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

Every AI data center writes two checks: one to the chip makers, one to the power company. This year chips (SMH) are up 69%, power (XLU) is down 8%. I noticed that gap while hunting for trades outside single stocks. Earnings season starts next week, IV is already climbing into the reports, and most of my usual names are off the table for now. Then I pulled up the chart below. XLU: IV Rank 88 SMH: IV Rank 25 My first thought was easy. Sell XLU, skip SMH. I was wrong about the second part. SMH options still price 38% volatility, about 25% more than the ETF really moves, and its puts cost more than its calls. IV Rank only compares IV with its own past year. I ended up selling premium on both, as one package. Most days these two barely move together. I also wrote up the one scenario where they fall together, and what it would cost me. Full breakdown, as always, on Patreon

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Most options educators stop at the entry, and when a trade goes wrong, you're left alone with the hardest decision in trading. I haven't seen anyone fix losing trades in public, with real money, before the outcome is known. We're going to. I've been promising you a fully public options portfolio, and many of you voted on the details in our surveys. Phase one, the Ugly Trades Public Portfolio, is almost ready, and it's a real tastytrade account where I fix difficult positions in the open. Everything I know goes into it I'll use every repair trick I have, including the ones I rely on in the audited hedge fund I co-manage in Luxembourg. You'll see me roll, hedge, reshape each position, and hear why I chose that move. Almost every short-volatility position can be brought back to break-even if you follow the rules in the OptionsJive Trading Plan. Ugly Trades is where you watch that happen live, with real money. In December, I published 4 ways to repair a breached SLV ratio spread. This month, oil ran through the short calls in my USO call ratio, and the follow-up has 11 advanced techniques. In Ugly Trades, you see decisions like these made in the live account, before anyone knows how they end. At selected decision points, I'll post the position and my choices before I make my move. You can tell me what you'd do, then I act and explain why. When a position can't be saved, I'll take the loss, and you'll see that too. My ambition is to make this the most valuable learning experience we've built at OptionsJive. It starts with your trades Every major article and official trade idea stays on Patreon, that will never change. The Discord is a bonus on top of it, a place to talk through the trades in more depth and get to know the other traders in the group. Go to #ugly-trades in our new Discord and post the most difficult position you have, tell us how it got there and where it stands now. I'll pick the most challenging cases that still fit the portfolio's risk limits and open the same structure in my account at today's prices. That gives us a real position to manage and an honest record of whether each repair helped.