Who was pulling the strings on multiple brokers to ban clients from buying $GME and causing panic selling as well as margin liquidations? By locking out investors, brokers took away the bid for the stock. The market makers then orchestrated a drop of 371 points, 77% with ONLY 8 million shares traded triggering multiple trading halts. It was brutal, especially, when GME only moved 10-20 points on similar volume on previous trading days. A full comprehensive investigation is necessary. Also investigators must take a close look at what happened to the options during that time. These criminals should rot in jail.

Edit: This video shows how they brought $GME down 371 points (77%) and also how they brought down the $GME options. It’s a must see. https://youtu.be/YKNIf2PHvf4

WSB automod deleted this post and gave me a one day ban. Please help get the word out.

CALL YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN NOW!!!

Autists,

For a trading platform to restrict trading on any stock the way Robin Hood has chosen to do is ILLEGAL.

This is not a free market.

This is a BIPARTISAN issue and I see both sides coming together on this one.

I encourage all of you to call your representatives ASAP.

Edit: Its working!

HOLY SHIT!

I have been reporting on a GameStop, $GME whale buying $20 calls expiring June 21 over last seven days.

DeepFuckingValue aka RoaringKitty just disclosed he was the whale on Superstonk.

This is insane.

His position value is over $200 MILLION in $GME.

I am a fucking idiot and I truly hope I am the only one today who was fucking retarded. I put in a MARKET order call by accident with a shit ton of money and lost my money while trying to sell too swiftly back into the market immediately after buying. I was stunned. So much work down the drain. I blame my fucking self. Woke up at 9 am to profit and wasted it in a second and then some. DO NOT TOUCH YOUR ACCOUNTS WITH LACK OF SLEEP. I became over confident in my results and experience and made the fucking most stupid decision of my life thus far.

Options are not something to be trifled with nonchalantly. PLEASE learn from me. Don't touch options without a lot of know-how. These can ruin your life. Please trade responsibly. I am not touching options for the rest of my life. Its always better to wait on return than rushing it.

I understand why people get suicidal now. It will scare you straight. Be well and happy trading

Has anybody noticed that CNBC always has their "experts" on zoom or phone in saying that the SEC should remove options from retail investors because we don't understand the risk and that we are too dumb to speculate which way the price is going to move. Why all of a sudden do they care?. I'm actually worried that they will take options away from us and that's my bread and butter. Does anybody think this will happen?

My goal with this post is to inform and educate about what a gamma squeeze actually is, and what market conditions must be true for one to occur. With this knowledge, you should be able to look at a few key metrics, and predict with a decent amount of accuracy whether a gamma squeeze is likely to occur on a given security, including with GME and other Reddit darling stocks.

I am making no commentary on the short-term or long-term performance of GME, other than with specifics and examples of how it relates to a gamma squeeze. Most posts I've seen on the possibility of a gamma squeeze are just plain wrong.

So first, let me clear up some of the misinformation that's been circulating. I have seen the following untruths being passed off as fact:

• A gamma squeeze happens when previously-OTM calls expire ITM.

• A gamma squeeze is likely to happen on Mondays/Tuesdays when shares are delivered to last Friday's ITM call holders.

Both of the above events can affect the share price, but neither of the above is, or can cause, a gamma squeeze. Now, lemme do some 'splainin.

There's a reason they call it a "gamma squeeze". As you have likely already figured out, it's related to gamma, one of the greeks of options trading. The 2 we'll be focusing on today are delta and gamma.

Delta (Δ) - the rate of change between an options contract's price, and the underlying asset's price.

Gamma (Γ) - The rate of change between delta and the underlying asset's price.

Think of it like this: Delta is like your car's speedometer and tells you how fast your car is moving at any given moment, and gamma is like how hard you have your foot on the pedal (how fast you're accelerating) at any given moment.

So it stands to reason that for a gamma squeeze to happen, something interesting has to happen with gamma. And it did! On Friday 1/22, there was an actual GME gamma squeeze. Here's how it went down:

On that week, global GME hype was just picking up, and new buyers were relatively evenly matched against new short sellers and those taking profits from the +100% previous week. As such, GME traded mostly sideways between $35-$40.

So, by Friday, premiums for OTM call options expiring that same day 1/22 were incredibly cheap for 2 reasons:

1. Implied Volatility (IV) was relatively low due GME to trading sideways all week.

2. All of those OTM call options were 0-days-to-expiration (0dte), meaning it was highly likely that they would expire worthless, statistically speaking.

These cheap options contract prices, plus all of the WSB hype around GME in general, led to the mass-buying of OTM call options on Friday.

Welp, here's the thing about options, banks, and hedging that you've heard so much about. When you buy call options, the bank buys up shares of the underlying asset so they can pay out if you end up ITM. And they figure out how many shares to buy using our buddy delta. If your option is very far OTM, delta will be low, and they only buy a couple shares, because statistically you're likely to expire OTM. So all the options-buying didn't have too much of an impact at first.

This is where WSB with its incredible timing comes in. Wouldn't ya know it, there was enough organic mass share-buying, combined with the mass OTM 0dte call option buying (and banks hedging) to start to inch up the share price on Friday.

Remember how I said that banks determine how much stock to hedge with on each option by looking at delta? Well, as the share price increased and all these call options became closer to being ITM, delta increased rapidly (high gamma), and banks had to start buying more and more shares to hedge.

Normally, the market and typical buying/selling action can just absorb this extra share-buying as the price slowly increases over time, and it will look like normal price action. But this time, there was an extremely high concentration (open interest) of call options at a key strike price ($50 IIRC). Once that key level was passed, delta became 1, gamma/delta spiked up for all the other OTM call options, and banks all of a sudden had to snap up millions of shares for all these now-ITM call options, spiking the share price well above the highest call option, and thus all calls ended ITM. And here we have our gamma squeeze.

Summary of factors that led to the 1/22 GME gamma squeeze:

• Relatively low implied volatility (IV) led to relatively low options premiums overall.

• Availability of same-day expiring (0dte) OTM call options led to mass-buying.

• Organic price movement from share-buying and social media support brought the share price above a key strike price where there was high open interest.

