Author: Jon

Part of the reason for writing this blog is to catalog my own research and system design thoughts in a central place. But another less selfish reason is that I’ve learned quite a bit about trading in the last few years and I think I have something to contribute to the community. New traders have an overwhelming amount of information to pick from. I hope I can help steer them in a direction that is not only profitable but also realistic.

My trading ranges from entirely mechanical systems on stocks and ETFs to relatively discretionary options trades. I think there are good traders in both camps although I lean heavily to mechanical systems. For my options trades, I am primarily focused on profiting from time decay through iron condors, calendars, vertical spreads, etc. although I’m not above buying an out of the money call or put for a purely speculative trade.

I intend to discuss my successes and my failures in trading. I would like to develop some tutorials on system design, option basics, etc.  Maybe I’ll throw in some world opinion from time to time just to make it interesting.

Hope you enjoy!

My journey in trading began nearly 15 years ago. At the time my employer offered an employee stock purchase plan where you could purchase company stock at a discount to the market in addition to the stock options they granted. This was in a large telecommunications company in the late 90s so anything you looked at made money. I watched most of the value of those accounts drop to nearly nothing after 2000.

I became aware that there must be a way to make money in financial markets – there wouldn’t be the industry around Wall Street if there wasn’t. I received my first real introduction to options at an InvesTools event in 2003 and accelerated my learning of trading from that. I traded full time as a retail investor for nearly 3 years and did alright for myself. During that time I learned a great many things about myself and about the amount of risk I could actually handle. I also began researching and building complete trading systems based on quantitative data rather than just discretionary trading.

I hope to give some worthwhile content around trading system developments and options trading through this blog. I’ve made a great many mistakes as a trader and I may be able to reduce the learning curve for some.

Hope you enjoy!