📊 How to Trade Options with OptionsPlay l Top Performing Platform and Analytics

okay good afternoon and welcome back everyone to our options education webinar series my name is tony zhang i'm the chief strategist here at options play and during today's session i want to spend some time to go over and review all of the different tools and services that you have access to as part of your options play membership it doesn't matter whether you're a free trial user or you're currently a member or if you're just learning about options play for the first time i want to go through the different resources that you have at your disposal when you are using optionsplay so that you understand um how to how to access all of them making sure that you understand what what every what's available so that you can take advantage of all of the resources to help you navigate the markets so let's go ahead and get started before we do anything i discuss here today is purely for education and demonstration purposes it is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell any specific securities so during today's session i'm going to do a quick platform overview just to give everyone an understanding as to how to utilize the platform so if you have an idea whether it's an idea initiated by our t research team whether it's whether it's an idea that you've created on your own or somewhere else that you've got the idea from how do you actually go about evaluating with some of the technical indicators that you can look at some of the analysis techniques to understand whether the auction strategy that you want to trade makes sense and i'm just getting a sense for risk to reward ratios those are going to be really important for you to understand and then i want to show you the options to play hub this this is this is where a lot of the resources that we provide live um different income generating reports education um you know scanners these are all available here through the options play hub and then i want to talk to you about the daily play the ideas that we send out to you every single day what they are kind of what the best practices are around trading them and then taking a look at the different weekly events that we host whether it's education events like we're doing here today the market outlook sessions that we do on tuesday or the rapid fire sessions that we're doing tomorrow morning uh and then taking a look at some of the new features that recently have been released and the new features that are coming out here over the next couple of months and at the very end i'll open this up for q a but the primary question that i want to help everyone walk away from today's session is a clear understanding as to how can you maximize your options play membership for both your trading and your learning experience with respect to options and analysis so my name is tony zhang i'm the chief strategist here at options play hopefully today i'll give you a quick overview of kind of the broad range of resources that you have access to as part of your options play membership um so at the core of it is really going to be some of the ideas that we send out every single day as well as the options play platform so the the daily play ideas are signals that we send out to you every single morning they are delivered to your inbox at six a.m eastern every single day and the signals are either an entry or exit signal with a specific options trade idea now this is really where we take our fundamentals when we take a look at technicals and we look for stocks that are aligned from a technical and fundamental perspective and we generally give you either a credit or debit spread to trade occasionally we'll trade some diagonals or outright calls and puts uh but largely most of the trades that we make are going to be credit or debit spreads and you can take a look at all of our trades here you using this link here on your screen but just to walk everyone through uh you know some of the rules about using these signals because we've been getting a lot of questions sometimes regarding the validity of these signals whether or not you should trade them how you should enter these orders so i want to make sure that we understand how to go about utilizing them so when we think about the open and exit signals because the signals that we send out have a specific expiration date strike price and price for the option strategy we always recommend that you enter these orders after the market opens meaning don't place these orders before the market opens because you never know whether bit-ass spreads open are wide and near the open what the prices are going to be at the open so we always want to let the first few trades go through let the spreads tighten up before we place our orders so that we know where the market is you want to place your your order near where the current market is now the general rule of thumb here is around validity of a trade right sometimes the market opens substantially higher substantially lower how do you know if a trade is still valid generally the rule of thumb here is that when you're able to price your options price so the market opens within 10 of the quoted price that we uh send out as part of the signal generally speaking it is still a valid trade so just make sure if let's say for example we send out a trade that's currently at two dollars credit uh you know your range here is somewhere between a dollar eighty and two dollars and 20 cents basically uh 10 of the quoted price uh if you're within 10 that's still considered a valid trade if it exceeds that 10 then it's a trade that perhaps you need to adjust the strike prices or reconsider whether it's a trade that you want to make but the most important part about the daily play more important than anything else is the fact that you should never risk more than two percent of your total portfolio value on that trade so we have a p we have a risk and investment calculator on options play i'll show you here in one second how to go about using it but this is really the tool that helps you calculate the appropriate number of contracts to trade i cannot tell you how important it is to make sure that you stay within your risk tolerances if you start to exceed your risk tolerances and the trade goes in the opposite direction that you or i expected to that's really where you can get yourself into a lot of trouble there's only one way to prevent that and that's to minimize your risk and you can track all of the trades the open trades that we have in our options play portfolio tool inside of options place so all of the open trades you'll be able to see within our platform does that make sense everyone please type one into the chat window if that makes sense to you and the two most important rules are these two rules entering a trade within one per within 10 of the quoted price and making sure that you calculate the number of contracts that are suitable based on your account value so right now what i think we should do is just quickly review you know a specific trade setup and how to calculate um you know a potential a potential you know number of contracts so this is purely for educational purposes this is not a trade signal or a recommendation if let's say you're bullish on cam uh kamiko uh the uranium enriching company and let's say you were