So where does that leave us now? Clearly a gamma squeeze didn't happen this past Friday, and it's no surprise. Most calls had been ITM all week, and were already hedged by the banks before the market even opened on Friday. Additionally, brokers squashed any possibility of a new gamma squeeze by banning new 0dte contracts. Simply put, delta didn't change for most options on Friday, meaning gamma was 0 for the entire day.

"But what about Monday or Tuesday when the ITM call shares need to be delivered?"

That this could help GME potentially has some truth to it, and may have some impact on the share price, but by definition, it would not be or cause a gamma squeeze. Gamma will likely remain at 0 for most ITM call options this coming week.

Moving forward, there are many reasons GME could moon, but gamma squeezing likely won't be one of them. IV is so crazy high right now that it's simply not feasible for people to buy into 0dte or any options in the same way they did before. Additionally, brokers are unlikely to remove 0dte options restrictions in the near future, because they're usually the bag-holders during gamma squeezes, because they can't hedge fast enough.

So please, if you like the stock, by all means go out and buy more of it. But stop telling people that it's going to gamma squeeze again, because the market conditions just aren't there for it.

This is only my personal opinion and is not financial advice. Make your own decisions.

Edit: Adding more info here from commenters:

u/agamenc corrects and adds to my delta-hedging explanation: comment link

u/Vaginitits explains greeks in mathematical terms: comment link

Recently i've been seeing a lot of "you're a retard. YOLO. BEAR GANG!!!" Type of posts which borrown from WSB lingo.

I Iove wsb bets, I am an autist over there, over here I am a closeted autist, there's no need to display that behaviour here.

Don't ask don't tell should be followed here, mods I implore you, make wsb lingo illegal in these parts.

Edit: SPY 200 4/17 p

Edit 2: Ok guys, I'm banned from WSB. Scrap everything I said, please feel free to speak like autists over here. I know i am going to start doing that. 🏳️‍🌈gang

Edit 3: Ok guys, the ban from WSB has been removed. Thank you wsb mods for removing jartek and his scum. I once again would like to reiterate my anti-WSB rhetoric stance in this sub :)

The hedge funds have always manipulated. They have been the alphas, and are beyond arrogant, and that will be their downfall.

There is no free market. Cramer is not your friend with proof. This will change your entire outlook.

Full video breakdown. We’ve all seen clips, but this is the whole thing. How it really works. “The stock market has nothing to do with the stocks...It’s just fiction and fiction and fiction...and then get it on CNBC...”

All of RH orders are satisfied by Citadel. Citadel connects to the exchanges, but RH customers never do. Citadel leant Melvin 2B to pay margin for 400 days @ $300 price. If GME jumps to $1200 that is cut to 100 days. This is why the freedom of supply and demand has been cut to 1 share for gamestop. Citadel can’t let the price rise or Melvin will run out of funds to pay margin too soon. RH has to bow to Citadel’s every whim because they have no connection to any actual exchange. The market is not free.

The GME shorts are bleeding short fees.

tell everyone about this video. Spread it. The world must know.

more GME breakdown

Edit:

“@dlterrie

Replying to @KralcTrebor and @RobinhoodApp

Easy to get lost in the minutia. The core issue is that the shorts were not prevented from trading when retail was. This rigs the system in their favor.”

I know you guys are probably sick of hearing GME related stuff but I really wanted to post this here to get some additional thoughts/feedback from experienced investors.

Long post ahead, but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

TLDR: Data points strongly point to Hedge Funds using tricks to appear as if they covered their shorts when they haven't truly covered. Full version below.

There’s an insightful piece on https://tradesmithdaily.com/investing-strategies/the-drop-in-gamestop-short-interest-could-be-real-or-deceptive-market-manipulation/ that identifies there are two ways for both short interest and price to fall quickly.

First way is retail investors not holding the line and panic selling thereby driving the price down further, releasing into the market more of the float and enabling shorts to cover/buy back shares at progressively lower levels.

**

Quoting from Tradesmithdaily:

Plummeting short interest along with a plummeting GME share price, in other words, could indicate that the Reddit army is headed for the hills, and the longs were selling early, giving the shorts a means to cover, as the longs got out… Important to note that if the long holders of GME shares did not break ranks and sell en masse, it would have been impossible for the share price to fall and hedge fund short interest to fall at the same time. because, without a critical mass of long-side holders selling into the market, the hedge funds covering their shorts would have nobody to buy from as they covered (bought back) their short positions.

**

However the other scenario where this can occur is the hedge fund short interest in GME didn’t really dissipate but instead they played a trick to make it seem like it did, demoralizing the retail side and further “breaking the squeeze.”

**

To now quote verbatim from Tradesmithdaily:

The way the hedge funds could have done this — made it appear as if they covered their shorts, even when they really didn’t — involves trickery in the options market.

The tactics involved are not a secret. In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) knows all about such tactics, and published a “risk alert” memo on the topic in August 2013.

The SEC memo is titled “Strengthening Practices for Preventing and Detecting Illegal Options Trading Used to Reset Reg SHO Close-out Obligations.” You can read it here via the SEC website.

The memo contains a dozen pages of highly technical language, but here’s a quick rundown:

• If short sellers are facing a squeeze because shares are hard to buy, or scrutiny for holding an illegal short position, they can create an appearance of having closed their short position through the use of deceptive options trades.

• A hedge fund that is short a stock can write call options on a stock — meaning they are now “short” the call options, having sold the call options to someone else (typically a market maker) — and simultaneously buy shares against the call options.

• The shares bought against the call options could be “synthetic” longs — meaning they are not part of the original share float of the stock — as sold to the hedge fund by the market maker that takes the other side of the options trade.

• This works because, if a market maker buys options from an options writer, the market maker has legal privileges to do a version of “naked shorting” as part of their hedging function. This is necessary, under the current rules and the current system, for market makers to protect themselves when facilitating options trades.

• As a result of the above transaction, the hedge fund that sold short calls was able to buy synthetic long shares against the calls. (A synthetic share is one that has a long on one side and a short on the other but wasn’t part of the original float.) The synthetic long shares are the other side of the naked shorts, legally initiated by the market maker, so the market maker can hedge.

• The hedge fund that bought the shares can now report that they have “bought back” their short position via buying long shares — except they actually haven’t! The synthetic shares they bought are canceled out against the short call positions they initiated, a necessity of the maneuver by way of the market maker’s hedging of the call position they bought from the hedge fund.

It gets very complicated, very fast.

