As you probably know, there are about a million different newsletters and websites out there promising outlandish returns and overnight success, and all for the low, low fee of half of your life savings. You’ve seen them advertised online and on late-night television, and you may even have tried one or two of those sites before.
The truth is, one reason we started Condor Options was to provide investors and average traders with an honest and rational alternative to all the hype and misinformation. We know, and you know, that options trading will not make you rich overnight, and that anyone who says it will is actually asking you to take on undue levels of risk, and is probably overcharging you for the privilege. By contrast, we aim to teach investors how to use market neutral strategies like the iron condor to achieve results that are:
- consistent
- market-beating
- and have limited risk.
That’s already a pretty tall order: the Efficient Market Hypothesis claims that it isn’t possible to outperform market averages over the long run without luck or access to secret information. We’re not very lucky, and we don’t have any insider tips (we trade indexes, after all!), and yet we think that over time, market-neutral options strategies really can beat the markets in a consistent and risk-limited way.
But where we are honest about the challenges that face every investor, most newsletters and trading services pretend that they have such magical stock-picking powers that they can endlessly generate alpha without breaking a sweat.
In this new Takedowns series, we will do something that no one else has ever done (as far as we know): we will take on the financial publishing industry - the newsletters and the self-appointed gurus and the hype-ridden trading services - and expose the tricks, half-truths, and outright fraud that they use to keep themselves in business. Believe it or not, some of these companies have even been taken to court for their tactics, and we’ll reveal them as well. Since there are so many nefarious candidates to choose from, we will try to limit ourselves to the world of options trading, and in our review of each site, will try to answer the following questions:
- Is their marketing honest?
- Are their returns repeatable?
- Does their strategy entail unlimited risk?
- Is their price reasonable, assuming an investor with $10,000 to work with?
Those, we think, are the most important questions; if we’ve forgotten any that can’t be subsumed under any of the questions above, feel free to let us know.
Last point: there’s an obvious conflict of interest in this project, in that we provide a service in the same industry that we are critiquing, so it’s hard to imagine us being particularly unbiased. That’s a fair objection; but that’s why we’ve set out those four questions above, so that we have some consistent and objective criteria by which to judge others (and ourselves). Another response is that, if anything, we should be silent about the existence of our competitors: after all, we’re giving them free publicity and traffic. But that’s only more proof that we’re just as interested in debunking industry myths as we are in hawking our own product. And by all means, if you object or have a rebuttal to anything here or in the forthcoming series, we’re always up for some conversation.
Our first Takedown will be posted in the next few days…don’t miss it.
