r/thetagang

Keep it friendly and civil; this is not WSB and automod will censor your posts at will for unsavory and unfriendly remarks. Try to keep shit posting and bragging to a minimum.

Keep it friendly and civil; this is not WSB and automod will censor your posts at will for unsavory and unfriendly remarks. Try to keep shit posting and bragging to a minimum.

Please do not feel compelled to be specific, be as general as you'd like. And I am not a "bot" nor an LLM fiend. I am curious as to from what walks of life the mentality develops to be successful, or at least productively cognizant, at selling options.

For my own part, decades ago I got a master's degree in electrical engineering and most of the time I have been involved with digital communications/signal processing, later switching tack to Machine Learning as it also involves the stochastic process and information theory mindset and was a natural fit as an "in" thing to keep an older person relevant.

Of the underlinings that you normally trade, approximately how often during earnings season do you place on trades that expire shortly after earnings announcements? Or do you avoid earnings trades?

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Trying to calibrate expectations before I scale up a 0DTE IC strategy on SPX and want to pressure-test what I'm seeing.

Setup I'm running:

SPX, same-day expiry, entered between 9:45 and 10:15 Short strikes around 15-20 delta each side Wings 20 points out Exit at 50% profit or 21% SL on the spread, otherwise let it run to close

Backtest over roughly 18 months of historical data shows something like a 68% win rate, avg winner about 22% of max profit, avg loser about 55% of max profit. Net positive but not wild. Paper traded it for six weeks and got roughly similar, maybe a touch worse on fills.

Now I'm live with 1-lots and I'm already seeing worse numbers. Part of it is obviously sample size. 14 trades is nothing. But the fills are also genuinely worse than paper. Getting filled 5-10 cents worse on entry pretty consistently. On a $1.20 credit that's real money.

Two questions:

For people running an automated or semi-automated 0DTE trading bot on SPX, what's your actual backtest vs live delta on credit received? Am I in the normal range here or is my backtest lying to me about fills?

Does it make a meaningful difference entering via market order at a specific time vs. working a limit at mid for X minutes? I've been doing limits and I think I'm missing fills on the days the backtest would have captured the most edge.

Just trying to figure out where the friction is between the idealized version and the real one.

Put hit my strike around 2pm. My rule says roll at 21 DTE or if I'm tested with more than 7 days left. I didn't roll. Wanted to ""see what Monday does."" Monday gapped down. Now I'm holding something at a worse cost basis than if I'd just followed the written rule.

Running the wheel on 6 tickers, close to a year now. The strategy itself works. What keeps eating my returns is this. Every time I get tested I sit there for two hours trying to decide between rolling down, rolling out, rolling and doubling, or just taking assignment. I know what the right move is on paper. I've written it down. I have rules.

When it's live I don't follow them.

The dumb part is it's not a knowledge problem. Rolling for a credit when tested is almost always correct. Assignment is fine if you wanted the stock. This is execution. It's emotional trading with extra steps and a better vocabulary. I'm a discretionary trader pretending to run a rules-based system.

So how do people who have run this for a while actually get past it? I'm not asking for a new rule to add to my list. I already have enough rules. I'm asking whether the answer is strip out the discretion entirely, or learn to live with being the weak link in your own strategy.

DD includes the fact buffett is down ~70% & has never sold a single share

the market being relatively overvalued

& ketchup

I use Robinhood. Robinhood has margin maintenance ratio 25% for SGOV but I can only use approx 50% of values of my SGOV portfolio as collateral. I expect that to be at least 1-25%=75% but maybe I’m wrong.

Keep it friendly and civil; this is not WSB and automod will censor your posts at will for unsavory and unfriendly remarks. Try to keep shit posting and bragging to a minimum.

I‘m quite new to this and still trying to figure if getting deeper into options will be worth it for me. I’d be really thankful if some of you wanted to comment on my thoughts.

When people discussed about options trading, I read quite often (especially in the context of CSPs) that getting seduced by high premiums for selling CSPs while neglecting fundamentals of the underlying is a common mistake. What is your opinion on that?

E.g.: if I see a random stock where I can sell a 2 weeks atm CSP with 5% premium, I only lose if the underlying drops by > 5% in these 2 weeks. Since we are talking about a random

stock here, chances are not too high for this drop to happen, so we should in average make profit with this trade. I understand that your profit is limited with CSPs while you still have the risk of major drawdowns. But beyond a certain point, the premium has to be high enough to make you want to forgo potential additional gains and take some risk. Buyers of diversified ETFs always buy „random“ stocks while accepting the risk of drawdowns and without expecting 5% in 2 weeks.

And: if the abovementionned trade is not profitable longterm, then that would mean that high premiums on CSPs (let’s still take 5% for 2 weeks as an example) would be a very reliable bearish indicator, which seems way less likely to me.

I sell 0dte option spreads. But lately since the war, whenever oil spikes up or down, the options go 200-300% in that minute.

How can I protect myself from not hitting my stop. I need a stop because it can go -1000% with one tweet.

I do about 5-10 wide on SPY, should I just go 1-2 wide instead?

What about selling 0dte and buying 1DTE for protection against these IV spikes.

Hey good people of the Reddit community, I’m not complaining or anything but man it seems like soon as soon I sell a covered call the stock just rockets, the stock I’m talking bout in particular is AMD, I have 200 shares at an average cost basis of 177. Been holding 485 days but since last November I started selling CCs I’ve made about 2500$ selling CCs with AMD up until I sold a AMD 240 April 17 CC premium collected 1.49 a apiece 2 contracts total, well AMD rocket shipped on me and I broke my rules and chased it down bought back both contracts for 8.50 apiece, then broke another one of my rules and tried to collect all the premium back from the prior loss on the CC with one trade selling 2 AMD April 24 260 CCs at 8$ per contract, I’m not chasing this any more just hate when I get emotionally attached to a stock, how do u guys deal with that?

I'm about to try to upgrade to options level 3, but I'll need to participate in a call with Robinhood and answers some quiz questions about options. For anyone who has done this, I would really like to hear exactly what you were asked and how the call went, so I can prepare myself. Your help is very appreciated!

I understand that it's always possible, but what would be their strategy here?

Keep it friendly and civil; this is not WSB and automod will censor your posts at will for unsavory and unfriendly remarks. Try to keep shit posting and bragging to a minimum.

Curious to what strategy others prefer, I currently am running a strangle on Micron, sold a 400 put exp 5/15 and a 480 call exp 5/15

Run the wheel and so far it’s been going well, but obviously biggest opportunity cost this week, but I knew the risks.

Hey gang — What’s the easiest way to see the Greeks for the same contract type and strike across all available expiration dates? (e.g. NFLX $100 Put for May 1, May 8, May 15, … Jun 18, Jul 17, etc.)

Is there a website (free or paid) that shows this view cleanly?