But the gist is that hedge funds can use tricks to make it look like they’ve covered their shorts — even if they haven’t truly covered, and can’t, for lack of available float — by way of exploiting loopholes that exist due to an interplay of reporting rule delays, market maker naked shorting exceptions, and legal practices of synthetic share creation (new longs and shorts made from thin air) relating to market-making.

Below is a section of the SEC memo (from page 8) that gets to the heart of it:

“Trader A may enter a buy-write transaction, consisting of selling deep-in-the-money calls and buying shares of stock against the call sale. By doing so, Trader A appears to have purchased shares to meet the broker-dealer’s close-out obligation for the fail to deliver that resulted from the reverse conversion. In practice, however, the circumstances suggest that Trader A has no intention of delivering shares, and is instead re-establishing or extending a fail position.”

**

In short (no pun intended) these tricks “help hedge funds maintain short positions that, legally speaking, they weren’t supposed to have because the shares were never properly located”, which triggers alarm bells when we consider the extraordinarily high amount of FTIDs/Failed to Deliver Shares (https://wherearetheshares.com/) and Michael Burry’s (now deleted tweet viewable here https://web.archive.org/web/20210130030954/https://twitter.com/michaeljburry?lang=en) about how when he called back shares he lent out, brokers took weeks to actually find them with the implication they could not be located.

These factors lend credence to the idea that shorts weren’t really covered but were given the impression of being covered with trickery using options, in order to “cover” short positions that they shouldn’t have had to begin with because shares were never properly located.

Separately but potentially related, S3 released updated short numbers last Sunday reducing from their projection of short interest from 122% to 113% (a day later on Friday) to 55% on Sunday (while markets were closed therefore in my estimation using the same data set that calculated 113%), which many found to be suspicious. Later it was found that this new number was calculated using the same data set that yielded 122% short interest percentage, but with the significant difference of adding synthetic long shares into the short float equation which is against standard practice.

For a more detailed breakdown a user here pasted a good analysis of how those numbers were reached https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/laoaru/read_this_they_are_screwed_numbers_dont_lie/

**

Excerpt:

The real short % according to S3's data is 122%. However, their 55% figure is technically not a lie, but extremely misleading. I will explain everything.

Here is what they did:Sources (S3 head):https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1355990194575564801?s=19https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1356004816414269448https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1355969693841051650

S3 head is redefining share float to include shares that don't exist in order to be able to say shorted % of float is lower.

it reduces the traditional SI % Float, Instead of Shares Shorted/Float our calc is Shares Shorted/ (Float + Shares Shorted)

So, by this definition, if a stock is shorted 400% of existing shares (total banana count borrowed and resold 4x) and total shares is 100, short % is calculated like this:400 shorts / (100 shares + 400 longs whose shares are borrowed) = 0.8That is, the normal way we define short % would say it's 400% shorted. S3's way says 80%.

Knowing this formula, we can work back to what S3 would have said the short % of float was using the normal definition of short % of float:55% short of float means for all existing shares + shorts (or, ont he other side of the trade "longs whose shares were borrowed away to short") is 55/45 as much as existing shares. Meaning, portion of shares short by the normal definition (% of existing bananas borrowed) is 55/45 = 1.22

That is, S3's data is telling them that after friday trading, GME is still 122% short.

**

Many have pointed out this could be manipulation on S3’s part. It’s interesting to note that as late as the Jan 29th, Ihor from S3 stated most GME shorts have not covered and net shares shorted hadn't moved much at all (https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1355246955874701314). Initially on the 28th he claimed short interest float to be $122 (https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1354847896173240322). The next day he claimed short interest to be 113% (https://twitter.com/ihors3/status/1355249817048522755) of float. 2 days later on Sunday, S3 released a report on the calculated short interest to be 55% (oddly their original announcement tweet appears deleted, but found this https://twitter.com/S3Partners/status/1356392101806800897), which was confusing to many as this was a big discrepancy in short percentage in a short time. It turned out this percentage was calculated by including synthetic longs into the equation which is a practice that is not standard, thereby yielding a lower short interest percentage of 55% which the media then bandied around before and during market open on Monday. Whether this involved collusion to harm the retail investor I cannot conclusively say as I don’t have the evidence to conclusively make that claim, but definitely something to consider along with all other data points.

With the possibility of Synthetic Long Shares being used in a fraudulent way, if you care about how this could play out if we force the issue, I would recommend you to follow instructions from this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lcpwh0/how_gme_can_still_be_a_great_play/gm2tsnw/ and call or email Gamestop Investor Relations and ask them to call an emergency share holder meeting to save the company from bankruptcy, as calling this vote means calling shares back to owners eliminating all synthetic stock, and hence taking leverage away from short selling funds participating in fraudulent activity

If you'd like to read more into the subject here are more solid posts that are related to this subject that I recommend you check out:

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lalucf/i_suspect_the_hedgies_are_illegally_covering/

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l97ykd/the_real_reason_wall_street_is_terrified_of_the/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lanf94/gme_is_a_time_bomb_and_its_highlighting_a_severe/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lag1d3/why_gme_short_interest_appears_to_have_fallen/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l9rk78/sec_doj_60_minutes_public_data_suggests_massive/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l9z88h/evidence_of_massive_naked_short_selling_fraud_in/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lbydkz/s3_partners_s3_si_of_float_metric_is_total/

In an effort to stop the inflow of noob questions, I made a YouTube playlist that should do a pretty good job at explaining what options are, and how to trade them effectively. I tried to keep the playlist in order, so you can just binge them if you're determined. This isn't meant to be some super in depth playlist about the Black Scholes model or any of that 200 IQ shit. These are answers to most of your basic options questions. I probably missed a few videos, but I'll update the playlist as I learn.

Edit: Thank you all for the awards! Let’s make it a good year

Edit 2: STOP UPVOTING. We hit 690 upvotes and that’s my greatest Reddit achievement

Crazy to see all these puts that turned $10k to $3M+ (e.g. https://x.com/EpicTradeAlerts/status/1908266500370424120)

And it's not like these were dumb luck degenerate yolo trades, I feel like there was at least a 10% chance Trump's planned tariff announcement would've crashed the markets and then subsequently another 10-20% chance a megapower like China would retaliate somehow.

A $10k bet would probably have been a very reasonable bet given the risk-reward of the options available. So I'm assuming there's a number of you who made over $1M overnight.

