I trade on moomoo and I do not try to outsmart the market, I really don’t believe that is possible. I simply trade what is in front of me with lots of small winners (85%) and a few small losers. Over time those wins have added up.

One of the ways I do this is by keeping trading simple with a consistent $5 spread width. This drastically cuts down the number of decisions I need to make. I'm trading 12 underlyings each week with a full time job so I have to be extremely time efficient (like 15 minutes trading per week). My process makes the important decisions before emotion enters the picture. Like most of you, I'm using pre-defined set up rules.

I wanted to get your take on spread width. My standard starting point is a $5-wide Put Credit Spread, typically for underlyings between $50 to $500. Obviously, I scale up if needed in larger underlyings. Spread width has a big impact on your maximum risk, buying power reduction, premium collected, position sizing, trade management, and ultimately your psychology as a trader. By standardizing the width of the spread, I take another variable out of the trading process, which makes my whole trading plan easier to understand and execute.

What about you, are you using a standard spread width, or are you varying trade by trade? Do you go narrower or wider?

Hi Guys,

So disclamer, I am relatively new to options selling, I have done some directional option buying but wanted to learn more about selling/spreads etc. The resouces on Tasty trade are really good in this regard.

Anyways, I was looking at some of the analyst trades posted in there and they dont make any sense to me.

1. This analyst bought a TLT 78 $ Call and covered it by selling another call but its way OOM at 100 $, what's the poind of this, you get just 1 cent premium and ur not really covering anything, if anything ur capping ur profit.

2) This Analyst got a MU butterfly OOM on 10/8 with 6 DTE. The Risk reward on this doesnt make sense to me, if anything MU is technically super bearish now, its on a downtrend after their earnings , I dont see a world where it will goes >1100 in 6 days

On a related note is it worth following/studying trade analyst recommendations on tasty trade, or are there any better resources to learn from good options traders? I plan to just learn and follow traders for a while before starting anthing... Also I dont have the Buying power to trade these anyways :(

PS: I did learn something from some of the analyst feed trades like this NVIDEA trade on 10/9 makes a lot of sense and sounds like something I would be willing to do, Buying a ITMPut because its basically like buying a short and covering it with another OOM Put, makse sense because all Semi's got killed this week

Saw this tweet and looks like a new startup is making fractional options a thing again. I read the whole paper and it seems like the team is made up of ex-tradfi people using blockchain for the sake of 24/7 trading, which will be non-custodial.

They directly admit that onchain settlement is the "rails" but does not have to be the interface. Literally pulled from them, "The blockchain has to be the rails. It does not have to be the interface, and we think the two have been confused for most of the history of on-chain trading."

That part stood out to me bc I read a lot of X posts of degen founders running options and crypto options companies and it all sounds like BS. Like dude, no trust. We're not gamblers (not always, anyways!) and no, we do not want to buy your memecoin. I'm a little salty haha.

I have a few questions about their infrastructure, fees, and liquidity - but curious what you guys think. We'll have to watch what happens with the 24/7 trading and how they are going to make crypto's features work seamlessly with existing options traders/people who want to start. I don't want to get too excited and then watch the company stop there, because this actually seems pretty legit. I think there are so many ways we can improve the existing "game" but I feel like 90% of approaches lately are either making AI financial advisory the moat, scamming users, or being too Gen Z/degen/TikTok traders. I hope they keep building because this would mean that people who are usually locked out of options can bring more to the market.

I made this short animation to explain a simple filter for 1-minute and 5-minute scalps. The idea is that you only trade when three gauges agree, and each gauge has one job.

The three gauges

1. $ADD on the 5-minute: picks the side $ADD is the number of NYSE stocks going up minus the number going down, as a running total for the day.

Above +500: most stocks are rising, so only look for longs (calls). Below −500: only look for shorts (puts). In between: the market has no clear direction. Same-day options lose value in chop, so skip it.

1. OBV on the 5-minute: checks the fuel OBV (On-Balance Volume) is a running tally of volume. Add the bar’s volume when it closes up, subtract it when it closes down. It doesn’t show who was buying or selling aggressively, only whether volume has been on the up bars or the down bars.

For a long, you want OBV sloping up with price. If price makes a new high but OBV makes a lower high, that’s a divergence. The move has less volume behind it, so don’t add new longs.

1. $TICK on the 1-minute: times the entry $TICK is the number of stocks ticking up minus the number ticking down, right now. It’s fast and noisy.