looking at buying the november 21 by 27 call vertical which currently costs 188 dollars per contract let's say you have a 2500 a 25 000 account right we'll multiply that by zero point zero two which is two percent of that total portfolio value that comes out to be five hundred dollars so the most you can risk on this particular trade is five hundred dollars which is two percent of your total portfolio value what you can use is the risk and investment calculator which is the third um button here at the bottom of your screen and using the risk and investment calculator you can select i want to risk and you can type in 500 and in this particular case what it's going to do is it's going to calculate the number of contracts that you can purchase for any strategy that you type in and it's going to approximate exactly how many contracts you can trade or number of shares that you can trade where you're risking roughly about five hundred dollars or no more than five hundred dollars so if we look at this particular trade uh the two call options will risk 494 risk two call verticals will only risk 376. this will help you stay within your risk tolerances so that no matter how a trade works out whether it works out great and it goes exactly the exp your expected direction or works out exactly in the opposite direction that you expect it to that you don't have huge losses in your portfolio that's how you survive as a trader is by thinking about long term and surviving any downturns in the market surviving any periods of consecutive losses the only way you can do that is by maintaining your risk profile so calculate your pro your your portfolio size multiply it by 0.02 or 2 and that is the number that you want to enter into the risk and investment calculator does that make sense please type 2 into the chat window if that makes sense to you this applies for any trade you make doesn't matter whether you're trading a trade that's sent out by options play research maybe you subscribe to other newsletters that give you research this platform will allow you to scan for any type of of opportunities in the markets for these types of uh checks right so if you get your own ideas if you get your ideas from another newsletter if you get your ideas through us doesn't matter plug it into options play use the risk and investment calculator and calculate the appropriate number of contracts it will do it will pay a lot of dividends in the long run for you and your portfolio's value okay so you know and then at the core of the platform is really this tool that gives you the ability to take any idea that you have in the broader markets and easily do some sanity checks across the board okay so when we send out a trade idea a couple of things that you should always look for you should always look at the one month and six month trend and the technical score now this doesn't mean that this is the only metric that matters but usually the market is pretty good at giving a better a sense for whether the stock that you're looking at or the etf that you're looking at is is favorable or not favorable stocks tend to outperform the market unfavorable stocks and out underperform the market and stocks that are in favor and trending higher will typically have uh strong trends right and as trends deteriorate you'll see how those trends change over time so let's just take a look at this chart a little bit longer right so i'll just zoom out a little bit here at the bottom of your screen and i'll make this actually a little larger so that everyone can see as you can see here at the bottom of your screen this is our one month and six month trend indicator as you can see our one month and six months trend indicator gives you a sense for how the trend of the stock is currently uh trending so the six month trend as you can see stayed positive from november uh i'm sorry november 19th all the way through uh april 15th or so and during that time a couple of times the one month indicator started to turn neutral or slightly bearish but not for very long and then once the thing started to turn sideways once the stock started to move no longer any higher that's when the six-month trend also turned neutral and never turned bullish i'm sorry bearish but it did then again resume its bullish trend here back in uh april 28th before this the market started to rally here again and as soon as you had this dip that's when trends started to deteriorate again and things started to turn negative here on uh december uh sorry june 29th as you can see the trends deteriorated all the way through about here on september on august 27th when things started to turn bullish again and things really took off here again right so our one month and six month trend indicator helps you stay on the right side of the trend and not only do you want to stay on the right side of the trend you also want to get a sense for how long a stock has been in a trend for because do you want to be in the trend here or do you want to enter the trend up here i think we all know that we prefer to be on the earlier side of a trend so the one month and six month trend indicator helps you understand how long a stock has been in a trend for whether it's pulled back here and if you start to see the trends turn bullish again here that might be a good opportunity to look for a further entry and then this technical score this is to give you a sense for how strong is the stock relative to the market the trend indicators only tell you how the stock is doing against itself but you also want to know is this a stock that's outperformed the market or is it underperforming the market so this indicator gives you uh the ability to quickly get a sense for whether a stock is outperformed in the market or underperformed the market generally speaking we want to buy stocks that are outperforming the market and short stocks that are underperforming the market does that make sense please type three into the chat window if that makes sense to you so regardless of where you get your ideas from your own you know research from someone else's research from our research i always encourage investors type in the symbol that you are looking at take a look at whether a stock is outperforming the broader markets and starting to turn south such as facebook very strong stock has been outperforming the market since march of this year outperform in the market and just a few weeks ago uh on september 20th sting started started to turn south here um and this is really the first indication of a break of what was a very large bullish trend right as soon as it broke that trend our trend indicators turned negative this state this hopefully helped you either exit a long trade that you were in or look at initiating potentially a short opportunity now this is still a strong stock right still outperforms broader markets you know this is a little bit more speculative right but strong stocks usually tend to have some of the biggest falls so this is really where you can use our technical score our one month and six months trend indicator to quickly gauge any views on any stock that you have and even you know i think some of the most powerful tools that we have is our watch list because you can either use one of our current watch lists like our rapid fire symbols which i'll show you here in one second or if you