#81 - Trading Options With A Small Account
Hey. What’s up, everyone. This is Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and on today's daily call, I want to get back to again, the topic of trading options with a small account and more importantly, maybe just going through a couple of things that you can do if you are trading options with a small account, little checklist, reminder things that I think are important. We’ll cover the high, overarching stuff. We’re not going to get into obviously like the nitty-gritty details in a short podcast like this. But the first thing is when you’re trading options with a small account, you’ve got to focus on small positions. This gets down to really, the heart of everything that we talk about here at Option Alpha and that’s making sure that you know what your edge is. We’re playing that implied volatility edge in the market. The expectation that implied volatility is always overstated and therefore, option pricing is always overstated. If that’s your edge, then we know that that edge plays out over time and the only way that you stay in this business long enough to see that edge play out is you don't blow up your account early on. You have to focus on small positions. You have got to keep your position size under 5%. The smaller, the better as you get started. Don’t try to overstretch your account or the saying is, “Don’t run before you can walk.” Because as I’ve talked about before and I think we even did a podcast on this on the main show way back when, maybe the earlier episodes in the teens. The reality is that even if you have high win rates, you have a high probability of success, great trades that you’re putting on, over-allocation can kill you and that's because with a small account, you should be focusing on not losing as much and increasing your consistency. What ends up killing people with small accounts is that they don't know and neither do I really for that matter. We don't know when losing trades are going to happen. We don't know the sequence of returns that we’re going to get. If I told you that you got a 70% chance of winning, does that mean you’re going to lose in the first three trades or does that mean you’re going to lose in the last three trades? The first 7 out of 10 trades could be all winners or you could lose the first 3 trades and win the last 7 trades. It’s still a 70% win rate. You just don't know when those returns are going to come in, when they’re going to be profitable versus losing. If you over-allocate early on, you end up putting yourself into a quick hole that you never can recover from. That’s what I see a lot of people doing. Again, focus on that 1% to 5% of equity risk per trade. The second thing you need to do is you need to be neutral in your direction. Stop guessing where the market is going to go. You have to have neutral positions which is very easy to do with a small account. You can do very neutral iron butterflies, iron condors and you just use those two strategies interchangeably to get some neutral positions on the market. Don't take the directional risk of the market moving up or down. Please keep all of your positions neutral at least when you get started. Then when you start growing your account size, you can start taking on more directional trades if you want to and I usually say as long as you’re balancing them out with some other directional trades on different ticker symbols. The last thing you have to do is you have to diversify. Now, we did a podcast before about diversifying on the main show and basically, if you have a small account, you can diversify across at least 10 different ETFs very, very easily, maybe a couple of thousand dollars of risk and you can get diversity across a wide range of industry sectors, countries, currencies, metals, commodities, etcetera. It does not take a lot of money to diversify and have a completely spread out portfolio. Why this is important with a small account in particular is because again, you don't want any one sector to basically wreck your probabilities or wreck your numbers. The more you can diversify out of your risk and diversify across different ETFs and different sectors, currencies, commodities, etcetera, the [Inaudible] slowly and steadily grow your account and again, not have too much risk. The alternative to this (and again, something I see a lot of people do) is they allocate way too much money to whatever [Inaudible] industry is hot right now. They have let’s say a Facebook trade, a Tesla trade, a Apple trade, a Twitter trade, all this technology social media allocation. They’ve got nothing in say utilities or healthcare or currencies like the Euro or the Yen. If that sector has a real big pullback or a real big run higher, that could really dramatically impact your returns and again, get you off course from where you want to be. What I suggest is try to pick some of the major sectors ETFs, again, currencies, countries, whatever you want to do. Diversify out as much as possible early on, maybe one trade per sector ETF, etcetera, so that you don’t have too much risk in that particular area. Again, one domino is not going to knock down the rest of your portfolio. As always, hopefully you guys enjoy these podcast. If you have any questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!