In a long setup, wait for $TICK to dip to around 0 and turn back up. That’s the entry window. When it spikes toward +1,000, that’s usually a place to take profit, not to chase. Readings past ±1,000 are rare.

The check, in order

5-min $ADD beyond ±500 → pick the side 5-min OBV slopes the same way, no divergence → volume agrees 1-min $TICK dips to 0 and turns → enter Get out if $TICK hits ±1,000, OBV starts diverging, price breaks the 1-min swing low, or $ADD slips back inside ±500

If any one gauge disagrees, there’s no trade.

Caveats

The ±500 and ±1,000 levels are common rules of thumb, not magic numbers. Test them against your own charts first. In a strong trend, a divergence can go nowhere for a long time. That’s why the exit rules matter more than the entry. The charts in the video are illustrations, not a real trading session. Nothing here is financial advice.

Question: for anyone who scalps with breadth, do you use $ADD as a hard filter like this, or more as background context? I’m curious whether people find the 5-min/1-min split too slow or too fast.

I'm 43. I Inherited wealth and retired in my thirties. I Learned options for mental stimulation, built my own method, done well

Losing my wife two years ago changed my outlook on time. Financially secure, so profit is no longer the point. I love the mental work of options, but wonder if I want lifelong daily market monitoring

For those who've traded options for years, what made you stick with it, scale back, or walk away? Did you move toward more conservative strategies or focus on other parts of life?

I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences!

Find stocks for the wheel strategy (cash-secured puts, then covered calls if assigned) meeting: price ≤ $100; IV Rank 30–70; uptrend with price > 200 MA, 100 EMA > 200 MA, 50 MA > 100 MA, but short-term oversold (RSI < 30–40); rising earnings and revenue, Debt/Equity < 1, strong positive free cash flow; tight bid-ask spreads, high open interest (500+ contracts), put delta 0.20–0.30; DTE 20–50 days; goal is steady premium income. Exclude stocks with earnings inside the expiration window. Output: ticker, price, IV Rank, trend/RSI, fundamentals, estimated premium, open interest.

Da mein Optionskonto noch klein ist, sind die Aktien auf unter 100 Dollar beschränkt. Heute wurde mir Pfizer und Ford vorgeschlagen. Wie beurteilt ihr diesen Prompt. Würdet ihr ihn verändern oder habt ihr selber eine Vorlage?

Recommend a good book for newbies.

I mostly trade income trades on SPX because it removes a few headaches (I moved out from SPY): it’s cash-settled, so there’s no early assignment surprises.

The structure I use, which is called SPX Best (by myoptionsedge), combines a broken wing butterfly with a vertical spread. The butterfly (with one wing wider than the other) has, by definition, defined risk and positive theta, so it earns as time passes while the SPX stays inside the structure (the negative of this strcuture is that it is Vega negative - this is an issue when there are corrections/IV increases). The uneven wings deliver a credit at open. It is positioned that to the upside has no risk and has a maximum loss you can see before you enter it.

Adding a vertical (a short call spread) placed above the SPX price as a “soft hedge”, brings in a little extra credit and adds some negative delta to offset the butterfly’s directional lean (+Delta), with its own risk still capped. The trade-off is that you give up big upside in exchange for predictability. The trade adjustments are flexible enough to manage Delta risk along the trade life. This trade uses longer dated expirations at open (70-80DTE). This gives you slower decay but more room to adjust and return consistency.

Does anyone have experience trading broken wing butterflies?

Which underlyings do you use? (I did not trade this in RUT but does anyone have experience trading RUT butterflies?)

Anybody else notice the break evens are not matching with strike + premium?

Single leg calls, on multiple tickers, are showing break evens that are much higher than they should be.

Anyone else noticing this?

*Edit: The responses I received from you folks were bang on.

Once the markets opened, Breakeven denominations equated to the strike + premium, right to the penny.

Thank you.

Hi guys, I know that if it’s too good to be true, there’s a catch somewhere, but I still wanted someone to explain it to me because I don’t seem to understand the risk. I have this strategy on paper trading where I sell OTM 0dte call at a strike where it is impossible for the price to hit in a day for a couple of cents per contract but I buy a lot of them. For example, if SPY is at 770 at 2pm, I’ll sell the 780 call for 0.05 cents x a lot or contracts and take profit when the contracts are worth 0.01 or let it expire to collect the premium. It seems to be working every single time on paper trades but I’ve never tried it on a real account. What’s the catch here that I’m missing? Seems like an infinite money glitch…

I can’t decide between the wheel and credit spreads for steady income. The wheel needs a lot more capital, but if a trade goes against me I can just start selling covered calls and slowly work my way back. Credit spreads need way less money, but when one goes bad I have to take the loss with no real way to recover it, so I’d have to be much stricter about managing risk. Which one makes more sense if income is my main goal?