create your own watch list and what you can do is you can quickly sort it based on the score and what that allows you to do is instantly take any list of stocks that you're looking at and see which stocks are outperforming the market which stocks are underperforming the market which ones have bullish trends which ones have bearish trends instantly without even having to pull up the chart for that underlying stock so this is my bullish watch list as you can see it's all stocks with a high score and as you can see it's pretty much all green across the board so not only are these stocks that are outperforming the market these are stocks that are also trending higher and i can quickly click on a link uh click on the symbol and see you know is this a stock that recently started a bullish trend like united rental has or is this a stock that's been in a bullish trend for a long time like netflix uh it's been bullish since august 16th these are the types of things that you might want to um just do a sanity check on any ideas that you have you know so that you know i know that training sometimes emotional sometimes is um you know you get caught up in the emotion you you read a research piece or you see something on tv or someone else told you about a stock that you should look at before you act on that particular um idea plug it into options place see if it aligns up with what the market is telling you whether it's trending higher whether it's um you know outperforming the market and more importantly is it a little bit late um sometimes you might find a great idea but it's it's a stock that's already had a really long run here like palo alto networks right you know it seems like great stock right technical score of 10 one month and six months trend is fairly strong here but this is a stock that's been bullish since um may of this year right this is a 350 stock now it's 4.73 great idea but maybe a little bit late these are the things that you want to understand before you place a trade and then once you do have a trade idea let's say you have a specific trade setup whether it's a setup that you created on your own or if it's set up that you uh got somewhere else you know you have some on the newsletter that tells you it's time to sell an iron condor and power of the networks no matter where you get your ideas put that idea into options play whether it's a condor a butterfly whatever that is credit spread debit spread um use the p l simulator see how the strategy will perform if the stock does exactly that you expect it to if the stock does exactly the opposite of what you expect it to know how much you can potentially risk and how much you can potentially lose is going to be invaluable information because that prepares you for when you're in the trade what you can expect i cannot tell you how much uh you know i've seen traders panic because they didn't do their homework before they got into a trade and once they're in a trade and the trade is maybe not going in the direction they expect it to they're taking they're looking at this loss and they're and they're surprised at how much they're losing on a particular trade or didn't understand when they would lose that trade so not only do you have to look at where the stock goes you also have to look at you know how does the the trade uh profit right sometimes you know the stock stays exactly where it is and a week later you barely see a profit and then you realize that you really have to hold this all the way through expiration and most of your gains happen in the last few weeks you know that could be a surprise to you and these are some of the things that are important to know because you can hold the trade halfway through expiration and only make 25 of the potential p l even if the stock stays exactly where you would like to be dead center in this iron condor for example right and then you realize that most of the profits actually come in in the last and the later half and it's a surprise to you so these are some of the things that you really have to make sure you understand before you place the trade and that's what options play is designed to do and more importantly for those of you that are new you can paper trade these these strategies you can click on the blue share button and use this link here to save a trade and when you save a trade it simply just allows you to pay per trade this and track this trade between now through expiration uh if you're brand new to a strategy if you've never tried an iron condor before or some other strategy that you're learning or someone else told you about a strategy use the paper trading feature and all of your paper trades show up under your profile you'll be able to see it under shared trades and when you should look at your trades you'll be able to see all the previously requests uh traded uh strategies if you click on an old strategy it'll bring it up and it will show you how the strategy is performing so that you can track it day to day and see whether you're making money losing money as you expected to so hopefully when you're ready to place that trade with your real money you nothing surprises you know exactly what to expect so between the p l simulator that prepares you and gives you that homework um what this the paper trading tool will allow you to do is actually simulate those trades and just for one last time just to show you how to place that trade for any trade that you want to place you click on the blue share button on any trade when you click on the blue share button you will be able to see this link here on the upper on the right hand side when you click on that that will save the trade in your profile you can find all of your trades under your profile so this is all designed so that no matter where you get your ideas you can have a sanity check on the underlying stock itself whether it's trending in the direction you expect it to whether you're early or you're late and then on your option strategy you know exactly how much you can potentially lose or or or make before you get into a trade and if you need to paper trade it go ahead and do that so that you can track it on your own okay does that make sense everyone please type four into the chat window if that makes sense to you and and just just one last thing on the platform right there's a lot of things on this platform i couldn't go through everything here today but that's why we have a few different things that are designed to help you we have a guide we have an faq and we have a platform walkthrough in the lower uh left hand corner and you know that's designed to help you guide you through the platform but if let's say you don't know how to use something you can use the questions ask us section here on the upper right hand corner those tickets go to our support team we're here to help answer your questions um and this is so if you have a question regarding you know what's currently what you're looking at on the platform you can send us a message and you can even attach a screenshot of the platform so that we can see what you are looking at if you have some questions so always feel free to contact us and our support team on the platform the next thing i want to go through is the options play hub and the options play hub is what you find on the options and education and resources link here on the upper