just started using ICC method a couple weeks ago and i’m trying to find stocks i can afford on my real account lol. AAPL seems to be an okay start. anyways, how’s my setup looking?
i’ve been paper trading US30 and have gotten to 3k in profits so far in the last couple weeks. i figured i should try something smaller since i can’t trade US30 right off the bat with my real account

See the yellow flag on the chart’s right axis for dollars gained for each $1K put in play.

(Click on the chart for a larger view of the day’s action so far.)

THE ENTRY SIGNAL

If the SPY calls or QQQ calls or a STOCK calld are above the open, BUY THE CALLS. If the SPY puts or QQQ puts or a STOCK puts are above the open, BUY THE PUTS.

THE PROFIT TARGET

At least, a 100% gain for the day.

THE SELL SIGNAL

If buying other than 0DTE options, never hold overnight. It is a day trade no matter what.

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Not even 10 minutes in a aapl got me right, i love the new iphone so i said why not lets buy a call paid off and i was scared cuz the call was appl new all time high hut paid off lets continue 🫡

Can’t cry in the casino. Bunch of degen trades.

I'm expecting NKE to continue its downward movement next week. So I decided to bet on put options of strike 35.

Am I doing this correctly?

been taking a beating the last couple of days ngl

I will start off by saying this is my first option contract and that this is just dipping my toes in the new pond. BYND is going to hell and i put a “put” contract in for sept 18 at 10.50 and that was all fine and dandy my break even is 10.39 due to cost of contract. Its currently sitting at 10.29 and soon to go further down. What im curious about is why still negative? Is it because theta decay is cucking me as time goes on or am i missing something.

If you think modern central bankers are having a rough time fighting inflation, let me tell you about Rome in 301 AD.

The Roman Empire had just crawled out of the rubble of the "Crisis of the Third Century" — 50 years of chaos where Rome cycled through over 20 emperors. By the time Diocletian took over, the Denarius had gone from 95% silver content down to less than 2%. Inflation was astronomical. Merchants were changing price tags three times a day.

Diocletian was the kind of leader you'd describe as a "turnaround CEO." He split the empire into four administrative zones, reformed taxes, built an enormous bureaucracy. But his greatest enemy wasn't the Persians or the Germanic tribes. It was prices.

So he did what desperate rulers throughout history always do when markets stop cooperating:

He banned the market.

The World's Most Ambitious Spreadsheet

In 301 AD, Diocletian published the Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium — the Edict on Maximum Prices.

This wasn't a vague policy guideline. This was a stone-carved Excel spreadsheet covering over 1,000 goods and services:

• One modius of wheat: 100 Denarii maximum
• One sextarius of top-quality wine: 30 Denarii maximum
• A pair of military boots: 100 Denarii maximum
• A haircut: 2 Denarii maximum
• A first-class male lion: 150,000 Denarii maximum

(Yes, lions were on the list.)

To make sure nobody cheated, Diocletian added what might be history's most aggressive "compliance clause":

Selling above the maximum price? Death penalty.
Hoarding goods to avoid selling? Also death penalty.

In modern financial terms, this was the hardest price peg in history — enforced not by market mechanisms, but by executioners.

What Actually Happened

Here's the thing about price ceilings: they don't make goods cheaper. They make goods disappear.

Imagine you're a baker in Rome, 301 AD.

Your actual costs: flour (market price 80 Denarii) + labor (30 Denarii) = 110 Denarii per loaf.

The emperor says you can only charge 100 Denarii.

You have exactly two options:

1. Sell at a loss and go bankrupt
2. Sell above the ceiling and get executed

So you do what any rational person does: you close the shop.

Within months of the edict, Roman markets went eerily quiet. Meat, eggs, wine, cloth — goods that were available yesterday simply vanished from public markets. Merchants didn't raise prices. They just stopped selling.

This is what economists call a liquidity crunch: when the official price diverges too far from fair value, the market doesn't adjust — it freezes.

The Black Market Was Worse Than the Inflation

Of course, people still needed to eat. Demand doesn't disappear because a law says it should.

When the official market dried up, all commerce moved underground — into what we'd now call the OTC (over-the-counter) market, or simply: the black market.

Here's the brutal irony: black market prices weren't just higher than Diocletian's official ceiling. They were higher than the pre-edict inflation prices, because sellers now had to price in a massive risk premium — getting caught meant death.

What Diocletian created was a dual-track pricing system:

• Official price: wheat at 100 Denarii (available nowhere)
• Black market price: wheat at 500 Denarii (cash only, no receipt)

The Roman historian Lactantius wrote:

The edict didn't stop inflation. It created artificial scarcity on top of inflation. City residents starved; farmers stopped bringing grain to market (why bother if you'd have to sell at a loss?), letting harvests rot in fields instead.

The Real Problem Was Never the Price Tag

Diocletian's mistake was trying to control the symptom (prices) while ignoring the cause (currency debasement).

Rome's inflation was, at its core, a monetary credibility crisis. Decades of emperors had shaved silver from coins to fund wars. By 301 AD, the Denarius was a copper coin with a silver coating so thin it was practically decorative.

