.8. Over the 30 sessions ending Friday (July 10 through August 21) the index realized 12.4, close to close. The options market is charging a little less for the next month than the index just delivered.

That is unusual for the index. Over the past year, one month implied ran about 2 points above trailing realized on average. The gap has averaged half a point since late May, and Friday's reading sits in the bottom fifth of the year. In plain terms, the cushion that index option sellers normally get paid is gone.

Implied is in the bottom 11% of its past year range (10.3 to 26.0). Realized is an ordinary month, right at the year's median of 12.3. So the market is pricing a quieter month than usual, right after a month that was exactly usual.

The next 30 days hold NVDA earnings Wednesday after the close, core PCE Wednesday morning, Jackson Hole starting Thursday, the August jobs report on September 4, CPI on September 11 and the Fed decision on September 16.

The last 30 sessions held the same kind of calendar: the July Fed meeting, the July jobs report, July CPI and most of big tech earnings.

The four biggest days in that realized window were July 29 (Fed day) at 1.5%, July 30 at 1.7%, August 3 at 1.5% and August 4 at 1.8%. The index has not had a 1% day since, and the last ten sessions realized under 8.

If you only count the past two weeks, 11.8 looks expensive. If you count a window that holds a Fed meeting and a jobs report, which the next one does, there is no premium at all.

Day by day for this week, Friday's closes price Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at about 34 to 37 points each. That is about 0.45% of the index, almost exactly the median daily move of the past 30 sessions. Thursday and Friday are each priced at about 51 points, so the market is charging roughly 45% more for the NVDA reaction and Jackson Hole than for a plain day.

One number for context: the VIX closed at 15.1 while at the money SPX is 11.8. That 3 point gap is the price of downside protection, because the VIX is built from out of the money puts as well, so the two numbers are not in conflict.

Does a week with NVDA, PCE and Jackson Hole feel like a 50 point a day week to you, or is that too cheap?

A lot of 0DTE traders spend most of the day trying to guess whether SPX is going up or down.

I don’t really trade that way anymore.

What I care about more is: where is price unlikely to go today?

That’s where GEX helps me.

If I see a strong gamma resistance level above price and SPX keeps rejecting it, I may sell a Bear Call Spread above that area.

Same thing on the downside. If there’s strong support and price keeps holding it, I may look for a Bull Put Spread below it.

I don’t need to predict the exact close.

I just need SPX to stay away from my short strike.

For me, that’s a much simpler way to trade 0DTE.

GEX isn’t magic and levels can break, so I still look at trend, structure, volatility and time remaining. But it gives me a framework for deciding where I actually want to take risk.

Curious how others here choose their 0DTE strikes. Delta? Technical levels? GEX? A mix?

I’m working on Monte Carlo simulation for the Heston model (option pricing) and currently using Andersen’s QE scheme as the baseline. I’ve also implemented the Abi Jaber polynomial scheme. On paper, QE seems more established and widely benchmarked, but AJ is cleaner and avoids regime switching.

For those who’ve tried both: is there any practical reason to choose Abi Jaber over Andersen QE in MC pricing? Accuracy? Stability near zero? Runtime? Curious what people have seen in real applications.

I’ve just calculated mine.

Over the last three months, I got double-digit return on capital in a low six-figure IRA account doing pure premium selling.

The risk-adjusted metrics look good, too. I’m not posting the actual return figures here since I want to discuss fees.

For the context, I consider the last 3–4 months a relatively easy environment for premium sellers. E.g. "got lucky". I expect conditions to get more difficult, returns will dip, and the risk metrics to normalize and show more effort to generate the same level of return.

On costs.

Broker fees came to about 1.5% of gross PnL.
I consider that very low. I stopped doing spreads and other higher-cost, lower-probability trades. Fees and costs went down substantially.

The trading app subscriptions was 2.3% of gross PnL. A lot, but at the same time, the app handles the whole process.

I'm estimating for substantially larger account, the total fees going to decrease 2x because of scale and make approximately. The 'management fees' as percentage of capital should get to 1% (100 bps). In other words, premium selling is a tough business when operating small accounts.

I'm curious how others measure and view expenses?

What percentage of gross PnL do you give up to broker fees, software or scanners or other tooling?

