I remember being around 12 when my dad told me about this new investment vehicle, puts, which give someone the option to “put” a stock to you for a certain price within a certain amount of time. 

My other memory as regards to the stock market was the 2000 crash. I was 14 at the time and too young to really understand what was going on, but my father (a computer scientist) was laid off work and it seeped into my subconscious that we lost a lot of money. 

Those 2 memories basically sum up my predisposition as regards to investing – the fear that the market will go down significantly in the immediate future, and the desire to use options as an investment vehicle. 

Around 2017 I started managing a sum of money my family had put away for me over the years. From the beginning I was analytically focused, learning all the options combinations, reading options graphs, trying to figure out the best way to get statistics on my side. But also my subconscious predisposition that there would be a crash. 

Needless to say and some may say against all odds, the market had a raring bull run the following years, gaining XXXX over that time period. And my basic thesis that there would be a crash any minute badly hurt my performance, because I was always looking for ways to minimize my downside risk, at the expense of making profits on the way up. 

I tried every option investment strategy, from the simple ones to the complicated, with adjusting, rolling, combining, everything imaginable. I sat glued to the monitor during trading hours, doing calculations, writing trading scripts and algorithms, trying things out, and basically losing money. I paid an expensive tuition during those years, but without having skin in the game, I would have lost interest quickly. 

Paper trading accounts, theoretical calculations, other peoples ideas, nothing compares to sitting and watching the market in real time making and losing large sums of money, hour after hour of rolling tickers, endless articles, earnings reports. It took a big toll on my life at that time. 

But I lived to trade another day, and here I am, trying to save you the tuition I paid in time, money, and life energy over the last 5 years. In this blog is concentrated advice, distilled and processed from thousands of articles written by the best people in the industry, adding on top my analytical orientation and experience.