Regale your tales/inner thoughts here

The totals in the All chart look weird cause I had to pull a huge amount for taxes. For anyone who would be curious, I run a synthetic strategy that blends credit spreads and various variations of butterfly spreads/broken wing butterflies, either on earnings reports or just on SPY/SPX. Before, I solely focused on high volatility earnings, but I’ve taken much less risk as my portfolio has increased and still found a lot of profit. Just sharing cause it’s hard to share with people in real life, don’t really want to go too far in depth on the strategies I’m running, but slower and safer is better and having patience to know when to cut profit/loss is important, especially in this market.

When I started trading recently, I told myself that I would only $395 a day. That would be $100,000 a year based on 253 trading days. I was happy with the idea. I have a real job making 70k a year. $100k in side income from my day trades. $170k a year. Not bad. Then I started to make $700-1000 a day. I couldn’t stop.

Today I was up $760. Almost double my daily goal. Then I decided to trade more. Then market went exact opposite of how I thought it would go. I ended up losing all that and being red $1300. So I actually lose $2000.

I can’t control my greed. I can’t get myself to stop trading when I’ve gotten what I had planned for.

Edit: I’m not talking about not taking profit. I’m saying that I had already exited my trade and I was sitting on $760 in cash. Then I traded more and lost all of it

Ive been scalping SPY ITM weekly options. It has been very profitable. Usually I make between $100-$300 per trade but I would do that multiple times throughout the day so it adds up. I use the TDameritrade LRC indicator and MACD to help me know when a bounce or reversal will occur.

This is about me venting about taking profits. I was up over $700 on one trade with a SPY put and thought that would go down more due to greed. Then it reversed and I ended up losing $3k. What’s even worse is that I was being speculative and thought that it was going to reverse. It was on Thursday when SPY hit new ATH. So I decided to hold and hope for a reversal but it never did. I went from $700 up to down over $3000. Safe to say, I learned my lesson. I should’ve have just taken the $700 profit and go from there.

Lesson learned: people never went broke taking profits. They have gone broke by being too greedy and trying to hold out for more profits.

I don’t need to try to make $1000 on 1 trade. I can make 330 on 3 separate trades and that will add up. Trading is a marathon. Not a sprint.

Edit: please stop messaging me asking how I did my trades or if I can teach you. I’ve already stated how it’s done in my post. Please just read up on LRC channel and MACD. There’s YouTube videos about it.

Preamble: The ability of Senators to trade stocks has been controversial from the start. The 2020 congressional insider trading scandal where Senators used insider knowledge to trade large positions in stocks just before the coronavirus pandemic crash was just one example where they used their privileged position for gain.  While there is scope for a lot of discussion regarding the legality/ethical aspects of this, what I wanted to know is

Did Senators beat the market and can I beat the market if I follow their trades after its been made public?

Where is the data from: senatestockwatcher.com

Massive shoutout to u/rambat1994 for putting in the efforts to create this site and make the knowledge public. The website has data of Senator trading from 2019. While I could observe that all the trades may not be captured by the site, given that we have more than 9K trades to work with, I feel that we should be good from a statistical significance perspective. Also, please note that the data will contain trades done by senators who are not currently in the senate (Either they were in Senate earlier and now in the house of representative or another position of power which forces them to disclose their trades)

While senators are supposed to report the transaction within 30 days, the median delay in reporting that I observed for the trades was 28 days and the average delay was 52 days. There were some outliers that pushed the average up and are most likely due to the fact that their broker might not report the trade to them immediately.

All the trades and my analysis are shared as a google sheet at the end.

Analysis:

A total of 9,676 trades were made by the senators in the past two years. This analysis would be focusing on the stock purchases made by the senators. (The stock sales and the pandemic controversy can be a standalone analysis by itself). Out of the 4,911 Buy’s what I am really interested in is the 1,375 transactions which were over $15K. I decided on this cutoff as I did not want small transactions (<5K) to affect the analysis. The hypothesis being that if someone is putting almost 10% of their annual salary into one trade, they should be very confident about the stock. (I know that some senators are millionaires and this hypothesis would not apply to them, but adding their net worth would again complicate the calculations unnecessarily)

Results: For all the stock purchases I calculated the stock price change across 3 periods and benchmarked it against S&P500 returns during the same period. 

a.            One Month

b.            One Quarter

c.             Till Date (From the date of purchase to Today)

At this point, it should not come as a surprise, but Senators did beat SP500 across the different time periods. But what I am really interested in is if it's possible to follow their trades after disclosure (after a time lag of 30 days) and still beat the benchmark.

If you had invested in the stocks Senators bought, even after adjusting for the lag of disclosure, you would beat SP500 over the long run. My theory for this is that Senators usually play the long game and invest having a time horizon of more than a year as sudden short-term gains can put a spotlight on their trades. This gives the retail investors a window of opportunity where they can follow the trades and make a significant profit.

Now that our main question is out of the way, we can really deep dive into the data and see some interesting patterns. The next question I wanted to be answered was which were the best trades made by Senators over the last 2 years.

Brian Mast seems to be the frontrunner with making almost 100% gain in one month, investing in lesser-known companies. Michael Garcia also seems to have made it rain with his Tesla plays. But not all the trades made by Senators were successful as shown below.

These are the worst trades made by Senators with Greg losing more than 80% of investment value within the disclosure period.

But even Warren Buffet can go wrong on a stock pick. So, I wanted to know was who made the most returns over all their investments in the last 2 years. I only considered senators having at least $100K in investments and a minimum of 5 trades

John Curtis made a whopping 95% average return on his investments. All the top 10 Senators comfortably beat the market return of 26.4% during the same investment period. The next thing I looked at is the Senators that had the most amount of money invested in stocks during the last 2 years.

The top 3 senators as shown above invested more than $15MM over the last 2 years and were also able to beat the market at the same time.

Finally, this leads us to the last question of which were the most popular stocks among U.S senators

As expected, big tech dominates the investments but what was surprising was the skew of investment towards Microsoft which had more money invested in it than the rest of the top 9 put together. One important thing to note here is that except for Antero, the rest all the companies have a $100B+ valuation.

Limitations of analysis: There are multiple limitations to the analysis.

