$137K Profit in January – My Conservative Options Portfolio Update Dear Traders, consistency beats hype. While $SPY is up 2.7% YTD and $QQQ is up 1.66%, my conservative short premium portfolio locked in +9.75% YTD and $137K in gains. Why? ✅ Selling premium where the edge is ✅ High-probability, risk-first strategies ✅ Outperforming while staying conservative It's all about consistency. Sticking to a solid trading plan, managing risk, and executing with discipline. Full breakdown in my latest YouTube video – link in the comments! 👇 Who else is selling premium in this market? Drop a 🔥 if you are! #OptionsTrading #ShortPremium #PortfolioUpdate #ThetaGang #Optionselling #Transparency #TradingPlan

Oh no! In early October I shared a corn Jade Lizard. Three weeks later, corn is down 10% and the trade is underwater. Yesterday a subscriber emailed me. His screen shows a loss bigger than the trade could ever make. Nothing is realized yet, but he's frozen, waiting for a bottom. That's the moment most traders turn a paper loss into a real one. When I opened this trade, it had a 70% probability of profit (PoP). Most traders stop reading there. But there's a second number almost nobody checks: probability of touch (PoT). It's the chance the price hits your strike at any point before expiration, and it runs roughly double the chance of expiring ITM. For this trade, it was about 60%. Getting tested was the likely outcome from day one, and the plan for it was written before I clicked send. So now the real trading begins. Corn hands option sellers a gift in a spot like this: May corn trades 8 cents above March, and July 15 cents above. Roll out in time and the market moves you further, and pays you to do it. Before you touch anything, check your chart. Mine was drawing the wrong corn contract and made the position look twice as bad as it is. If you trade options on futures, it takes 10 seconds. I wrote the full step-by-step plan for everyone holding this trade, link in the first comment. #corn #optionstrading #futures #hedging

Trade #8 will make you uncomfortable. Last week I launched the Ugly Trades Public Portfolio, a real tastytrade account built from your ugliest, most challenging trades. Then the market turned brutal, and the $VIX just had its biggest weekly jump since early June. Skew sat at 152, and the front of the VIX futures curve inverted. I recorded my first walkthrough of every position, raw and unedited, while travelling. Trade #8, SMH, is the hardest one in the account right now. You have to see how we're managing it. The full video is in the first comment. #OptionsTrading #Volatility #OptionsJive $SMH

Today I just posted a trade with a 97% probability of profit (!) If $SPY goes up, it makes a little. If SPY drops 5% to 10% by December, it makes 20 times more. But there's a catch. It hates speed, so if the market crashes fast and VIX explodes, this trade goes red long before December. That's the risk I'm paid to carry, and the article shows exactly how I manage it. I also posted a $BAC trade: a strong bank that just printed a weak quarter. Both are on Patreon, plus a small-account version of the SPY trade. Link in the first comment. #OptionsTrading #Volatility #StockMarket #SPY #BAC

Charging batteries before the most intense earnings week of the season, while theta paid for my pool day (yes! theta works on Sundays when the market is closed!)

Most option sellers never look at the number Cboe prints next to the $VIX. This week it hit 6.93. It's $COR1M, Cboe's 1-month implied correlation: how tightly S&P 500 stocks are expected to move together, on a 0 to 100 scale. 6.93 was near a 10th-percentile low. That's how the $VIX held 14.8 with earnings season underway. Most of the biggest S&P 500 companies report within a month, so their 1-month options carry the earnings gap. Inside the index, those gaps mostly cancel. Your short put on one stock keeps the whole move. Where to look instead, every trading day: 1) $COR1M and $DSPX beside the $VIX. Low correlation with rising dispersion means the $VIX is understating single-stock risk. 2) The stock's term structure. Find the expiry with the earnings bump. A high IV Rank is often one overnight gap dressed up as 45 days of premium. 3) That stock's skew at your expiry, against its own history. Skip the SKEW Index here, it prices S&P 500 crash tails and says nothing about one company's earnings gap. The same Cboe report shows S&P 500 skew steepening from the 9th to the 15th percentile while the $VIX fell. Someone was paying up for the day these stocks start falling together. Source: Cboe's Macro Volatility Digest, linked in the comments. #VIX #SPX #OptionsTrading #Volatility

Warren Buffett's $BRK.B now owns about 12% of $LEN. It kept buying between $75 and $81. Today, the stock trades about 15% below book value. Copying Buffett has one catch. Berkshire can sit through a drawdown that lasts years. Most traders can't. $IBKR beat earnings last quarter. The stock fell. It reports again after today's close. Options price that single day at 102% volatility, while November sits at 41.6%. One day costs as much as a full week. I found a mispricing in both stocks. How I'm trading them is on Patreon. #OptionsTrading #Earnings #WarrenBuffett

A research paper published this week tested one switch on an AI options trader. Off: +18.3%. On: -2.7%. The switch was the news. I could've told them that for free. The paper comes out of Carnegie Mellon, and the AI traded $SPY, $NVDA, $TSLA and 7 other big names from March to August 2025. Once it could read headlines, its worst drawdown more than tripled, from 9% to 31.7%. It even won more trades and still lost money. This is why we don't trade the news at @OptionsJive. I treat news feeds as noise, because by the time a headline hits your phone, the options market has already priced it in. The 3D volatility surface shows me which expiry is rich and which wing is cheap. That's everything you need to be successful. What's the worst trade a headline ever talked you into? $SPY $NVDA $TSLA #OptionsTrading #volatility