right hand corner of your platform and what that gives gets you to is the options play hub the options play hub is where all of the different resources that we live is in one place we have everything from a platform walkthrough that's designed to help if you're brand new to options play and you want to refresher as to how to utilize the platform we have all of our upcoming events that you can look at our events calendar we do three at least three events a week so if you want to know what's coming up what you're going to be able to learn the events calendar will show you that information and then we put out a lot of commentary each week on what's currently going on with the market we have market outlook we have options education we have members only content this is all available to you through the options play hub and then we have the different income reports i don't quite have enough time to go through all of them but i will go through as many as possible but for example we have our credit spread opportunity report this is by far the one of the most um uh popular tools from traders a lot of you like to sell credit spreads and this report is designed to quickly find credit spreads that provide some type of edge in the broader market so as you can see we look at how the percentage of the width that you're collecting in terms of premium these are trades or credit spreads where the risk reward are skewed in your favor where we collect more than one third of the width and you're risking less than two dollars for every one dollar you can potentially make a lot of credit spreads you risk roughly two dollars for every one dollar you make but let's say for example if you select something that has a 40 a width of 40 percent that means you're only risking a dollar and a half for every one dollar you can potentially make and that half a cent i'm sorry half a dollar makes quite a bit of difference in the longs on the grand scheme of things when you place that trade over and over again and this is a true this is a platform or a report that updates every single hour and when you're using the credit spread opportunity report you can actually click on the symbol here so for example if i click on lockheed martin here it will actually bring up the trade in options play so this is designed to help make your analysis part as easy as possible because it brings up lockheed martin you can see that it's a score a very weak stock the one month and six month trend does not look particularly strong and it gives you exactly the expiration date strike price and how much premium you're collecting so for uh 555 dollars of max reward you're risking 495 on the back of it you have a probability of profit of about 68 or so giving you all the metrics that you need to decide if this is a trade that you want to make and then you can click on the trade button and see how to enter this trade into your broker's platform this is designed to try to make your pro your research process as quick as possible because you have all of the technical analysis information at your fingertips and then you can do the um the options analysis also very quickly and decide whether it's a trade that you want to place for your platform so the credit spread report is more for those of you that like to sell credit spreads have a directional view but we also have other reports such as cover calls and short puts cover calls or for stocks that you own short puts are for stocks that you want to own and these reports are designed to give you uh you know pretty much all of the stocks in the s p 500 and very liquid etfs and what we sort them by is the highest annualized return so what you're trying to find is opportunities for stocks that you own to give you a large downside protection and to generate some yield on the stocks that you own so if we look at the cover call report let's go back to the cover call report this report covers uh you know pretty much every single s p 500 stock um in in the universe and what you're able to do is see how much uh yield you're actually collecting and what you can do is you can click on a stock and be able to see uh not only you know what expiration date and strike price are you selling how much premium are you collecting using the midpoint uh the distance of the strike meaning how far does the stock need to rally before this uh stock is called the way and when you click on the stock it'll show you the the um the setup in options place so that you can look at the yield and compare it to the dividend yield so i always tell investors look at the annualized yield of the 12 months projected yield and compared to the dividend yield now a firm is a very volatile stock so right now you can collect a lot of premium for this but that's not always necessarily the case this is a bit of anomaly how much premium you're actually collecting here on a firm but you know some of these volatile stocks they do provide a lot of juicy premiums and our goal of these credit spread reports is to show you where you have the highest premiums by selling uh stocks and you can always search for the stocks that you want to uh or the stocks that you own and use this cover call report to find opportunities for your portfolio and we do the same thing for short puts short puts are simply very similar uh strategy but for stocks that you want to own so for example if you want to look at buying neo if you sold the 35 put you'll collect a dollar ninety that's a five point three percent discount on the stock purchase so you can click on this uh the symbol and see that selling the october 29th 35 puts will collect you a little over five percent of the stocks value and keep in mind if you get a 5.33 discount on a stock that pays zero dividends remember you're getting paid 5.33 over 29 days if you annualize out throughout the year that 67 annualized return on your cash that you're setting aside to potentially own this stock so even if this put expires worthless you're collecting 5.33 on the cash that you're putting aside that is a fair amount of premium to collect in 29 days so this is really where you want to utilize these types of strategies for stocks that you want to acquire and just like that you can type in the stock that you want to acquire and look at the opportunities to sell a put on that specific name this is all available to you through the short put report we also have liquidity and iv ranking but that's already built into your options point platform so for any symbol that you type in you have the iv rank and you have the liquidity this gives you a sense for whether the options that you're trading are liquid or not and the implied volatility rank something that a lot of you uh like to use in your trading okay so this is all available to you on our platform and then for those of you that are a little bit more sophisticated in terms of the option strategies that you are trading if you'd like to take on more risk and you're and you want to collect more premium you can sell straddles you can sell strangles we also offer this type of report for straddles and strangles and this is really where we're looking for stocks that generate an outsized uh amount of premium if you sell the at the money straddle or if you sell an out of the money strangle um and we show you what percentage of the stock price you're collecting as as