I'm live at 9:15 Eastern this morning, and I'm walking through a position that's open in my account right now. Not a hypothetical, not a backtest, the actual trade.
It's a Christmas tree, and here's the part that matters. I don't care where you think this market is going, and I don't care where I think it's going either. Up, down, sideways, doesn't matter to the structure.
What you're doing is selling expensive, fear-inflated skew and buying cheap volatility at the same time, which is the market maker's side of the trade. That's not the side retail usually gets to be on.
This one collected over $1,300 in credit on a single unit the day I placed it, and ThinkOrSwim put the probability at 99.87%.
You want to know what has to happen for it to lose? The market has to fall 22 to 25% before this thing even reaches a loss at expiration. The last time we saw a move like that was COVID, not the tariff selloff and not Liberation Day.
Nineteen wins and zero losses since inception, just over a year, with $12,789 on one unit across all nineteen. I'm putting the brokerage statements on the screen. And when the loss comes, and it will come, you'll see that day too.
The whole job is four steps. An alert hits your phone, you place it as written, you live your life, and you close when I say. No charts, no screen-watching, and it runs in an IRA with around $10,000.
9:15 AM Eastern. Come find me in the room.
To your success,
Don Kaufman