Hello fellow hivers!
I wanted to share something that I am currently doing for income, am passionate about, and something that hopefully can help or teach someone. (or just offer something cool to look at and read)
I got my start into trading back in 1999. I was a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I received a small booklet in the mail entitled 'The World's Most Powerful Money Manual' (TWMPMM for short)
After reading that I was hooked and got the full book. TWMPMM was about futures commodities (things like wheat, soybeans, oil, and gold) and how to make money selling and buying them. The movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy is real funny and shows futures trading.
I tried to win with futures, but eventually lost my money within a year.
Fast forward another three years and I am now discovering Forex.. FX has many advantages over futures.. it trades 24/7, the minimums are less and anyone can trade, even just pennies at a time. I especially like how simple it seemed compared to futures and how for only $1 u can trade up to $500! (this is leverage, and it will bankrupt u very fast)
I made a fatal mistake that some beginner traders make.. I WON my first few trades.. so then I HAD to keep on trading until I was a millionaire! After all, I obviously knew the secret to success. The fact that I lost all my money in the next six months was just a fluke.
So, I papertraded for about a year after that.. trying to stumble onto a way to win consistently. I had already found a way to LOSE consistenly, so it shouldn't be too hard, right?
I gave up and moved onto better things. Enter steemit and that was a good thing to focus on. Well, that just led to crypto trading since that was already a known obsession of mine.
I was winning at that., it was too easy.. if you look at a chart of bitcoin for those past months when I was trading it, you will see that it was just in a major bull market that year.. constantly rising in price. That was why I was winning.. just dumb luck. Bitcoin stopped rising and crashed hard. Thus ended my crypto career.
I got my hands on a video course that taught this very cool looking, very promising looking, very profitable seeming method of SELLING stock options, like stocks of amazon or disney, etc. That was exactly opposite of what I had been trying to do all the years before by BUYING things, then hoping they go the direction I predicted and then selling them for a profit.
At the time, perhaps I was just too young to understand.. I lacked the patience for it. Now I see how I want to like the banks, loaning money out and then collecting interest, or the insurance companies selling protection and collecting premiums each month, or even like a casino that has a mathematical edge and wins just a little bit, but over and over and over again. I wanted to SELL like the big brokers, to all the greedy, think they're slick and smart, traders that always end up losing trade after trade.. and the brokers are raking in those monies lost.
I credit being stuck at home due to covid, for my looking/searching for a way I can really make some income from home.. just on my computer since that is what I'm good at. I watched a bunch of vids on youtube and finally stumbled on the options trading ones. They had the same look (showing the TOS (thinkorswim) platform that I had seen in the past videos that I knew I wanted to understand, but this time they made sense. :)
I'll end this intro part (I will continue in future posts as long as I have something to share with you. put in the comments if you have any question I can try and answer for you or if you have a suggestion on what I should cover next time.) with one example of my best (in terms of ease of performance and how it's an ideal trade for me) trades from this past week..
and here is that trade just before it expired worthless.. meaning I get to Keep the credit the broker deposited in my account (the 2 contracts of $45 each) notice how my profit zone (the green, dotted lines) gets wider as the trade goes on. I luv how it does that. If I had been the trader who BOUGHT this option, instead of SELLING it.. my profit zone would be shrinking as the trade goes on.
(pay no attention to the red arrow and line I drew on that chart.. I made a free discord server for some option traders to learn and talk about trading. I was showing how I tweaked my trade just a little.)
More to come in future posts..