lystn

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha. In today’s daily call, I want to talk about why I think running Option Alpha actually makes me a better trader. This is a topic that I often think about all the time because frankly speaking, I don’t need to run Option Alpha and I have not needed to run Option Alpha ever. It’s always been a love endeavor for me. It’s a passion endeavor to talk about trading and to teach trading and to help people out and see people become successful and quicker jobs or whatever the case is, pay for a college or pay for a wedding. I’ve seen so many different case studies in the past, almost 10 years now that it really helps still motivate me. But I definitely believe that running Option Alpha and everything that goes into it has made me a better trader for sure, not only because… I’ll take it maybe in two stages. That might be the best way to go about this in this daily call because it’s a topic I think about a lot. I’m probably sure I could probably rant for like 25 minutes on this, but I don’t want to. I think I’ll take it in two stages. First is I think that running a business like this and a website business like this is important because it helps me focus not only on the big picture, but also on little details. I’ll give you an example of how this helps me. I realized that in running the website that I want to get more people hearing our message. I want to reach more people. We don’t do practically any advertising and really haven’t done that for a long time. It’s all word of mouth. It’s all just converting people and doing great content. Part of that is figuring out what works to progress people along. Awhile back, we just had a lot of course modules and then we released tracks and within those tracks, we tested around lots of different styles of course flow and course work and how long videos were, etcetera and many of you guys probably didn’t even see it on your end because you may have seen one version, but not the other. But we’re tweaking things all the time on the back end, as far as optimizing how you get through and what you complete because ultimately, I want you to complete all the videos and then move to the next stage, complete track one, then two, then three, etcetera. We’re always tweaking things on the website and for me, that’s cool, I like that. I enjoy tweaking those little details that are working towards a higher level goal of getting you to progress in your education, trying to figure out how long is one of our tutorials’ words, too long that you don’t actually watch it, but too short that you don’t actually consume the right information. That’s stuff that we’re constantly monitoring and optimizing. Now, on the trading side of things, that makes me better because on trading, now I have taken that same thought process and logic and applied it to what you guys already see in the software and the research that we do. When I started tweaking the website to improve how fast and how much you guys consume as far as education, I started asking myself questions like, “If this works in options on the website, why doesn’t it work in options trading? Are there tweaks that I can make to a strategy, maybe just very small tweaks that I can make that would make an exponential impact?” This is ultimately where just this whole thought process around the trade optimizer and the back-tester came out of, is I wanted to know at a certain time period and with a certain implied volatility level like what was the best strategy. Just like I wanted to know what’s the best video length on average for people to watch that they don’t quit at the end of the video, but that they actually consume the information. Like what is that optimized point, just to use that video tutorial analogy. We transferred that same logic and thought process over to options trading and asked the same types of questions like what is the best setup for an iron condor if you’re 30 days out versus 40 days out. If implied volatility is 50 versus 25, what do you do different, (if anything) so that you really, really optimize it? I think that having that same thought process has really made me a better trader because it’s hopefully made a better business owner running this website for you guys as an educator. But it’s also made me a better trader because I started asking harder questions that need time to be answered and start implementing systems and processes to get those in place. For me, it’s all about that aspect of it. The other thing about running Option Alpha that makes me better is accountability. I talk about this all the time and I’m sure I’ll talk about it a zillion times with this daily call podcast because I think it’s really important, but you have to be accountable to somebody. For me, this has been really good because I have to be accountable to trading and it creates a habit and a routine for me of trading and doing it the right way because I’ve got 60,000 plus people always watching my every move, scrutinizing what I do, asking questions, adding comments, telling me, “Hey, why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do this?” Of course, I’m not a perfect trader by any means and all the feedback helps me and gives me feedback as to different ways of looking at things that I may have never seen or helps me reinforce the concepts that I believe in and that I’ve researched and have data on because then, I have to say it again and again and again. I have to explain to somebody why we trade during low implied volatility again and again and again. That helps me become a better trader because ultimately, it reinforces these concepts in my brain and in my logic and thought process and ultimately carries through with my trading. For me, Option Alpha like I’ve said time and time again, if you haven’t heard me say it, it’s really a passion business for me and I think it comes through in what we do. We try to do everything really, really well. I don’t want to be a fly by night company and we’ve been around for almost 10 years now which is crazy and I think that it’s really important for us to continue this journey that we’re on and with you guys hopefully and lead you guys in the right direction and evolve together. That’s really why I like still doing this. I plan to be around doing this for a long time. I’m still fairly young, my girls are still fairly young and this is something I truly, truly enjoy. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions or comments, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!