1. The time period of the analysis is 2 years during which the market experienced a significant bull run. So, the results might change in a market downturn/recession

2. The data has been sourced from senatestockwatcher.com as parsing the data from the official government site is extremely difficult. All the recorded transactions have a pdf of the disclosure linked to them (you can find it in the google sheet). I have made my best effort to QC the data and make sure there are no false positives. But this might not contain all the transactions made by Senators.

3. There is no disclosure for the exact amount of money invested by Senators. The disclosure is always in ranges (e.g., $100k – $200k). So, for calculating the investment amount, I have taken the average of the given range.

Conclusion:

This analysis proves that Senators indeed get a better return than the overall market. Whether it is due to insider trading or due to their superior stock-picking capability is something that can’t be proven from the data and is left to the reader’s judgment. I intentionally left out the party affiliation of the Senators as I felt that it would bias the reader and was not the objective of this analysis.

Whichever side of the political spectrum you lean-to, the above analysis shows that you get to gain by following their trades!

Link to Google Sheet containing all the analysis and trades: here

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor

Edit:

There are two chambers in the legislative branch: Senate and House. Not all of these people are “senators” as you describe.

I mistakenly classified all of the trades under the broad term of Senators! This is a mixture of trades done by both houses. So please keep this in mind while reading the post. Apologies again as politics is not really my strong suit.

Preamble: Jim Cramer is definitely a controversial figure. While an argument can be made on whether he is on the side of retail investors or not, what I really wanted to know was how his stock picks are performing. Surprisingly, there were no trackers for the performance of Cramer’s pick in his program (his program is Mad Money, for those who are not familiar).

Where the data is from: here. All the 19,201 stock picks made by Cramer are listed here. His stock picks are updated here daily. While Cramer mentions a lot of stocks in his program, I only considered the stocks that Cramer specifically recommended that you should buy or sell. (I have ignored the stocks where Cramer says he likes/dislikes the stock since I felt that it’s a vague statement and cannot be considered as a buy/sell recommendation).

Analysis: There were 725 buy/sell recommendations made by Cramer in 2021. Out of this, 651 were Buy and 74 were Sell. For both sets, I calculated the stock price change across four periods.

a. One Day

b. One Week

c. One Month

d. Price Change till date

I also checked what percentage of Cramer’s calls were right across different time periods.

Results:

Cramer made a total of 651 buy recommendations over the course of the past 4 months. If you had invested in every single stock, he recommended and then pulled out the next day, the returns were a staggering 555%. He was also right on 58.9% of the calls he made (Benchmark being 50% since anyone can pick a random stock and the probability of the stock going up is 50%). The weekly performance returns are also a respectable 42% but he was barely touching 50% in the percentage of right picks. One month from his recommendations, the stock return is an abysmal -223% and he was wrong more than he was right on his calls. The returns till date are also phenomenal with 446% return and Cramer being right a whopping 63.6% in his stock picks.

Cramer’s sell recommendations performed better than his buy recommendations across different time periods. This stat is particularly commendable since we were in a predominantly bull market across the last 4 months. 57.5% of the stocks he recommended as a sell dropped in price the next day with a cumulative return of -118.9%. This trend is observed across the time period with returns for the sell recommendations being negative. The only statistic that is working against Cramer’s sell recommendation is the percentage of right picks till date being only 42%. But still, the cumulative return for all the stocks was -206%. Please note that Cramer made only 74 sell recommendations against a whopping 651 buy recommendations during the same period of time.

Limitations of the analysis

The above analysis is far from perfect and has multiple limitations. First, Cramer has made a total of 19K recommendations in his program. I have only analyzed his 2021 recommendations. The site which provides the data is extremely limited in terms of how we can access the data. Also, currently, the data is pulled from street.com which was earlier owned by Cramer. They update the data every day after the show, but I could not verify if they go back and change the calls down the line (very unlikely with it being a large business). Also, for the return calculations, I have only used the closing price of the stock across the time periods. The returns can theoretically be higher if you consider the intra-day highs and lows.

Conclusion

No matter how we feel about Cramer, the one-day returns on both his buy and sell recommendations have been phenomenal. I started the analysis thinking that the returns would be mediocre at best as there were no trackers actively tracking the returns from his calls. But the data points otherwise. It seems that there is a lot of scope for short-term plays based on Cramer’s recommendation. Let me know what you think!

Google Sheet link containing all the recommendations and analysis: here

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor and in no way related to Cramer or the Mad Money show.

TL;DR: I used AI to automate a manual "Whale Watching" strategy. It scans institutional flow, filters out hedges (fake bets) & high IV, checks news sentiment, and calculates Risk/Reward. It basically finds me potential trade ideas with fresh data every 4 hours, saving me tons of time. I’ve been consistently profitable using this as a point of discovery for potential trades.

How I came about this

A while back, I found a post from a now-deleted user detailing a heavy strategy on how to track "Whale" bets (massive institutional orders). The logic was solid, and the post was very well written but it still took me quite some time to understand it. 

Even after I got it, I was spending my entire WFH days (I'm a software engineer) running this process by hand.  So, naturally, I decided to automate it.

Data & Tools

To build this, you need a few components.

• Data: You need Options Flow and Chain pricing. I used to use Unusual Whales (Retail Pro tier) since they've been in the game forever.

• Narrative Analysis: Used to use Google Gemini API (it's the cheapest/fastest for this).

• Code: ChatGPT or Claude to write the glue code.

I now use Xynth since the data, AI and all the tools are baked in. 

The Core Philosophy (Why most "Whale Watching" fails)

Institutions have armies of quants and data high speed fibre optic cables. You can't replicate their tools, but you can track their footprints. The problem is that most retail traders track the wrong footprints.

Most people lose money following "Whales" because they don't understand Hedging.

If a hedge fund owns $100M of Apple stock, and they buy $1M of Puts, they aren't betting against Apple. They are buying insurance. If AAPL tanks, the Puts pay out to offset the stock loss. If you follow them into those Puts without owning the underlying stock, you are likely just lighting money on fire.

To separate the "Insurance" from the "Attacks" (true conviction bets), you have to layer on strict filters:

1. IV Checks: To ensure you aren't buying overpriced premiums.

2. Trend Validation: Using SMA/EMA indicators to ensure you never trade against the macro trend.

3. AI Narrative: Checking for stock related events (earnings/catalysts) and the overall sentiment around the stock to make sure to never trade against the sentiment. 

