Option Trading Strategies

I have spent another evening surrounded by forex traders designing their own trading systems.

So, my talk went OK but nobody was interested in UK shares or spread betting so I had a mild look of boredom. They are all US traders or forex traders and seem to obsess over designing new spread betting systems. One guy has six indicators, which he has programmed to come up as red or green bars at the bottom of the screen. It’s all rather clever but he’s not really adding anything; he’s just spending lots of time making it all look pretty. Another guy has a foreign exchange spread betting system for working out which currency pair to trade each day (he works and can’t watch it), which I failed to understand.  I’m hoping to email him to figure out what he was on about but it did look quite interesting. One speaker got the full brunt of my front-row (we were all front-row but that’s an aside) arms-folded routine when he kept saying “let me tell you that you can read the charts if you know how” and “but I can’t tell you how in 30 minutes” and then he put up a chart with bog standard support and resistance, which he called supply and demand.  A few people tried to point out that supply and demand and support and resistance are the same thing but our speaker said not. The dutchman chipped in with “what the f*** are you talking about” (aimed at him, not me) but said speaker stood his ground and promised to come back next time to show us how support and resistance and supply and demand are different (with no volume or other indicators being used). We wait. A good talk by cycle-man on pivots and their use; for once demonstrated with real trades. I like that. The supply and demand speaker had demonstrated using an example…why? I say, if you have a system and you’re making money then “show us the money”. An old mantra but one that helps me separate the wheat from the chaff pretty reliably. At the end of the evening supply-and-demand-man suggested I stay the night with him, so clearly all water off a duck’s back then, or was that to be my punishment . I declined the kind offer; wondering, as one does, what would happen if I actually said yes. I should add that he is recently divorced. I met an interesting lady who runs two chocolate shops. Business brisk, “everyone has a fiver for a bit of a luxury”.  The dutchman, who at the last meeting had lost his shirt on options has stopped trading options (what relief!) and is using simple pivots to trade. He’s made back his losses and is planning to start trading full-time in October. Nice. There were 9 speakers with 9 different views on how to make money in the market. 5 are clearly making money spread betting, 2 just starting out and the other 2, including supply and demand man, end up on my dunno list.