part of the strangle or straddle and you can do this using our report which is also available to you on the hub not suitable for everyone but certainly a report that for those of you that are willing to take on the risk and understand the risk piece of it uh you know you can find both straddles and strangles strangles are near the bottom of the report because strangles collect less premium but you can select either a strangle or a straddle on any of these symbols you can see there's a lot of them right and you can select how much premium you're actually collecting you can even sort and filter these so if you want to say i only want to look at triangles instead of straddles you can do that and see where can you get the most premium selling a strangle so if you look at nugget or firm as you can see you can collect eight percent of the stocks value by selling a strangle um you know what's another one alcoa a lower price stock right now that you can collect seven percent of the underlying stocks value has an iv rank of 55 percent that's part of why you're collecting so much premium it does have earnings coming up so you can know which stocks have earnings but which stocks do not have earnings and some of you like to sell going interning some of you like to avoid them so this income report gives you the opportunity to scan for both so regardless of what type of strategies you trade credit spreads cover calls short puts strangles straddles there's a different scanner and report built for you so that you can find the opportunities that generate the most yield for your trading and lastly we have our earnings calendar earnings calendar is really important for earnings uh season which is just about to launch here in about a couple of weeks we have banks kicking off the week of october uh is an 11th i think um yeah october 11th is when we start to see some banks kick off earnings season it's important to know what's what stocks are reporting earnings um so you have an earnings calendar this will show you um i'll show you how to use this earnings calendar and i will do a separate session here coming up but as you can see you have the dates across the top and as you can see the week of october 11th pretty light on the earnings calendar not a whole lot but the following week this is when things really start to heat up as you can see there are a lot more uh symbols the week after and the following week even more and this is color coded for you so that you know the symbols in green are the most liquid the ones in yellow are somewhat liquid and anything that's white meaning there's no color in it these are symbols that are not very liquid so whenever you're thinking about an earnings calendar sometimes on a specific day there may be 300 stocks reporting on that day how do you sort through all of that the reality is you can't so what you do is you only look you focus on the ones that have um green uh first right because those are the most um uh liquid and the ones with the asterisks are the ones that report in the mornings the one without the asterisks or the one that reporting the afternoon so we built this earnings calendar to try to make it as easy as possible to know what should i focus on for that specific day what coming up day focus in the mornings the night before the ones in the afternoon which ones are most liquid those are the ones that you want to focus your time on researching on understanding whether you think the stock is going to be bullish or bearish looking at the implied volatilities those are the types of stocks that you want to focus on going forward does that make sense everyone please type five into the chat window if that makes sense to you and i am doing a session on earning season uh in the month of october mid october as we kick off earnings season i think i'm going to be doing that either on the 21st or the 14th one of those two days i'm still finalizing our october calendar but one of these two days i will be doing a session on earnings season and we'll be looking at the earnings calendar together we'll be looking at how i research an earnings play before i place a trade for um for earnings so uh this is a really powerful tool during earnings seasons to give you an idea as far as what to look for and what to focus on for each given day um and then just to switch gears a little bit you know we also host a lot of events throughout the week like the one that you are on here today and these events are designed to help you navigate the markets our tuesday morning market outlook sessions gives you a macro view of the broader equity markets each week we cover equities we cover bonds we cover commodities and we cover the individual sectors we look at what sectors are lagging which sectors are legal to give you a sense for where to focus your attention including giving you our top trading ideas stocks that are breaking out to the upside stocks that are breaking down to the downside and you get all of it as a member recorded so that you get the slides and the recording afterwards i know some of you are on the west coast 9 a.m is a little early so you have this recording so you can watch it at your own time right after we finish each day and you can access some of it at optionsplay.youtube.com make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell to get access to these series and we also host a bunch of members only series we have a rapid fire session like the one we're doing tomorrow morning at 8 30 a.m this is really where you as members you can submit symbols to us and we put your symbols through our technical and fundamental scans and we show you which symbols out of all of the hundreds and hundreds of symbols that you guys submit which ones meet our technical and fundamental screening criterias and i show you why the setups of the stocks that you put that you um submit to us i think are relevant so every single week we we try to go through brand new symbols from the ones that you submit and the ones that we think have the best setups from a technical and fundamental perspective and what we started doing is we started creating these watches so after each session you have a list of all the stocks we referenced during that session during our tuesday morning market outlook session as well as our rapid fire sessions all of the symbols that we look at we create a watch list so everyone can look at them afterwards after each session you can go through them one by one see which ones you like and potentially enter a trade on them once the market opens both of these sessions are right before the open so that you can have these ready to go at the open for you to do your analysis and potentially make a trade immediately on the back of that we also send you the recording and the slides as well but i think the watch list makes it a lot easier for you to sort through those opportunities and potentially place a trade and then we do these thursday afternoon sessions these sessions are really focused more on education showing you how to think about the markets how to think about different options strategies and how to utilize the different resources that you have available here at options play just like this session here today where we focus on the tools and services normally what we do is we focus on a specific option strategy we show you how to utilize uh