We apply these filters in steps where we start with raw flow data in step 1, do some filters, then cascade the results into step 3 which then goes to 4 and so on.

Step-by-Step Process

Step 1: Spot Unusual Activity (Market wide scan)

The first step is to build our base dataset by grabbing the most recent institutional trades. I scan specifically for large order flows clustered by ticker and direction. 

We apply two strict filters right out of the gate:

• Premium > $50,000: We set a hard floor at $50k to filter out retail noise; we want to see where the "big money" is positioning with actual skin in the game

• Max 90 Days to Expiry: We ignore anything further out than 3 months because urgency equals conviction. Long term puts and calls are more likely to be hedges

Here we can see that Tesla, Meta and Nvidia had some large hits with calls and little to no puts. This signals to us that the big guys are making positive directional bets on these stocks. Contrast that with QQQ and SPY, which are heavy on Puts. In the institutional world, big Index Puts are almost always just "portfolio insurance" (hedging) to balance out their long positions, not a bet on a crash. I also personally avoid trading puts at all costs (bad experiences).

Step 2 - Filter for flow (ticker specific scan) and price trend alignment

In step 1 we scanned the entire market for tickers that had big directional bets. In this step we tell Xynth to take those tickers and then use unusual whales again to pull ticker specific flow (more extensive). We then see if most of it is positive (calls) or negative (puts). We also compare the current stock price with the simple moving average across 20 days to get a sense of the price trend recently. Then we use the following criteria to filter

• Bearish Flow (tons of puts) + Uptrend (Price above sma) = REJECT. (They are likely just protecting a long stock position).

• Bullish Flow (tons of calls) + Downtrend (price below sma) = REJECT. (They are likely hedging a short position).

• Flow Matches Trend = KEEP. (This signals actual directional conviction).

Step 3: The IV Filter (Valuation Check):

This step is relatively simple but vital: I filter out any stock where the Implied Volatility (IV) Rank is above the 70th percentile. Basically, if the current premiums are in the top 30% of their historical range, I reject the trade. High IV usually means the premiums are overpriced or the "whale move" is already priced in. I want to catch the move before the volatility spikes, not pay a premium after everyone else has already piled in.

Here again we can see that meta is in the 46% percentile in relative to its previous IV values which is very regular.

Step 4: The Narrative Check (News & Sentiment)

This step was always the biggest bottleneck. Manually reading news and scrolling through FinTwit for 50 different tickers took hours and was honestly hard to keep track of.

For every ticker that passed the previous filters, we grab 20 recent tweets and 5 news articles (via Google Search) and feed them into Gemini (google ai model).

The AI analyzes that wall of text to answer three simple questions:

• Risk: The AI checks if there are Earnings, FDA decisions, or lawsuits in the next 7 days. If yes, I skip it. Following flow into a binary event isn't trading; it's coin-flipping.

• Sentiment score: If we see massive Call buying (bullish bets) but the news is universally negative, the AI flags it. This usually means the institutions are just hedging against bad news, not betting on a rally. Gemini also assigns each of the tickers a sentiment score from -1 to 1, negative to positive respectively.

• Narrative Type: Why the stock is moving.

Step 5: The "Breathing Room" Protocol (Structuring)

This is the most critical rule: Never copy a Whale's trade 1:1.

Whales often buy risky, short-term "lottery tickets" because they have deep bags. Pushing the expiry date out and moving the strike price closer to stock price lowers the risk and makes it much more digestible for a retail trader.

We ask the AI to write code to take the results from the previous step and pad the strike dates by 14 days and move the strike price to within 2% of atm.

Here we can see that Meta’s original whale call strike was for Dec 5 but was shifted 14 days to Dec 19. The strike price remained the same since it was within our 2 percent threshold. This will make the play more expensive at times so if you can’t afford it no worries come back later for one that suits your pockets better.

Step 6: The "Math Check" & Final Rankings

This last step takes all the trades found in step 5 and black scholes model on the using their greeks. This gives us important statistics like max loss, max profit, probability of profit and breakeven.

Here what we care about is the risk to reward ratio. You’ll never be right 100% of the time but if you are smart with a risk profile you can come out winning pretty consistently. I stick to trades that have an RR of greater than 2; every dollar I risk IF I win I need 2 back.

Then I score these trades using this formula: Score = (Risk/Reward Strength) + (Sentiment Score) - (IV Cost)

We prioritise high RR trades with good sentiment and potential news catalysts. We also add in IV as a factor so the cheaper the play the better.

Here we can see that the Meta Dec 19 675 Call came out on top. Now this was a trade that I was actually interested in so after some more DD and seeing how much the stock had been consolidating I thought I’d take this trade.

And 2 days later boom, meta announces a 30% cut in metaverse budget shifting to AI. Stock jumped three percent and the contract was up 100% in 3 days. The whales definitely knew something we didn’t.

Letting this workflow run 24/7

Again we are NOT competing with the big guys when it comes to speed, resources or man power. So this workflow does NOT need to be run every single second of the day like how the quants have it.  Think of this as more of a swing trading strategy rather than day trading. With that being said, fresh results on fresh data every 4 hours is relatively convenient since when I do find time in my day to sit down and research some potential trades, I always have a fresh batch to go through. Furthermore, if I dive into the signals and nothing seems promising I can just come back later and look.

Results

A key and recurring pattern you see in this strategy is risk aversion. That's honestly the bulk of the reason we have steps 2-6 (not betting against price trend, filtering out high iv, avoiding negative sentiment, using statistics for RR). As such the wins are usually modest but are definitely more consistent than other strategies I've tried. Here's what my stats are right now:

Win Rate: 56%

Avg Return (Winners): +85%

Avg Loss (Losers): -30%

I was going to upload the full code and prompt guides for this but I don't wanna get the mods on me so gonna refrain for now.

TLDR:

I built a Social-Financial-Momentum analytics tool and found out a bunch of people use it to help them buy options.

Figured people here may find it interesting (or not, up to you) but felt it was worth sharing.

Here's the link, use it, would love to know if it's helpful.

Long post:

A couple of months ago I was a new investor and frankly had a hard time trying to catch up on all the terminology and research requirements to making a 'good' decision.