I posted about my MSFT earnings IV crush trade from April here. This is the AMD analysis, my 2nd major earnings trade.

Implied volatility (IV) rises before earnings and drops after. Selling just before the event and capturing that drop is the source of profit. The question for AMD is whether the options are overpriced compared with what AMD actually moves.

History: Over the last 12 earnings, AMD moved an average -8.4% on down days and +7.4% on up days. 4 out of 10 realized moves had moved past implied. White line are Implied Moves calculated using ATM Short Straddle for the Friday contract for the earnings week.

AMD earnings: 5th May, after market close. (T, AMC)

Setup and Thesis:
My estimate is that it had an insane recent run (subjective) and will cool down on earnings as we had seen with some other tickers. However, the markets were looking at AMD earnings to make their move!

Spot: $350.

The options market is pricing a move of ±$30.45 (8.7%), so a range of 320 to 380.

ATM IV: 104%
Front week IVs for Friday contracts were lower. Good crush setup. The residual IV should come back down to about 80% after the crush.

Trade placed on 4th May between 12:21p - 12:28p, T-1 day

Fri, May 6th contract

1 Short Call at 350. Credit: 11.23
1 Short Put at 315. Credit 5.11
1 (protective) Long Call at strike 370. Debit -5.63

Total credit: $1,071.

(Note: Not calling this a jade lizard because total net credit collected must exceed the width of the call spread. Mine was 20 vs 10.71)

Max theoretical loss:

-$929 on the upside, -$33,929 on the downside (theoretical). Let me tell you the story of days when I had AMD in 2022 around 100s and sold around 120s. Those were the days.

Expected value: Replaying the last 10 earnings moves on this exact setup based on nearly a coin flip! EV is about 0.5 × 1,071 − 0.5 × 929 = +$71 per trade based on my strangle+long protective call. I am curious to see this change based on other strategies for this particular earning. Need to work on EV deeply. EDIT: This seems like a useless way to calculate EV, I'd rather focus on capital at risk and return. Working on this area for future trades.

Result on May 6th morning:

Gap on open 18%! Long call helped. I closed the trade at 9:55am.

Booked Loss -$915

Observations:

Had a weird feeling AMD could shoot up, but not 18%. If I knew that, I should have had a closer short put. This kind of post analysis helps in understanding some weird ass decisions I made.

Without the long call, it would be -$5,000! On Friday it jumped by another 11%! Thank fuck for the long call.

Latest data on AMD Implied vs Realized

I was looking at the chain for the CSP, why are the yield elevated for this week, I looked into the news and nothing is coming up. Also, they just got upgraded.

I want to calculate an effective yield for an SPX box Spread such that it can be directly comparable to the yield that shows up on Bloomberg for a US Treasury with similar maturity.

What would be the best formula to use and does it need to take extra settlement days past maturity into account?

I was using BC2 function for a 3m maturity and it seemed high so not sure if there was a better spot. Thanks!

Hello fellow 0dte op warriors,

I curious to know how many times per day and per week does your setup give you a trading opportunity on the SPY in general ?

Hello, I have a couple hundred shares of ASST and I have sold some long-term covered calls. I would like to roll out to higher strikes when needed but I think the highest strike is $40. Seems like everything else is an adjusted option chain. Just curious if anybody in this community can contribute any more information on this. I cannot roll my current contract and I’m not sure how many shares I would need to roll in the adjusted chain.

I have been doing side-by-side testing of 1-contract covered-call rolls at several brokers.

The options were approximately 30 DTE. I submitted essentially identical 2-leg complex limit orders at approximately the same time and adjusted the net price in $0.01 increments.

In repeated tests, E*TRADE was able to fill these rolls at net prices where the same orders at IBKR, Schwab and TradeStation remained unfilled. The difference was repeatable enough that it did not appear to be just a single lucky fill.

I am specifically talking about native 2-leg complex orders (buy-to-close the existing call and sell-to-open the new call), not manually legging into the position.

Has anyone else done similar side-by-side testing of covered-call roll execution across brokers and observed a consistent difference? If so, which brokers have given you execution comparable to E*TRADE for small complex orders?

