As of 9/1/2018: Time to update this summary with what i'm really up to. I've mucked around with a few ideas in options trading and read a bunch (books and forum members) and have settled on the following strategies to continue to test (results are posted periodically) live in the markets.
I've also committed to journal and logging all of these trades. I first did this via this journal (which is good to get in the habit of writing your trades down) and then via a custom excel sheet (same principle).
The problem with these methods is that they make it difficult as hell to find out if your ideas are actually successful over time. I found that i have traded several ideas (dare i say strategies??) over recent months and now i've reached the point where i need to prove to myself they are statistically profitable before continuing onward. As these are pretty specific options strats it's not terrible difficult to catalog them. The following are the tags I use on my trades on my beloved tradervue (been using only a few weeks) account. I'll explain each.
Short Vol (non-earnings) - this references the trades where for some reason (news event or otherwise) volatility and likely price has spike and made an unexpected move. These are fades with usually a littttle bit of delta bias (not much though) and mostly benefit from a vol crunch once the cattle calm down in the next few days/week.
Short Premium (Fundamentals) - this is a strategy that ron99 does (though i'm less sophisticated right now) but it's basically making an assessment of a future option (commodities mostly, though i've done a few equities) and determining my fundamental bias/trend. Then sell deep otm options that support that opinion. The idea here is that the trend is your friend and you are far enough out of the money that even a black swan type move against you shouldn't kill you (because the move is rarely based solely on fundamentals).
Short Earnings VOL - sell premium in high IV environment right before earnings announcements, scoop up profits when volatility settles after the announcement. Try not to get my face ripped off in a multi stdev move. SImple.
SteadyOptions Eearnings Straddle - these guys have an amazing service and from what i can tell a tried and true strategy. I'm a current subscriber and trying to learn as much as possible about them. They publish their ideas so it's not private to subscribers only. Basically they identify stocks that have good IV increases running up to earnings, and try and buy at the opportune moment to benefit most from the increased value in the straddle (usually bought atm). Then they sell right before the announcement.
Earnings Straddles - this is the same idea as above, but trades that i find/try myself that aren't part of the SO service.
SteadyOptions Non-Earnings - a few of the SO trades are not earnings based and are plays on ETFs etc. this is just to keep track of the effectiveness of the service, i'm pretty much taking all their signals here (for now).
Note as of 9/21/2017: I've recently completely changed up my trading strategy, products and goals. That part of the journey starts on page 13 and is focused on Equity Options trading, being a net seller of options and maintaining short delta (for the most part). I'll leave my original journal (mostly futures price action trading) here of course, but skip ahead to 13 and on to see the more interesting stuff.
-Ethan
Ive been observing/reading on futures.io (formerly BMT) for about a year now and its definitely time to start my own journal. I was initially very hesitant to because I felt I had not been actively trading enough and didn't want to have a dormant journal sitting around. Ive been at it mostly daily (work full time in tech) for several months, and with the help of tradervue, I plan to use this as a log of results, thoughts and a forum for experimenting with different strategies.