STR 144: Some Live Coaching with Long Time Member Alex

Published: Dec. 18, 2017, 4:45 p.m.

While it is never planned ahead of time, once in a while throughout the course of a discussion it can turn into a coaching session. Thanks to the feedback you as listeners provide, I know many of you enjoy being a fly on the wall and observing the teaching and suggestions being made. This is exactly what happened in our conversation with longtime member Alex (same name in the chat room). He has been a member of our community for multiple years and his strong desire to succeed is what has kept him in the game this long. It’s by no means been a smooth ride, and as you’ll hear, is still a work in progress but he is finding a groove and Chezz and I were able to coach him a bit so he can keep the positive momentum going. I can confirm the momentum is still going strong and growing as this was recorded several weeks ago, and fast forwarding to present day, things are looking very bright!

Notes:

  • Today we reinterview community member Alex. He was one of the first 20 podcasts and has been a member for multiple years at this point. After a brief summary of where he came from, we dive into where he has gone since.
  • Alex was a big buyer of options to start which means he had to focus on directional trading. Unfortunately, he was not able to do this successfully so he looked into option selling (which we cover in the Advanced Options Strategies Explained).
  • He has been a big advocate of journaling and logging his trades in an effort to find how to improve his performance. Something we have noticed over the years is Alex’s ‘account protectionism.’ He doesn’t allow himself to take a meaningful amount of risk to generate a reward.
  • Alex has an 88% success rate trading advanced options but that 12 % of losers have kept him from being profitable. Part of managing losing trades for this strategies is giving the trade more time but Alex emotionally closed half of those and never gave them a chance to recover.

Quotes:

  • I started to look at how Hooch successfully trades options and that is making a lot more sense to me now.
  • I got frustrated when basic options would go my way and my gains would disappear.
  • I was the only one stopped out on the trade example. After that, I went through Skill Sharpening again to learn to use price action.
  • I have an 88% success rate but my p&l is red. 40 winners and 5 losers but those 5 are a doozy.

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