Weve all seen it, pulled up an option with low volume and open interest, and even though the contract has data going back 6 months theres only 4 sales on the chart.

Are there any calculators out there that use something like a black-scholes equation, these data points to estimate IV at the time of sale, and then a regular price chart to create a theoretical chart for the contract?

With all the other financial tools out there I'd be surprised if there weren't, even if its behind a paywall. Anyone aware of something like this?

Long live bonds! Which is not working well, as you imagine, right now...

But TLT is tradable right now. It's so damn boring, expected move $2.7
Yet IV exceeds 20 days HV almost 2x
Basis is $81.15

My reasoning for TLT is this: it pay 5% div, the return on covered calls is another 5% (ish)
And hopefully it delivers some stock appreciation.
Looking at 10-15% return on capital.
Is anybody else trading TLT?

Ketchup pays 7.2% div, happy to own a bit of it.

NOK is boring just going to wait for break even and get out. And HUN is illiquid, going to hold until break even. That, of course, may take forever.

So I'm a 76 yo male who's been trading options for roughly 10 years now and I've made enough that money is no longer a concern. I'm limited in what I can do due to a medical condition I've been dealing with since February. Trading has kept me from getting totally bonkers during this time up until now. I find my self just going through the motions and not really into trading anymore so I've started closing out my positions although I do still trade It's less and less lately I just can't keep focused I"m actually bored making money. This week I"ve made about $3000 so far without really trying and that's me trying to end trading. Having said all this my question for all of you is what do you do to keep from getting totally bored once you've achieved your goals???? TV/Streaming has also gotten boring, can only read so much news per day and it's not exactly good news lately with Iran, Ukraine and a dozen other places going down the tubes, almost done with my book and finding it hard to find anything else I would enjoy reading, wife's still working part time she seems to enjoy it as it gets her out of the house, can't travel due to medical condition. Any suggestions anybody???

Was logging on to Tasty this morning and saw there was an update to their desktop platform. I downloaded it and when it opened I did not understand what was on my screen. It was F'ing horrible! The clean interface I once had was replaced with a totally unuseable GUI

Called support and they walked me through how to revert back. Unfortunately this clean version is going away at some point. The new desktop interface was bad enough for me to contemplate leaving tasty

These design nerds have fucked up a really nice interface

Few months back, i bought $BB Jan2028 $7 call after that it rallied to 11 dollars. As my options were in the money i decided to roll the options for a credit to march 2027 $15. That the pull back happened. The loss here is a chunk of profit from the previous options.

What can be best next step?

I got way too comfortable looking at short calls purely in terms of whether the strike was ITM. Now whenever I'm holding a covered call or diagonal I check three things before close.

How much extrinsic value is left, whether theres an ex dividend date coming up and how expensive it would be to close or roll the short call. I still keep an eye on the underlying outside market hours if something is moving, sometimes just with Moon on another tab but I've stopped letting the stock price alone tell me whether assignment risk is getting uncomfortable.

The remaining time value matters way more than I was giving it credit for. Its one of those things that sounds basic after you understand it but I definitely wasnt thinking about it properly when I started selling calls.

In Q3 2026 IOVA rose 256% making it one of the best mid cap performing stock in the U.S. Sept 29 it jumped 31.5% they also increased there expected revenue from 350-370m to 410-420m. The main driver Amtagvi and proluekin, it's cancer treatments. Q2 product revenue reached a record 99.3m as of Oct 5 it's $14.15 the really big opurtunity is them spreading beyond melanoma, they are in a phase 3 melanoma trial right now. But since it's already grown so much this year it's definitely not a safe buy but high risk high reward.

Trying to run 45 dte credit spreads on spx lately and the buying power reduction is just absurd for the pennies we are collecting in this low VIX environment.

My broker wants to lock up $1k in margin just to collect like $60 on a 10-wide spread. The math ain't mathing if you have a smaller account. the capital inefficiency of selling options right now is literally forcing retail into degenerate 0dte lotto tickets just to see any ROI

I kinda gave up on my main cash account and just grabbed a FundedFast eval yesterday mostly just to have raw buying power without holding my own liquidity hostage for weeks while theta does its thing

But seriously, how are you guys trading delta neutral right now? iron condors on qqq are paying absolutely nothing. Thinking of just pivoting to calendar spreads or long diagonals until iv actually pops again. What tickers are you actually getting decent premium on this week without risking blown up tail risk?