the reports and the platform to find opportunities and then the best practices around trading those types of strategies this is every single thursday at 4 15 p.m these sessions are also recorded we cover a variety of topics beginner intermediate and advanced this is really your opportunity to learn option strategies learn the options by platform and for you to ask questions on anything options related and these are all recorded you get the slides afterwards um so that you can watch them at your own pace and make sure you developed the skills that you need to trade these types of strategies in your own trading account and you can also subscribe at youtube.com optionsplay which i will post a link into the chat window for everyone who wants to subscribe and make sure you hit the notification bell because that's going to alert you every time we upload a video to our youtube channel so just to uh wrap up and give you some sense for some of the new features that are coming out here in q4 of 2021 for those of you that are currently on a free trial or currently have a membership we do have a mobile app coming up here in the in the next couple of months this mobile app for is for both iphone and android you'll be able to access our education uh our you know webinar recordings you'll be able to access our tuesday morning market outlook sessions our daily plays our income reports and we're also going to be able to allow you to analyze basic strategies using the new options play app so this is something that we're really excited about and i'm really excited about and hopefully you'll be able to utilize a lot of the resources that i'm going to show you here today uh on the road when you do want to make a trade on your platform on your mobile device and we're also launching new uh ideas watchlist we've been getting a lot of requests from the tuesday and friday outlook sessions and the rapid fire sessions to get ideas like that every single day so we are going to be launching new ideas watch lists in our platform so every single day we'll be scanning the market for technical and fundamental factors and we're going to create these watch lists that will give you uh stocks that have uh momentum uh the profitability and rising earnings for bullish trades uh liquidity and relative strength when all four of these things line up they get onto our bullish watch list and when all four of these things line up for the bear side we they get onto our bearish watch list this this is how we scan for opportunities in the market when we send out daily plays and we send out uh tuesday morning market outlook sessions and this is how we scan the hundreds of symbols that you submit every single week for the rapid fire sessions you're going to be able to access all of that information through our new bullish and bearish watch list that we will be launching here in the next few weeks so those are some of the things that are coming down the pipeline that we are working on at the very moment to help you uh better navigate the resources that we have here at options play so with that that covers what i wanted to share with you here today like i said if you're currently a member you have access to everything i showed you here today if you're currently on a free trial membership is just a hundred dollars a month or 750 a year and if you're brand new to options play if you've never seen this before you can sign up for a free 30-day trial at optionsplay.com i'll post this link into the chat window here for those of you that want to sign up for a free 30-day trial whether you're watching this live or watching the recording for this you can sign up for your free trial at optionsplay.com um with that that covers what i wanted to share with you what i will do at this point is i'll open this up for q a there's a chat window and there's a q a window please type your questions into the q a window and i will try to answer as many questions as i have time for here today before i have to sign off so like i said there's a q a section and a chat window please type your questions into the q a section um why why place a credit spread versus a debit spread trade when you def when you generally show a bull bear trade on stocks um i'm not sure what you mean by generally show a bull bear trade on stocks mark if you don't mind clarifying them i'll try to answer your question it would be helpful to me to be able to see if my peripheral trade would have worked if i sold an expiration date even after even after the option has expired currently the share trade since the trade has expired um sandra thank you for your feedback i will take that into account as we kind of continue to um improve our paper trading features uh do you have any training on thinkorswim so cornell i'd have some training on thinkorswim i will say i think the best resource to learn how to use thinkorswim is think or some themselves they have a ton of education on their website i would recommend that you go to thinkorswim for that the cover call and the cover call recommendation on the platform under income gives different optimal cover calls what's the difference so dave when you're on the options play platform you go to the income tab you can create your own settings here so what we show you here the october 22nd 520 are based on your settings short medium or long term conservative optimal aggressive you can set these yourself um so our platform will always show you based on your settings the cover call and short put reports are based on kind of generic settings across the board based on what we deem as best practices so the platform gives you the ability to override that that's up to you as to whether you use that the reports are really scanning for generic best practices all the stocks show up in the cover called short put reports um not every single stock shows up there are certain criterias first of all it needs to collect some enough income before it can show up there it also needs to have liquidity so um you know we are also at the same time looking to expand the list that we have for cover call and short puts so you know charles i i appreciate the feedback and that is something that we will work on is expanding that list so we have more opportunities to show you especially stocks that you currently own uh hello tony the straddle string angle is does it account for whether a stock is in a range by any chance j no it does not but that's something that we actually are are actually about to implement um you know whether a stock is trading in a range from uh from a volatility perspective just keep in mind the thing the problem with that is that stocks that are in a range that doesn't mean it's going to stay in a range right so that's sort of the tricky part you know just just focusing on stocks that are currently in a range actually may not be the best time to sell um a straddle or strangle it's usually actually after a big move in the underlying stock that's usually the best time to sell a um a straddle or strangle because stocks tend to trade in a range after a big move once it's been trading in a range for a while it actually has the highest opportunity of breaking out from that range so just identifying stocks that are in a range is not necessarily the best time to sell a straddle works right not to mention after the stock is stuck in a range