Today I just posted a trade with a 97% probability of profit. If SPY goes up, it makes a little. If SPY drops 5% to 10% by December, it makes 20 times more. But there's a catch. It hates speed, so if the market crashes fast and VIX explodes, this trade goes red long before December. That's the risk I'm paid to carry, and the article shows exactly how I manage it. I also posted a BAC trade: a strong bank that just printed a weak quarter. Both are on Patreon, plus a small-account version of the SPY trade. Link in the first comment.

Most options content I see stops at the entry, the part almost nobody shows is what happens when a position goes against you and you have to make the hard call with real money on the line. I opened a small, separate tastytrade account to do that in public. Most of the positions sit right where the market is likely to test them, because a trade that never gets tested can't teach anything. The first 10, plus BOXX for idle cash: - CRM: unbalanced iron condor - DRAM: Big Lizard - JNJ: put credit spread after earnings - NVDA: Nov/Dec put calendar through earnings - O: short put - SLV: short put - SMH: unbalanced iron condor - TLT: short strangle - URA: short straddle - USO: call ratio spread Some of these are not great trades by the numbers. SLV has the worst premium of the bunch, and selling a straddle on URA with IV near its annual floor isn't textbook either. They're in there because they're the most likely to get tested. I'll post updates as they get tested, including the ones I end up closing for a loss. Which one do you think gets tested first, and what would you do when it does?

Most option sellers never look at the number Cboe prints next to the VIX.\ This week it hit 6.93. It's COR1M, Cboe's 1-month implied correlation: how tightly S&P 500 stocks are expected to move together, on a 0 to 100 scale. 6.93 was near a 10th-percentile low. That's how the VIX held 14.8 with earnings season underway. Most of the biggest S&P 500 companies report within a month, so their 1-month options carry the earnings gap. Inside the index, those gaps mostly cancel. Your short put on one stock keeps the whole move. Where to look instead, every trading day: 1. COR1M and DSPX beside the VIX. Low correlation with rising dispersion means the VIX is understating single-stock risk. 2. The stock's term structure. Find the expiry with the earnings bump. A high IV Rank is often one overnight gap dressed up as 45 days of premium. 3. That stock's skew at your expiry, against its own history. Skip the SKEW Index here. It prices S&P 500 crash tails and says nothing about one company's earnings gap. The same Cboe report shows S&P 500 skew steepening from the 9th to the 15th percentile while the VIX fell. Index puts are where correlation risk gets priced. Someone was paying up for the day these stocks start falling together. Source: Cboe Macro Volatility Digest, Oct 12, 2026

Every option expiring this Friday is hiding a second event. Most premium sellers won't notice it until Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. Tomorrow morning a big bank and two healthcare giants report earnings. On Wednesday we get CPI. If you sell Friday's options for the IV crush, you're also betting on inflation! That's why this week I'm NOT trading the usual IV crush. One healthcare stock has options priced as if it moves 2.5 times faster than it has lately. I still made it my smallest position. All names and strikes are on Patreon. Earnings week just started. Let's squeeze the maximum out of it.

tastytrade says this trade has a 33% chance of making money. The real number is closer to 70%. Earnings season starts next week. Until stock volatility peaks, I'm trading corn. On September 30, USDA checked America's grain bins and found 90 million bushels more corn than even the most bearish analyst expected. Corn fell 21 cents in one day. The funds were all in. In August they held 465,500 long contracts, a record. Friday brings the next USDA report, and a market this crowded pays a lot for protection. I'm happy to sell it to them. The full trade is on Patreon, along with why my broker gets the odds wrong. Link