We’re pleased to announce that we have joined the optionsXpress Xecute autotrading program, which means that, if you’re a subscriber, you can now have our newsletter positions autotraded in your optionsXpress account.

optionsXpress is consistently ranked as one of the top options brokerages by Barron’s and others, and they’ve been around since 2000 - an eternity in the young world of retail options brokers.  OXPS have some very well-developed trading tools and screeners available for customers, and although their platform is web-only, it is intuitive and comprehensive.  They trade not only stocks and options but also futures and bonds, and are on par with other options brokers when it comes to commissions (and obviously beat out all of the legacy brokers).  We’re really glad to be on board with optionsXpress - they’re definitely pioneers in terms of opening up the options world to ordinary traders.

As with all of our autotrading relationships, we don’t receive any compensation of any kind for this arrangement.  If you have any questions about autotrading, do let us know.

We closed three positions for the April expiration cycle, and as you can see from the chart at right we actually did a little better than our monthly goal of an average return of 10% on capital risked per trade. This month’s average return per trade of 11.92% brings our average number since inception to 9.33%.

It’s worth mentioning that this 10% goal is completely arbitrary, and is just that - a goal. If you average returns of even 2-4% per month, you’re already beating every mutual fund and a whole lot of hedge funds. We also want to remind everyone that three trades does not a portfolio make: the key to success in options is to enter lots of little trades rather than just a few big trades, and to spread your risk out across multiple strikes, multiple products, and multiple months.

The average holding time this month was 25 days, and that’s pretty consistent with our average holding time in general. We’d like to increase that number going forward, which will mean entering trades a little bit earlier, perhaps two or three weeks before expiration of the prior month. We only have two trades open thus far for May, and we’d prefer to see implied volatility pop up a little bit before entering a third position. We also want to be cognizant of the bullish action that has developed, so a third or fourth trade would likely be somewhat wider and/or bullishly biased in order to keep our deltas somewhat in check.

Introducing… Frank

In case you haven’t already noticed, we’ve added another author here on the blog. Frank C. comes with plenty of trading experience and a smooth writing style, and has already posted some excellent work. So we’d like to formally welcome Frank, and if you missed any of these recent pieces, be sure to check them out:

Biding Time (Calendar Spread Bonus Trades)
Calendar Spread Update
Pollyanna Creep
Feed Your Hedge

We’ve all been there: it’s late, you can’t sleep, and there’s nothing much on TV. (And Tivo hasn’t been invented yet.) You flip through and happen upon a guy in a sailboat, who apparently also owns lots of red sports cars and spends a lot of time running down the beach with beautiful women. How did he get this way? Why, by buying the [fill in the blank] trading course, of course!

Wizetrade, Teach Me to Trade, Optionetics… they all make trading sound so easy. Well, in case you’re ever tempted to spend any of your valuable time with any of these people, be sure to check around online first. Most of those courses and programs, as you might suppose, aren’t quite what they claim to be (to say the least).

Infomercialscams.com is one of many sites that does the laudable work of providing a place for people to rate and assess companies that sell via infomercial. The site isn’t restricted to wealth-building scams, either. The Kevin Trudeau page, for example, contains exactly as many unhappy customers as you’d expect. Although you have to wonder about anybody gullible enough to buy a book called “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.” Anyway, according to Consumerist, Infomercialscams.com is constantly getting sued by all the companies that get discussed there. Which is to be expected, I guess.

Good rule of thumb: if anyone trying to sell you something ever mentions sailboats, sports cars, beautiful women, retiring early, easy weight loss, a clean house, five minute meal preparation, or any combination of the above, run like hell. Unless, of course, you’re actually trying to buy a sailboat or a sports car.

Question: What’s the only thing stupider than stealing easily searchable content from someone else’s website?

Answer: Stealing easily searchable content from someone else’s website, and then being dumb enough to link back to them.

[UPDATE: We made the mistake of notifying them of our copyright just before posting this, and they quickly pulled the offending page. Here's the imageless Google cache version. Only time will tell whether this is a site run by complete morons, or simply a cheap imitation of our honest work. Given how shady and bizarre the newsletter industry generally is, they will probably spend all their time on marketing instead of trading, make lots of quick cash, and retire early.]

As some of you know, Condor Options began as a quiet little research and trading outfit catering to a few private clients. Over time, we decided that we should open up our strategy to the public, and thus this website was born. We never expected much in terms of traffic and visibility, mostly because iron condors are a very specific (and let’s be honest, advanced) options strategy, so we didn’t anticipate a very large audience, and haven’t really tried to build one as such.

In spite of that, we’re now getting over 3000 visitors and 7000 pageviews per week! To be specific, according to Google Analytics, from Sept. 22 through Sept. 28 we had 3005 visits and 7438 pageviews. A lot of our readership has come from our current subscribers, who have been great about referring their friends and families.

If you’re just joining us, there are a couple things you can do to stay connected:

1. Signup for our free periodic newsletter, called Condor Options Reports, by filling out your information in the form at the top-right of our site. We won’t bother you too often, but we will offer you some very helpful articles about iron condors and the Greeks. Note that our Reports are not identical to this blog, so if you’re not signed up you’re definitely missing out on some excellent content.
2. Get our blog updates for free via RSS: You can add our RSS feed to your favorite feed reader and get automatic updates of any new posts.
3. Subscribe, obviously! We’re currently at our membership limit, but we do maintain a priority waiting list that allows our readers to get first access to any membership spots that open up.

Thanks again for reading, and as always we love to get your questions and comments.