for a while the implied volatility is relatively low so what you're collecting on the straddle and the strangle is going to be relatively low in terms of premium so for those reasons that's why we don't identify stocks that are in a range in order to sell straddles and strangles i'm at the money straddle and strangle report requests uh instead of directly showing the list um sharepoint online sign in um it should not require that because as you can see here i'm not signed in you can click on access now you do need a membership if that's what you mean um but you don't need to sharepoint to access this you do need to have an options point membership or a free trial in order to access these reports oh i see you were able to solve that on the bullish watch list and options my url has a green bar on the left but it's down today does the bar color represent the one month trend or the technical score the bar represents the trend so if we're looking out sorry if we go to watch this um i think you're talking about the bullish stocks list um and you're talking about u r i um no your uri hasn't changed right but um uri as you can see one month and six months trend is bullish here um but the score here the score represents the technical score and then the one month trend the arrow is for the one month trend and the bar is for the six month trend so you really get everything across the board on you know all three data points the technical score the one month and six month trend these three data points you get to see on your watch list before you even click on a chart amazing how you and often player progressed even just over the last 13 months ron thank you so much you know we can and this is all thanks to your support as members um i i cannot you know thank everyone who is a subscriber who uh watches us and supports us on youtube um it's because of your support that allows us to continue working on these new features and then releasing them and getting them out to you so please you know we're about to send out a survey also as well to everyone who's a member or on a free trial just to get your feedback so we know what to prioritize and what to work on these are the things that are important to us um and i hope that you guys are will continue to support us and see the the progress that we make and hopefully help you as traders as well uh julie um i really find your service valuable this summer i was working on my house and didn't have much time for trading and utilizing the platform resources i will be focused on trading once the house moves and i look forward to using your resources again julie congratulations and i look forward to having you back as well uh daniel do the short put and call cover call reports always show all stocks in the s p 500 does this get only stocks from the scanner so it stands for liquidity and we are again in the process of expanding that list so that we have a larger list of stocks that are in that scanner um but you know and daniel you're the second person to comment on that so we will make sure that we expand the list in the cover call and short put reports uh is the rapid fire watch this updated every single friday morning in the sandra the rapid fire sessions are updated every time we do those sessions right now we're doing them every two weeks um so every two weeks the rapid fire session will update the tuesday morning market outlook sessions updates every tuesday morning and going forward once i once i generate the bullish and bearish watch list those will update every single day how do we access your options charts um donald if you're referring to this platform you can sign up for a free trial at optionsplay.com if you don't have access to options play you can sign up for a platform at optionsplay.com i've just sent a link into the chat window for everyone if you want to sign up what's your opinion on synthetic portions to replicate stocks for those with limited capital so if you're talking about you know trading a a synthetic stock right so bullish uh long synthetic stock as you can see these two strategies are identical here's the thing is that you know the the max risk is the same right this might be slightly more capital efficient so if you have um you know the way that you should think about this is that if you trade a synthetic stock position and you don't have all the cash meaning you don't have 35 000 what you're doing is you're taking a leveraged position in that in in that stock so the question is if you don't have if you have limited capital do you want to now leverage your capital even more so that's the question only you can answer um i think that you want to be careful with using leverage because if you own let's say you only have 10 000 and now you can create a 35 000 position you're just simply increasing the risk of your total portfolio um and only you can answer whether that's an appropriate amount of risk for your portfolio or not so just be aware that you are leveraging your capital if you have limited capital can you please explain the greek in a trade example so marco i don't quite have enough time on that today but i do have a specific video on youtube if you subscribe to our youtube channel which is youtube.com optionsplay i do have um videos on the greeks and i just posted a link into the chat window but you know one of the things that i can show you is that the price slider shows you delta it shows you how the stock will how the value of your option will change as the stock moves higher as the stock moves lower so this price slider actually accounts for both delta and gamma the time slider accounts for theta which is uh time to kick and then the volatility slider accounts for vega which is volatility so you can learn more about this using uh the videos in my youtube channel currently doing bare put spreads on all indices use op today to help me select some doing quite well michael great thank you so much for sharing that and that's exactly why we built this platform so that you can take your ideas analyze them make sure they align with what you're expecting and then so that you can place that trade it doesn't mean that you'll make money on the trade but it means that you'll know exactly what to expect after you place the trade and that is really more important than anything else the worst thing is placing a trade and then not knowing why you've lost money or made money that is the worst thing because you don't really know whether you should stay in the trade or exit a trade if you know exactly what to expect it'll help you better plan for that and know exactly when to get in and when to get out should i put orders half an hour after the market opens or one hour after the market opens you don't have to wait that long just even a couple of minutes after the market open is fine you know within one minute once the bid ass quote starts to tighten up you can start placing your orders you don't have to wait half an hour maybe back in the day you did but certainly not in the days of electronic market making usually about a minute is all you need to play star placing trades um do you have educational videos on selling iron condos so i do not have one specifically on iron condors what i do have is a lot on credit spreads because an iron condor is really just two credit spreads it's a put credit spread and a call