Doctors v/s Traders

The only way you can be profitable over the long run trading options is if you can predict volatility or price better than 95% of the other market participants. End of story. There is no getting around this. This is a non debatable fact. Nobody wants to hear this. It’s kind of like telling an average slop that he will never marry a supermodel. There is nothing inherently wrong with trading condors or calendars. It’s just that both of those trades happen to be volatility trades. If you predict volatility correctly, they will make you money. If you don’t, they will not. It’s that simple. There are some very very bright people in this business that spend tens of millions of dollars and hire 100’s of quants to predict volatility for them and they have a very tough time making money. But wait, some newbie with no option knowledge in the world is going to just slap on some volatility trades and consistently make money? Think about that for a second. Just try to use some common sense here.

Let’s pretend we are in the medical profession, which is not even a good comparison because there are far more successful doctors in the world then traders. Do you honestly think you could perform brain surgery on a patient after a few webinars, some e-mail exchanges, a few live phone calls and a booklet? Anyone? Of course not. Even a trained surgeon with 7 years of medical school, 3 years of residency and possibly thousands of hours of surgery under his belt still has trouble and loses many patients in surgery. Yet some guy is going to go through a quick course and just like that, become a surgeon. Laughable of course. But this is exactly what guys believe with about options trading. The only way you will make money trading options is to be able to predict either direction or volatility better than 95% of all the traders out there. There is no way to get around this mathematically.