On 9/10/01, SPY closed at 110.05

The next day was 911/01. The end of the world was coming. Everything has changed. Panic is the streets. We're at war. The skys are empty. MArtial law may be on the horizon.

On month later....

10/10/01. SPY closes at 108.32

Down 1.57%. I wouldve made money on this same trade even then.

On 9/21/01, SPY opened at 94.28. Down 14.33% from 9/10/01 (and down even more than from 8/21.01). I know how to look up historical prices too. I just think that there are better risk/reward investment vehicles than selling naked puts. I view selling naked puts kinda like taking the huge favorite in NCAA football games, putting large sums of money down on the money line. 2 years of wins can be erased by one loss.

I have been using another approach,

I have invested / speculated / gambled with all kinds of trades including the kinds of options plays Ice is talking about but I have found the easiest / lowest risk for a casual investor who really wants to invest in individual stocks is to buy the dogs of the dow or small dogs. Look it up on the net. I have my poker roll in the small dogs and I cycle it every summer, just about time. Once I have held for a year to get into long term capitol gains.

I leverage with margin at 60% mid summer and pay into it with withdrawals from my poker acounts.

I am unlike many of you very young players aspiring to get to the 2K game and above. I play for entertainment and make an average of $600 per month playing the 25 and 50 NL tables. Thats nothing if you were trying to live off it but it is quite a lot if you are putting it all into an investment. My account has grown over 20% (Stock appreciation only) the last two years and when you add the margin and dividents I am very near 30%. I consider this my early retirement fund and it is very likely to knock 5 to 8 years off the finish line. I max out the 401 K (All in index funds) and I have a very good job but with the penalties associated with early withdrawal I need something outside a qualified plan to retire early. I am 41 and want to retire at 50, 9 more years of poker money growing at 20 - 30% will bring it home and the risk is so far away from the kind if option play Ice is discussing that you don't have to do a lot of hard core research and stress about a 2% drop in the index at the wrong time wiping out your profit.

As far as options go:
I need 25K in my account to sell a naked put, so the statement that you put up $0 money insinuates you don't require a funded account. I don't think there are many brokerages that allow you to open up an account for 5K and start pumping out naked puts altough covered calls are easy.

I'll stick to the lazy way for now, if anyone is interested just look it up on the web.

BK

I was/am very interested in options trading as it sounds interesting/fun and has a lot of strategy to it, but I certainly don't believe that I know anywhere near enough to be +EV doing it.

In the past month or so I have bought shares in 4 different companies and tracked how they did. I bought the shares based on advice from friends who know their stuff and in shares that were very unlikely to fall drastically in price. Anyway, I watched their prices go up and down and was excited when I'd log on every day and see them go up, and disappointed when I saw the red colors on the web page meaning I had lost money. It seemed kinda stupid in the whole to me though as I had no idea whether or not the numbers would go up or down and it was just like the first time I gambled on craps - I bet on the pass line because I had read that it's a pretty even bet, so I'd put my money down and then have NO idea what happened for the next minute and a half and would either have my money taken away or more pushed towards me.

So I sold my shares a couple of days ago making a 2.5% gain or something on my investment and I'm now just gonna shove it into mutual/index funds till I learn enough to feel confident in my abilities to either buy individual stocks or to trade options.

Thursday morning, fifteen minutes before the market opens.

Duck your head, Ice, we are going through a tunnel. I fear it is correction time because of housing and oil. If it was just earnings, the market would keep going up.

I hope we can get to the end of the year as much winner as we are already.

It is just like poker. If we hit a dry spell, we wait, leather ass the proposition, and wait for the rush that always, always comes. We just do not know when.