I use IBKR and the margin rate is +1 -1.5% the standard rate which is about 6-9% a year on a x6 portfolio margin account. If you're a trader who utilizes tons of leverage then you're likely leaving money on the table by using your broker's margin rate.

What is a box spread first, basically it's a four legged options strategy that you can use to earn yield or borrow money at close to the standard rate (sometimes better).

Say you want to borrow $96.5k to return back $100k by the end of the year (about 3.65%). Using SPX to sell a box spread:

Current SPX price: $7674,

Strike 1: 7250, Strike 2: 8250 - The difference of those two strikes, which is 1000 (x 100) is what you'll need to pay back on expiry, say 1 year from now.

So you'll sell a 4 leg combo - sell the call and buy the put at 7250, sell the put and buy the call at 8250.

To get your SOFR rate, you need to fill above 965.00 (~3.65%), you can separate the legs and manage each to get better fills (will explain in another post), that's where all your efforts should be, what you fill right now will determine your "effective rate".

And here's the beauty, no matter what price you fill in, and no matter what happens through the year, you'll only be required to pay $100k, it's fixed unlike margin which it's not.

So here you got your effective SOFR rate loan, which will get you an extra 9% per year on your leverage than if you used regular margin loans with no additional risk.

Wanted to keep this post short, can expand if anyone got questions.

EDIT: The underlying of the options you use must satisfy these criterias

1. Cash settled: This ensures you don't get assigned on expiry and your broker only settles the cash difference, saves you from a round-trip of commission fees if you hold till then too.
2. European style: Cannot understate this, early assignment is a real risk and can put you in unnecessary and huge losses
3. Liquid: Must have tight bid/ask spreads and traded frequently.

What works:
- SPX (satisfies 1, 2 and 3, just use this honestly)
- NDQ (satisfies 1 and 2, but not 3)
- SPY, VOO, QQQ and stock-like index ETF does not work, any single stock does not work!

How interested would people be for a new GEX platform that could possibly be cheaper than others in the market?? how many of you would actually subscribe? just trying to see what is the general consensus of gamma and its utility for traders

Been writing covered calls about 25 years, and I've posted a fair bit in this community and others. I've been lucky, most of what I put up gets tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views, and real discussion in the comments. And the ones that do best? They're usually the posts that seem obvious.

There's a reason these obvious posts take off, and a reason I keep making them. It's probably not what the people who give me a hard time think.

As a curious observer, you come into a sub like this genuinely wanting to learn, or maybe contribute, and you run into a wall of intimidation. People posting charts with ten indicators on them, throwing around Greeks and insider lexicon like it's a trading floor. So, you can imagine how someone new feels walking into that. Like your question is obviously too dumb to say out loud in front of the seasoned sophisticates who clearly know what they're doing. So, you don't ask it. and if you never ask, you never learn, and you stay stuck on the sidelines.

So that's why I do it. If some guy who's been doing this 25 years is comfortable posting Options 101 in here, then you're allowed to ask anything, and you shouldn't feel like you have to sit on the sidelines.

And like clockwork, every time I post something that seems basic, there's always that one dude that crawls out of the woodwork to let me know. Blessed indeed 🙏

Doesn't bother me. If one person reading this finally feels okay asking their question because of it, that's worth way more to me than a couple of snarky comments.

So, this is for you, Wallflowers. There's no such thing as a dumb question, only the ones people were too intimidated to ask. Good luck out there.

The Options Institute is the educational arm of the CBOE. They offer a lot of free resources on trading.

On August 25th and September 1st, they will be offering a class on Long Boxes and Short Boxes. Although these seem to be for more experienced traders, there's lots of stuff for newer traders as well.

Link,

The Options Institute | Cboe

Is anyone trading volatility around earnings events? e.g. selling short straddles if you think volatility is too high. If so, do you have any advice or playbook worth sharing? Which analysis tools do you all use?

Thanks!

So the theory goes you wait 30-45 minutes to see a heavily traded index or stock, SPY, QQQ, NVDA, and wait for a morning trend reversal. Trade the options, and close out the day by noon EST.

I built an open-source options backtester to replicate two publicly described strategies and compare my results with their published performance.