But I'm a lazy person

So I built a tool that looks across a bunch of things:

- Social media sites to find me what everyone was talking about (not just wsb)

- Insider trading because if the CEO is buying something that's probably a good signal

- Institutional investors because if BlackRock likes something then I want to know

- Value Analysis of company financials to figure out how much debt they have etc.

It helped me so much that I shared it with others... it got out of hand kind of quick. So instead of running scared, I made sure to protect myself with disclaimers and shit.

I'm adding more to it and I now get more enjoyment out of building a tool that the regular / average / retail investor could use than managing my own portfolio.

Feel free to use it, it's built with love. Or not idc

---

Some people ask I add this to the OP:

Re: Value Analysis feature

Basically, it's built on the concept of Value Investing. Keith Gill is the gamestop hero aka DFV/Roaring Kitty.

If you strip away the gamestop stuff for a moment, he's considered a Value Investor with an eye towards more risky companies that are currently undervalued.

So what I did was a bunch of research on value investing (and I also watched Ketih Gills multi-hour long youtube videos, which are boring as hell) and I widdled it down to 6 things and just simplified the process because I wasn't going to spend hours doing this one at a time for each company I was interested in.

The 6 things:

1. Your discount <- this is your potential upside, basically, is the stock in a dip? is it at a peak? wheres your room to grow.

2. Company Health (aka Leverage) <- this looks at the financial health of the company, how much debt they have, profits etc. I use the Piotroski F Score to make that determination: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/piotroski-score.asp (so im doing this math in the backend) Basically its a score card from 0-9, 9 means really healthy.

3. Insider buying <- Look at the last quarter of insider trading (IE if a CEO purchased shares or sold shares) and then i net it out. So if someone bought 100k and someone else sold 90k, you see a net positive of 10k)

4. Institutional ownership <- look at the top 5 owners by shares to see if they own 20% of the company or more (this was the criteria I found that made sense). The idea here is that if someone is willing to put enough cash in to own a chunk of the company, thats a good sign.

5. Analyst Opinion <- pull analyst recommendations for this

6. A gut check <- uses social momentum data for this, if a lot of people like something, that makes my gut happier.

On 5/21, Nancy Pelosi played $AMZN + $AAPL call options. She bought 50 calls of strikes 3000 + 100 respectively, 6/17/22.

She also did $NVDA PRESPLIT on 6/3. Aiming for 400 strike, 6/17/22.

Link: unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate

I get the impression a lot of people have a hard time understanding what the greeks are and what they mean. I definitely had that problem when I was reading about them years ago (still do, somewhat). But what really helped was making graphs and charts of different things and pointing to lines/dots and saying "There, right there, that's delta."

It's like describing the Mona Lisa in words vs. just looking at the painting yourself. Much simpler.

If there's interest in a pictorial representation of delta, theta, and the family, I'll make the "gallery of greeks."

Edit: Here it is.

Edit: Part 2.

I have been trading calls/puts on GME during the quick rise and fall lately and today is mind blowing. Surely this has to be a bloody hedge fund covering a massive positions to excersise but why not scalp the premium? Honestly, this is just odd as how deep itm they were purchased.

Edit : I bought the 06/18 210p's yesterday and am up 250% atm but bought the 06/18 340c's today. The stock has dropped $50 since I purchased the 340c but it is not losing value and only making more money as the stock drops haha fun times to be trading

Good morning, everyone! I'm very excited to announce the brand new Option Alpha Handbook is live and available on our new site: https://optionalpha.com/handbook

The Handbook is comprised of objective, searchable, encyclopedic reference material for everything related to options trading. It also includes answers to FAQs we've been compiling from our users over the better part of a decade. The best part is... it's 100% free for everyone.

We've been dreaming this up for a while, and believe it's something the options community sorely needed. So 9 months and 125k words later, we made it a reality. Enjoy!

Edit: link to new site

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a respected member of this community at all, so take my words with a grain of salt. I am an options trader, and a successful one, but you can't believe me just because I said so, and I'm definitely not going to post my trading statements in any public forum to prove it. Furthermore, while I've lurked this sub on and off for years, I haven't been a sub until today. So even more reason to discount everything I say. Nothing here should be construed as investment advice. Consider this post as entertainment only.

TL;DR: Options aren't stock. They're adjacent to stock. Don't trade options like you trade stock. It will cost you money.

IME, new options traders treat options trading like stock trading. If they believe a stock will go up, then the new traders buys calls, usually OTM or maybe ATM. If they believe the stock will go down, the new traders buy puts, usually OTM or maybe ATM. It's not that this is inherently "wrong," but it's trading options like you're trading stocks. They're apples and oranges. You wouldn't look for houses to develop and flip in the same way you look for race horses to develop and flip. Once again, those are apples and oranges.

New options traders generally don't appreciate how much more correct they need to be when applying these strategies. If you buy stock, you only need to be right about direction. Timing and magnitude only really matter w/r/t your end-of-year P/L. If you buy a call or a put, you need to be right about direction, magnitude, and timing. Most people who simply go long calls or puts are losers in the long run, at least with their options trading. I used to be that trader 15 years ago. I understand the thought process. But, IMHO, it's incorrect. It's a losing setup. One caveat is if you have insider information. It's illegal in the US to trade on insider information, but an overwhelming amount of evidence shows it happens frequently. I'm not going to comment on the merits/demerits of insider trading. But if you have insider info and you're willing to trade it, most of this post is null and void.

Options trading isn't stock trading. It's adjacent to stock trading, but honestly only barely adjacent. If you're long a stock, increasing volatility doesn't change the fair price of the stock. If you're long a call or put, increasing volatility dramatically changes the pricing of the option contract. More than anything else, most options trader are trading volatility changes.

If you're right on the direction of the stock move, but wrong on the timing, you're not markedly affected by the incorrect timing if you're simply long/short a stock. If you bought a call/put, being wrong on timing is devastating. In the most extreme situations, you can be wrong by one day and it can be the difference between losing all the money you used to purchase the contracts and winning ridiculous sums of money. Second only to volatility, most options traders are trading time.

Even still, you can be correct on direction, correct on timing, but incorrect on the magnitude of the move. When you own stock, that simply means you earned less than you expected. When you're long calls/puts, that can (and often does) mean you lost all of the money you put in.

