I have no angle in this discussion to "make up stuff".

Go look at chart if you don't believe. CL ran up $40 + from Jan 2008 to July. Then CL sold off the gains it had made for the year. And didnt start tanking below $100 Jan 2008 low until after, the fall of Lehman Brothers. All the way down 30ish at the 2008. Besides Do you think the recent fall in CL signals another financial crisis and great recession? I think not

Since I'm making this "stuff up" here's a CL chart

Here's a ES chart

And the debt ceiling has been raised so many times over the years that would not have been a precursor to the S&P downgrade in 2011

There's your proof, I have no reason to make up anything.

My last post on this hindsight trading topic, no sense in arguing about it.

\ron,

Where did you get the data for these charts?

/rsm005/

Just now reading this thread, and I invite @ron99 to place you on ignore if you continue to basically call the people here liars.

I want to chime in that I was > 200% YTD return personally, on about 10x the risk rate of ES. I say "was" because I stopped posting all my broker statements because of users like you, so these days I don't share my returns any more because it wasn't worth the headache of defending them. The 200% figure was as of March 31, the last time I publicly shared all my statements.

I have nothing to sell, I spend time posting simply to help others -- as does @ron99. Ron runs a great thread, and I don't want him getting discouraged just because some people can't see the value. Ron has nothing to sell, same as me. He isn't a vendor. It's fine to question people that have ulterior motives and there is plenty of that on other trading forums, but there is none here.

You also need to understand there is a big difference between an individual trader that is trading a six or seven figure account, and an institution trading ten figure accounts (or more). It should go without saying that returns are not symmetrical with the invested money at play.

I'm not a fantastic trader, nor am I smart enough to trade options. So I have no difficulty believing that @ron99 would consistently outperform me in terms of risk to return.

If you want to call me a liar or continue trolling, go ahead, and that will be the end of your invitation to visit futures.io (formerly BMT).

Mike

I would like to share a link I've found interesting:

Think Tank Charts 2 - David Larew - Public ChartList - StockCharts.com

It is very profitable to sell PUTS in the green dots. You don't need to wait for 1 month to lose 50% of the value. In my case my record is in 4 days. I hope this link will help you in the future

I was able to plot the $SPX at stockcharts.com, but where do you find the Put/Call ratio? I didn't see it in the pop up
menu.

I don't doubt that, however, for the new people it should be noted that you had some implied volatility tail winds, or at least they weren't head winds.

During the month of July, ATM IV increased by about 3 points and put skew, as measured by 10-delta risk reversals, actually declined from about -.10 to -.07 during the month. For the newbies, the latter is a good thing if you were short puts coming into July.

So a short put position during a month of a 20% decline in the underlying could have worked. But a similar position from Oct 2014 to March 2015 could have led to painful losses, or at best a long, painful wait until expiration was nearer and IV/IV skew stabilized.

I should have mentioned that I had both call and puts on at the start of the month of July when it was around $59-61 range. At that point I was neutral since I thought it was range bound but that was quickly changed as we are down $14 (over 20%) from 1 month ago
As long as they keep adding rigs in the US it seem to keep going down

My ROI for CL was 2% for July