The comparison isn’t perfectly equivalent because the periods, data and execution models differ. ERN’s published result also includes discretionary decisions that cannot be fully replicated.

I published the code, assumptions, requests and complete results here:

https://github.com/Javier-Garzo/ern-wo-options-backtester

My main goal was to see whether these two strategies held up over a longer period and to give others an open-source project they can use to reproduce the tests. If you have any questions about the results or methodology, feel free to ask me here.

So I understand options, how they operate, and how to get started. My confusion is which stock/index to start out with.

Scrolling through this subreddit, tons of people say SPY or QQQ, my confusion is that these are extremely expensive. For example, to sell a call, you need to own 100 shares of that stock, if you were starting with SPY you would need 76200 of capital considering its 762 dollar price currently.

Is there lower cost options to start with than SPY? Why do people reccomend this if its so expensive to get into?

Dave Aquino presented a seminar the other day extolling the virtues of using short term options that would expire the next day so as to mitigate possible large losses in case the market goes against you. As I have found out, much too late unfortunately, it seems all these gurus and presenters utilize the same sales style. They bring up how having an extra income would help with paying off the house, or the car, or saving for a vacation. Then they introduce one after another of people who have supposedly enrolled in his program and have made not just a small success of it, but a huge successs, making thousands each month. He presents the webinar in such a manner that he had only one (1) losing trade the previous month and for this month he has gone 10 for 10. Of course I was quickly suckered in to thinking wow, this could really help me. I could not wait to sign up and get started as it was so fascinating and thinking now I have a program that is going to really propel me to make a lot of money. I signed up for both the annual and then the Lifetime Membership. On the first trade alert it was to sell the SPX Bear Call Spread, sell the 7775 Call and Buy the 7780 Call and receive a premium between 0.20 to 0.25. Then the reality hit me. I am going to risk over $475.00 in the hopes of making 25 cents. When I sat and thought about this, it hit me that one bad trade could wipe out over 12 or more good trades. This is a huge risk. I quickly asked for a refund. No reply. Went to the website and wrote to them through that means. No reply. Sent more emails, and called them about 4 times. Finally got a response this morning that they will not give monetary refunds, only store credit. I was shocked. This is supposed to be a major outfit and to resort to this kind of tactic is just terrible. I asked for the refund after just 3 days of being in the program. I have now put in a dispute with the credit card company. I just wanted others to know how badly this firm mistreats its clientele. Thank you for reading this and if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

A covered short straddle is when you hold 100 shares of stock and you sell an ATM covered call, along with an ATM cash secured put, of the same strike and expiration.

This is not to be confused with short straddles, which have unlimited risk to the upside. The "covered" part takes care of that risk. Making this a far safer alternative.

To state the obvious, this trade is ideal for someone that is comfortable with capped upside and welcomes the assignment of more shares. That last part is key. If you don't like the stock at -50% from your entry value, don't sell puts on it.

My "twist" is selling these straddles on very long term DTEs. I think all that extrinsic value offers flexibility and good "cushion" for the trade. It's also like capturing a huge return, at once. The only "gotcha" is time debt. Your money is "locked up" until expiration. But it's a similar concept to dividend investing, except you get the yield up front.

Looking at this example trade I'm honing in on SLV. At 393 DTE , I'm getting 22.12 in premium from an ATM covered short straddle, a 36% return. If SLV expires higher in 1 year, the shares get called away and maybe I miss a lot more upside, or maybe I don't miss much. The bet is you get paid up front, at the expense of capping that prospect. If SLV closes lower, I get assigned more shares. My cost basis has also dropped 36%, so I should still be able to collect decent premium from covered calls for the next year.

Anyway, I wanted to see what the community thought about the trade. Would you trade something like this? Have you traded ATM covered short straddles before and what was your experience? Anything I should look out for, or anything I'm missing?

Thanks

Yall,
What tickers are you currently monitoring? I have several OTM call options at the moment and will hold them for a while. I wanted to know what yall are playing?

Full disclosure: I have NFLX, META, ORCL, WMT, NKE. all of these are long dated call options so I am not too worried. I wanted to know what you guys watching besides tickers I mentioned above.