credit spread and i talk about the best practices for each one uh now matt an iron condor is really just the two strategies merged into a single strategy the only difference between iron condor and these two strategies is really how you manage them because you can as as as as a stock moves to one side you can you can move the other side and turn it into kind of an iron butterfly or a narrower iron condor but you know that's really the only difference between those strategies but i will look at placing uh doing a video soon on selling iron condors do you cover leaps yes i have a specific video on leaps it's actually one of our best uh performing or one of our most watched videos on youtube so please go on our youtube channel search for leafs um and there is one that i recently recorded earlier this year that gives you kind of a breakdown of leads and trading diagonal loops uh what are your preferred indicators on thinkorswim you know i've been a very long time user of what's called the woody cci i'm a big fan of this commodity channel index indicator it's one that i use a lot in my trading um it's the one that you i use on my market outlook sessions so you know i use cci a lot but again you know for those of you that looked at my technical analysis back test uh you know the indicators they don't have a big performance difference it's not like you've used one indicator you're going to get so much more profitable than the other one um it really just depends on what uh what what suits you in terms of what you're familiar with what you prefer using i like using cci you but you can really use any of them that you like uh sby trending down what do you think about shorting puts at this time um you know for those of you that like to buy the dip i think selling puts is a is a very uh interesting time to go about doing so if you believe that this is still another by the dip um i'm not quite convinced as that but so far support levels are still holding on spy qqq all the major indices um but even today we broke below some of those major support levels so i am concerned about selling puts here at the moment some of us are at work when the market opens um so you know this is really where you have to figure out what works for your schedule right you know if you are at work and you're not trading very often right then what you should do is you should have a system where you uh place your orders make sure that your stops and limits uh on hand for each one of them and then you you simply uh you know let the stops and limits work their work their magic if you will right um you know these days mobile platforms are pretty easy for order entry but i do again um if you're going to trade i do you know you you can enter orders before the market opens but you can't be surprised if sometimes you get a poor execution you're just simply going to get better execution if you know where the market opens and you're going to enter your orders near the midpoint um you're just going to bet better better executions you you can enter them before the market opens you may not just may not get the best executions um daniel uh thank you for for telling me about spy and qqq on the cover call and short put reports i will uh take a look at that and see if we can get those um expanded those lists is it possible to add the stock description to the list i'm not sure what you mean by stock description if you don't mind clarifying makes sense um is there a filter that checks stocks from making a pullback um so we have scans that are basically you know for example we have um dip and bullish trend so this is these are stocks that are trending higher that have pulled back um that have pulled back and are now trending higher here so we do have some of these scans built into these so this is sibo um you know stocks that have pulled back here in a larger broader trend so as you can see the larger trend is here it's pulled back here and this is the opportunity that we see here to the upside so as you can see it pulled back here this is the opportunity we've seen another one here and we're looking for that continuation higher here so we have a few different scans so dip in bullish trend is really kind of your pullback if you will indicator uh following short strangles from tom sawson if i adopted a dozen times but we counted few lodges on the other side one like which which losses are so big what's the good strategies for mitigating that loss so i mean here's the thing right when you're selling a triangle you truly have unlimited risk that's a risk that you're taking um you know there's really no way to truly mitigate that unless you trade a different strategy you can trade iron condors which are similar to a strangle but they have limited risk that's one way to mitigate your risk but if you're going to sell strangles or shadows unfortunately that's the risk that you're taking when you're selling strangles and travis uh bullish trade ideas in the platform seem to always be in the form of buying call spreads and sending put spreads um so louis this is something that we are also expanding we're actually looking we're actually in the process of revamping our entire platform um that's going to be coming out here towards the end of this year and beginning of next year and included in that or once we launch the new platform we're going to include mutual strategies so you can sell put credit spreads the reason i put credit spreads don't show up under bullish is because it's a mildly bullish strategy it's really more of a mutual strategy than a really truly bullish strategy but it is something that we are looking to add to our platform list uh rudy thank you so much um i you know i i really appreciate you know what you're saying i need to focus on on what it is i can and want to do any suggestions i feel like i'm going here and there if you can understand what i'm trying to say it's rudy um why don't you send our team a ques uh you know a a an email here using the questions ask us section and i'll try to help navigate and have my customer service team help kind of navigate you and give you a better idea as far as where to start okay um that covers the questions that i have time for here today i really appreciate everyone taking the time out here this afternoon i hope that this was helpful in giving you a better understanding as to how to utilize the options play platform and the different resources that you have available to you and again if you have any questions feel free to to ask us your questions and we'll try to direct you um you know in the direction that you need help with with that thank you so much i hope you guys have a great trading day and i'll see you guys tomorrow morning for those of you that are on a free trial or a member um you get access to our rapid fire session tomorrow morning at 8 30 a.m so i'll see you bright and early and i'm looking forward to showing you the symbols that you have submitted that we like from a technical and fundamental perspective with that thank you so much and have a great trading day

Channel: OptionsPlay

Views: 4,771

Rating: 4.9751554 out of 5

Keywords: options trading, options education, OptionsPlay, Tony Zhang, technical analysis, trading, trading education, CNBC

Id: fYhZsu_36xg

Length: 57min 3sec (3423 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021