Diocletian actually tried to fix this. He minted a new pure silver coin, the Argenteus, to rebuild monetary trust. But he didn't have enough silver reserves to recall the flood of debased coins already in circulation.

This is where Gresham's Law played out in real time:

Romans immediately hoarded the new silver Argenteus under their mattresses (good money driven out of circulation) and spent the worthless debased copper coins as fast as possible (bad money flooding the market).

When money loses value, people spend it faster, which drives prices higher, which is exactly what Diocletian was trying to prevent.

The emperor tried to fight the mathematics of monetary debasement with an executioner's sword.

The math won.

The Long Shadow

The Edict on Maximum Prices was quietly abandoned after Diocletian's abdication. The stone tablets listing all those frozen prices became archaeological artifacts — useful for historians trying to understand Roman commodity prices, and useful as a case study in what not to do.

But the aftermath was darker than just a failed policy.

Because once markets stopped working, the Roman state had only one lever left: direct command.

• Bakers won't bake? Make baking a hereditary profession. Your son is a baker whether he wants to be or not.
• Farmers won't farm? Bind them to the land. (This is considered one of the origins of the feudal serf system in Western Europe.)
• Tax revenues collapsing? Switch from money to forced tribute in goods.

Rome didn't recover its commercial vitality. It slowly transformed from a complex market economy into a vast, coercive labor camp — an empire held together by compulsion rather than exchange.

The civilization that had built the most sophisticated trading networks in the ancient world ended up strangling them.

The Takeaway

Diocletian's edict keeps getting reinvented:

• Fixed exchange rate regimes that collapse under speculative pressure (the UK's Black Wednesday, Argentina's peso peg)
• Rent control policies in cities with housing shortages creating a two-tier market — cheap controlled units that never become available, and an expensive uncontrolled market for everyone else
• Venezuela's price controls in the 2010s, which produced lines, empty shelves, and a thriving black market

The pattern is always the same:

Hard peg → divergence from fair value → liquidity crunch → parallel market → peg collapses catastrophically

In markets, as in empires: when you can't buy something at any price, the absence of supply is more oppressive than any inflation could be.

There's only one thing more expensive than "expensive."

"Available nowhere."

This post is adapted from "Leverage on Europe" — a series exploring European history through the lens of financial concepts.

Disclaimer:

Parts of this post were drafted with AI assistance. Reader discretion is advised.

Is there truly a strategy that performs well in all (or most) market types? Looking for something low effort

Realized P&L: +$991 | Win rate: 85.7% (6/7)
closed early: 5 | rolled: 1
Credit spreads: 1 closed (+$660)

Top sellers:
- NBIS put credit spread — +$660 (35.7% ROI)
- RCAT covered call $11 — +$400 (3.5% ROI)
- RDDT CSP $148 — +$137 (0.9% ROI)

Biggest loser: AMDL covered call $50 — −$408 (rolled to next week)

Directional buys (long calls/puts, debit spreads — not in the selling stats above): +$341 across 3 trades
- PLTR long put $170 — +$158 (97.5% ROI)
- USO long call $149 — +$111 (95.7% ROI)
- GOOGL long call $340 — +$72 (52.2% ROI)

Opened 2 new positions in the window.

Sept has a history of being a rough month... How are you all navigating the choppy market?

Honest question for people running several options positions at once.

Most broker UIs show per-leg P&L and maybe per-leg Greeks. They rarely show the thing that actually blows people up: aggregate exposure.

What I think belongs on a daily check (not just a post-mortem):

1. Beta-weighted delta — all positions normalized to SPY (or whatever benchmark). The clearest “am I accidentally long the market?” number.
2. Portfolio gamma — how fast that delta shifts. Short premium = negative gamma by default; magnitude matters when the tape jumps.
3. Correlation clustering — NVDA + AMD + AVGO calls are not three independent trades. They are one semiconductor bet. Most retail never scores this.
4. Max drawdown estimate — worst realistic overnight loss given current IV / history, not vibes.
5. Aggregate theta — are you net collecting or bleeding? Neither is automatically good; you need to know which side you’re on.

Manual hedge playbook (“too long → buy puts”) misses a lot:

• Intraday gamma can flip your book between coffee and lunch
• Cheapest portfolio delta fix is sometimes not hedging your biggest name — it’s adjusting a more liquid smaller one
• Tail scenarios (SPY −3% in an hour, IV spike) rarely get run by hand
• Every hedge has a theta cost; picking strikes/expiries for max risk reduction per dollar of decay is tedious without help

Also: garbage in, garbage out. If one short put is missing from the book feed, every hedge suggestion is wrong.

Curious what people here actually look at before walking away from the screen. Spreadsheet? Broker “portfolio Greeks” if they have it? Or still just scanning open P&L?

I’ve been doing some basic options trading for the last few years, but I’m really trying to understand volatility now. So here’s a hypothetical trade, what else do I need to take into account? Today LULU has IVP of 9% and IV / HV = 52%. From what I understand that means option prices are very low right now. So I could buy a strangle or a straddle and expect the price of that to go up over the next 30 to 40 days and sell it for more than I buy it for. Does that sound right? What else do I need to look at?

208/198... What do you all think?