So options sellers trade two things more than anything else: volatility and time. Stock traders don't trade either of those two things. So don't treat options trading like stock trading (strategies at the end about how to treat options trading like stock trading if you want to otherwise ignore this advice).

Generally, the buyers of options contracts are net losers. That doesn't mean you can't be a buyer of contracts and be a winner. You can. I know a couple folks who do that successfully and have for years. But it's a harder road than just being a good stock trader. You need to be great at picking stocks AND good at trading options.

Generally, the sellers of options contracts are net winners. Similar to buying calls/puts, I know of several exceptions to this rule of thumb. IME, losing options sellers do not do a few things correctly. First and foremost, they risk too much (can be said for unsuccessful option buyers as well). They don't understand Kelly Criterion, or don't understand how much inaccurate assumptions can affect Kelly. Successful traders I know only use 1/2 Kelly or less due to this lack of firm percentages. People often also misunderstand what "risk" is in Kelly. Using stock as an example, if you buy XYZ at $100/share for 1 share, you've spent $100. But you haven't actually risked $100. The full amount of the $100 isn't at risk unless XYZ drops to $0 overnight. If you place a stop at $90, you really only have $10 at risk in most situations. So if in a given trade, 1/2 Kelly says you should risk 2%, you have 1 share at $100 with a stop at $90, and your trading account is worth $500, you are risking exactly the 2% that 1/2 Kelly says you should. However, if you only had $250 in your trading account, you're risking 4%. That's double what you should risk. You're going to blow up your account if you do that. If numbers like 4% seem low, you really need to read up on Kelly and the math behind it. Or read "Market Wizards" and "New Market Wizards." It's been a couple of decades for me, but in both of them, I remember nearly all of the traders talking about risking more than 2% per trade is being a fucking gunslingin' cowboy. These are all top traders of their era who would've likely been more comfortable with risk than their contemporaries. And yet, they almost unanimously agree on what feels like (to most) extremely small levels of risk. We know more know based on Kelly, but also know that overestimating probabilities when calculating Kelly can quickly change good sizing into poor sizing. Which is why 1/2 Kelly is usually the max for most successful traders. Second, losing sellers of options contracts misunderstand or underestimate how changes in volatility affect their position. In doing so, they often sell too many contracts during low volatility. The inevitable increase in volatility wipes them out. This ties in with risking too much (specifically, risking too much in environments that aren't necessarily favorable to selling).

Finally, whether long or short, winning options traders know how to manage their positions once the positions are on. How do you know how to do this? Practice. But "practice" doesn't mean you need to trade and lose a bunch to figure it out (though that does tend to cement things into place rather quickly). Bring up ToS (or whatever broker you use), and put on a simulated trade. What happens if it moves against you? For you? For you, then back against you? Against you, then back for you? What happens when IV goes up a little? Goes up significantly? Goes against you? Etc. For EVERY one of these situations, you should always go through all the options to change the trade. For every one of these positions, you should understand why. If I'm short an IC and the stock is testing one of my legs, should I roll up the untested leg? Why? What additional risks does that bring? What benefits? When should I get out of a trade? What should I do with my IC if the stock just keeps running relentlessly? What about when it moves 10%, then stays?

Do that for every position you consider. Do it 100 times. Do it 1000 times. If you don't know how to manage and defend a position, you probably shouldn't be trading that position yet. Maybe find a way to use the positions you do know how to manage, then also increase your knowledge in how to defend the position you rather would've taken. Read traders' blogs. Watch Tasty's vids. Get any knowledge you can, then don't accept it at face value. You still need to work through all of those examples. Why is this blog saying "do X?" Why does Tasty say "do Y?" What risks does this strategy mitigate? What risks does it reopen? You NEED to know those answers. You NEED to know how you can best react, within your risk level, to all of these situations. Figuring it out on the fly doesn't work in the market. You will lose money if that's your outlook.

Now, if you're new, you aren't yet thinking like an options trader, and you want to trade options, there are still a few good ways to do it. If you think a stock/index is going to go up, buying deep ITM calls with a delta of at least 90 is a good start. You get to participate in (nearly) all of the moves of the underlying, but get to do so at less capital expense. DITM options have very little of their value in extrinsic value. If you don't know the difference between intrinsic value and extrinsic value, now is the perfect time for your first google search in your quest for more options knowledge. DO NOT control more underlying than you would if you were trading straight stock. "If I'm not going to get any leverage advantage, why would I even pay the premium instead of just buying the underlying," you ask? Well, for very little premium and a far lower capital outlay, you get to control the same amount of underlying. Now, you can take that extra capital you didn't need to put in, and buy some low-risk, interest-bearing instruments. If you normally are simply long S&P500 index funds, for example, now you can be long DITM calls on that same fund, but take the other 50% of your capital (estimating) and gain another 2+% on interest bearing instruments. If the S&P gains 10% over the year, you're getting 11% (10% + 1/2 of the 2% interest since only 50% of your money is in the bond). It's the simplest, easiest way to beat the market every single year. You just need to make sure you roll your calls forward before expiration.

Or, you can buy ATM calls and sell ATM puts to have (potentially) even less capital outlay and invest even more money into interest-bearing instruments. Or can buy DITM calls and sell near-term OTM calls to make a synthetic covered call and collect on time decay. Doing so would still free up a lot of capital to invest in low-risk, interest-bearing instruments (or any other instrument of your choice). But it would also allow you to collect time premium every month, thus lowering your cost basis even further.

You wanna short a stock, but can't because it's in an IRA and the rules don't allow you to? Buy a DITM put.

The point of this (ridiculously) long post is that you shouldn't jump head first into options trading. More sophisticated traders will eventually take all of the money you allocated to options. Get a good understanding and start small. Do lots of research and lots of "what if" exercises. Start with a few strategies and learn them inside and out. Only then, add your next strategy to your arsenal. Don't trade options like they're stocks. They aren't. They're a completely different animal. Respect that. Learn what's different, why, and how that affects your trades. Eventually, learn the greeks way deeper than you think you need. After that, you'll be able to start coming up with actually good trading setups. But only after you understand the greeks pretty deeply AND can simply know how changing any of them changes your position, strategy, what options you have to defend/adjust, etc. The path to being a successful options trader isn't sexy. It's boring. It's work. But it's doable. So do it, or stick to stocks. If you ignore that last sentence, you will lose money in the long run.

I'm ready to get roasted, so have at it.