And he's off!

OK, I'm starting this new blog on the topic of making money--hopefully lots of it--trading options. So, I've traded options before, mostly very unsuccessfully. I've tried following the advice of various gurus, subscribing to options newsletters and the like, but I've never been satisfied with the results. Plus, the biggest problem for me was that I just didn't know why I was making the trades I was making (besides because I was being told to). Well, no more! Time to get serious. In this blog I plan on describing what I learn as I learn it, and sharing all my trades and the motivations behind them. Hopefully this will all turn into a trading plan that will actually consistently make money in the long run.

So, first off, here's a workbook I've made to keep track of my trades: options.xlsx. It's currently got two worksheets: Positions, and Profit Calc.

The Positions worksheet is pretty basic. Just a list of options that I've currently got positions in. I pretty haphazardly chose most of the underlying stocks using PortfolioGrader Pro, just by looking at the Top 3 of Sector/Industry listings. Some of the others I stumbled across on Louis Navellier's blog. He's one of the gurus I used to subscribe to.

The Profit Calc worksheet is a way to create profitability charts for up to 4 legs of puts, calls, or stocks.

Well, more about the spreadsheet tomorrow. Like I said, it's pretty basic, because my way of figuring out what to trade is still pretty basic. More to come later, including expectations, volatility, etc. Currently I'm reading Trading Options to Win by S. A. Johnson, and trying to make sense of the log-normal distribution.