Saturday, December 19, 2009

RE: [TheOptionClub.com] RE: SJ Options

 

Hi Scott,

 

While it’s true I’m doing Dan Sheridan’s IT stuff and some other things like building PowerPoint slides for Dan, I was a student of his first in 2006.  I had experiences with a few other educators and I’ve only been a retail trader.    While I can’t speak for the other firms, I can answer your questions about Dan’s program.   I don’t want this to sound like a commercial so I’ll discuss pros and cons to Dan’s mentoring program.

 

DISCUSSION

To me, the absolute most important thing with trading is to keep your losses under control.  (It’s the same with gamblers)    Options have been around for decades and people have tried just about every combination possible with them.  There’s likely nothing new that hasn’t been done before.   People might come up with creative names, like Tarzan Loves Jane, Condagonals or some new “secret sauce” but all they boil down to are combinations of basic strategies.      It’s what you do after you put the trade on that matters (unless you’re in the camp that doesn’t do any adjustments)

 

Read Michael Catolico’s paper.  It’s great stuff.  He is reacting to the market and keeping his risk under control at all times.  We teach similar things with Sheridan Mentoring.    Mark Sebastian, one of Dan’s mentors, has a blog www.option911.com where he had an interesting article about how market makers use UNITS to keep from going out of business.  In that article, Mark has a great point:

 

In every trade there are 3 scenarios:
1. Being right
2. Being wrong
3. REALLY being wrong

Notice how this keeps you in business if the market has one of those seven standard deviation moves.  RISK CONTROL.

 

After risk control, the big thing you need imo is some kind of community for long term support.  TheOptionClub is great.  For many, it is totally sufficient.  The discussions here are interesting and thoughtful.   Dan’s mentoring program has a few other benefits.

 

For Dan’s Mentoring Program:

 

PROS

1.        A large community of traders all trained to a similar level of experience (Dan started mentoring in 2004 and we have lots of students still active from those early classes)  Over 400 students login to our website daily and that number grows each month.

2.       
Trading Groups.  These groups meet weekly and exchange ideas, go over trades in trouble, share their research with each other etc.  All at the student-to-student level.

3.       
Live and recorded access to all new WebEx sessions.  Mentoring students have access to ALL webex files.  Mentoring sessions, “paper traders”, special guests, portfolio classes and even the short courses Dan does!  Nothing is held back.  

4.       
The website (hey.. I built and maintain it so I think it’s a PRO J ).   I’m constantly trying to improve the website.  While I’m a developer, I’m also a retail trader so I look at our website with a retail trader’s eye of “what would help me”.  Because we’re small, it’s usually possible to incorporate suggestions to the website fairly easily.

5.       
No Secrets.  We don’t promise the moon.  All we promise is trading is hard work, we will help you learn it and help support you but you have to do your part too.  Nothing is hidden.  All mentoring students have access to everything we do.

 

 

CONS

1.       Price.  $6500 is a lot (it was for me anyway).  I spent $3000 on two or three day seminars at OptionEtics and had pretty much zilch support afterwards.  If you put $6500 with lifetime support in context with a $3000 seminar with no follow up, it was an easy decision for me.

2.       
You have to work!  It takes work on your part to learn how to trade.  This is no different with Dan or anyone else’s course.  Don’t let anyone tell you its easy.

3.       
Scheduling.  Our mentors teach primarily during the day.  If you also work, scheduling can be a challenge for some.

4.       Printed Materials.  To be honest, they could be better.  We are a small company and haven’t spent tons of money to pretty stuff up.  We focus on the content primarily on mentoring sessions and online classes.  We do have a trading manual, but it’s a collection of basic guidelines to start you off.  None of the experienced students use it that I’m aware of.

 

I was a professional military pilot with the USAF.  We didn’t teach people to fly jets by giving them a book and saying go for it.  It was a LOT of hands on training in the jet.  That’s what any good educational program will help you with.  Having an experienced trader look over your shoulder and show you what you did right and wrong with your LIVE trades.  Paper trades don’t count.  You HAVE to do live trades.  It’s the only way to really “get it in your bones”  as Dan says.