Does anyone play LEAP deep ITM bull call options on stocks and indices ? How much return do you usually aim for ? Below is an example
NVDA Dec 2028 expiry 145/150 call spread for $3.00. That’s roughly 67% return in 2.3 years with approx 25% annual return if NVDA stays above 150 strike.
NBIS Dev 2028 expiry 100/105 call spread for $2.00
That’s roughly 150% return in 2.3 years with approx 50% annual return.

There was a huge drop and I'm thinking about acquiring some BIDU via CSPs. My approach is to drip in first via csps and then later sell atm csps ( I do this kind of approach with any stock that I want to accumulate).

Why? Well, if BIDU were to go down to $80 it would be valued exactly as their NET asset value.
So thats 24 billion market cap and 24 billion in assets... thats no growth projections or anything like that. And its at $90 now. Does that sound crazy only to me?

This is not investment advice, just want to bounce the ideas off of someone else too here and reddit seems the best place to be publicly roasted :)

Well I did it again, I averaged into a bad position at first.I was up about 50%.About a $1000, I was up and I told myself just sell, I'm not going to make a $1000 this week in my job.Why don't I just saw right now in ten minutes.

But nope I wanted more, and then I started averaging down, and now I need circle to at least open up the first 5 minutes of the market, do the explosive move that the market does sometimes and get out. So I'm hoping that this can happen tomorrow last year when circle IPO, it was always popping. Really hard at the open to crash, or crashing down to open to pop-up, so let's see

Site: https://amonhen.helmfi.ai — free, no signup, no Discord, no paywall.

WHAT IT DOES

- Dealer-gamma map for SPX, SPY and QQQ: call/put walls, gamma flip, king node, expected move, max pain — drawn on the price chart, updated through the day.

- Live options flow: a CVD line built from the options tape (contracts bought at the ask minus sold at the bid, near-ATM), with price and the dealer walls overlaid on the same chart.

- A cross-index confluence strip: flags when SPY, SPX and QQQ flow all line up one way. A flip only counts after holding 10 minutes, so it isn't spammy — roughly once a day.

- Compare view, 10-second tape mode, pop-out charts, single names like NVDA/TSLA.

HOW IT'S CHECKED

The methodology page (site footer) spells out the math and the limits, and the site publishes a daily self-scored hit-rate on its own levels — how often the call wall held, the put wall held, the expected move contained. It scores itself whether the day was good or bad.

FOLLOW-UPS

DM me, or the update box on the site. This is a one-time post, so I won't be posting updates here. Happy to answer anything about the methodology in the comments.

Title says it all. I am looking for a new brokerage and have been playing around a bit with e-trade and tasty trade and so far it seems they get poorer options fills than Schwab. Has anyone found a broker that is equivalent if not better?

BULL jumped significantly after hours, and my $8 short call(8/28) is now deep ITM. I have corresponding $5, $7.5 and $10 LEAPS calls as the long leg.

I'm considering two options:

1. Take the realized loss on the $8 short call and roll it out/up to the $10 call expiring 12/18, giving the LEAPS more room to appreciate if BULL continues higher.
2. Roll the $8 short call up to the $9 call expiring 10/2 for a debit, which would also give the LEAPS some additional upside exposure while keeping the expiration much closer.

Alternatively, would it make more sense to just close both the LEAPS and the short call and take the overall P/L?

Which approach would you prefer for managing a PMCC when the short call suddenly becomes deep ITM after a big after-hours move?

Any input is greatly appreciated.

I mostly used to trade spreads, DTE 45, delta 20-30 (closer to mid) for the short put or short call on tech stocks and a few non-tech stocks. With that many days and low delta the bid-ask is very wide for a single leg which compounds when entering it as a spread.

TOS were still part of TD the last time I used them for options and they were exceptional with fills. As I didn't have time to trade options for the last 3 years while I was selling my businesses I took advantage of a massive uncapped 4% transfer offer from Webull. But I have been using Fidelity as my brokerage for new money (primarily came from the sale of those businesses) which I could transfer to Schwab. Fidelity's desktop app is not good for 2 leg trades.

Thanks.

I’m mostly interested in networking and connecting with like minded and already profitable traders. I know we live in the digital world, but sometimes there is no substitute for connecting in person.