 

Dan’s program is one of many.  You have lots of choices which is great.  Do your homework, talk to current students and research your decision if you think you need a bit of over-the-shoulder help.  Until/If you make that decision, TheOptionClub is a great place to hang out and learn.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

 

HTH

 

Tom Nunamaker

Sheridan Options Mentoring

 

 

 

From: OptionClub@yahoogroups.com [mailto:OptionClub@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Scott Thomas
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 5:07 PM
To: OptionClub@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [TheOptionClub.com] RE: SJ Options

 

 

Folks

 

I think this thread has sort of been sidetracked by another discussion about Morris and his supposed "secret sauce" and his marketing. The original question I think was does SJ Options have merit as an educational service and that question is getting lost in this discussion.

 

If you consider all the ways that are available to learn to trade there are books, newsgoups, mail order courses and of course mentoring programs. Mentoring programs certainly have a place in the Options Education universe. If you look into it there are about 4-5 services out there actively offering options education courses + some sort of personal mentoring component to the individual investor. (By the way this list is certainly not all inclusive as there are other schools where you can learn options trading techniques (Investools, Better Trades, Optionetics, Options University, Options GPS,  etc) but I am not certain about an individualized or group mentoring component. The ones below are offerings that I know for sure have some kind of mentoring included.

 

- Dan Sheridan

- Discover Options

- SJ Options

- Dan Passarelli

 

I've found that all these offerings have some kind of marketing hook and perhaps Morris is a bit more aggressive than the others in trying to get his name out there to establish his business.....ok its a free country and the guy is trying to market his business so I don't personally have a problem with that. He can say what he wants as far as I'm concerned as long as at the end of the day he can back up his claims and they can pass the truth test. In fact there are many more people out there in the educational area making much more outlandish claims to sell their crappy newsletters and talking about fantastic rates of returns etc. I've seen his stuff on youtube and I don't see where he does that, although he does say that he is doing things and teaching things in innovative ways that not a lot of other people are teaching and ultimately its to better manage the risk. And that might be true, I have not seen a lot of people teaching Broken Wing Butterflys to the main stream, although I have seen Skip Strike or Unbalanced BF written up in various places.  We all know that everything that has ever been known about options or basic positions has been written about. If the guy has figured out a unique way to manage his risk and turn basic trades into less risky trades by combining options in certain ways and to make adjustments or hedges to the trades or by obtaining better entries and exits via his timing techniques or whatever then great that is where the creativity and innovation come in, and if he is teaching that to students who are willing to pay to learn what he knows then where is the problem in that? Sorry I don't see it nor should we be snickering and trashing the guy over it.  

 

Out of curiosity and fairness even, I looked at his site and they do seem to have some innovative things going on there that some of the others lack.  There is a self directed course to teach the basics of options theory , technical analysis and the greeks and then it moves into multi legged spread techniques and risk management. They also offer group sessions and like Dan Sheridan everything is recorded. The other feature that I thought was interesting is that they have a live trading lab and post their trades. After you purchase and finish taking any educational course I think an important factor is..... ok now that I am done now what? SJ seems to have handled this problem in a unique way by allowing students to join a mentored group that focuses on specializing in certain bread and butter trades like Iron Condors. So there seems to be a way here to continue to learn and grow in trading.  

 

I think the central question in all this is the following.....How do you learn best. For any new trader or even a more experienced person who is looking to improve their skills where do you go to do that? Read a book? Use forums like this? Certainly that can help but what if you don't learn well that way, what if you learn better by having someone show you how to do it and explain it to you and look over their shoulder while they do it. That is depends on the individual of course and it makes sense to me that for those people who might want to get all the instruction and information in one place offerings like this are very viable. So to stroke a check ranging from $3000 for SJ's course all the way up to about $6500 that Dan Sheridan charges for their offerings makes sense. I am an IT Systems Engineer and I can tell you that people think nothing of writing checks like that and more to go to Cisco Systems or Microsoft or Oracle or any other types of specialized vendor training to earn certifications in their products. Its a question of ROI and increased earning power and so forth that justify the cost of going to any of these schools. What makes learning to trade options any different?.

 

Circling back around to the original question....the person was asking I think whether anyone knows if SJ Options has a decent offering and I think they where wondering if the program was solid and had anyone taken the course and would they offer an opinion. I could ask the same question about Sheridan or Discover Options Mentoring programs......are they good? What are the pros and cons of taking courses like this? What about the cost? Sorry to get up on a soap box about this but I think that the person asked a good question and then the discussion got off on a tangent and never really answered the question.

 

Cheers

 

 

Scott

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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