Posts Tagged ‘iron condor’

Iron Condor – Owe, That’s Gonna Leave A Mark…

The Iron Condor is perhaps the most dangerous option strategy around.

The thing is, when rookie option traders first hear of this strategy (perhaps from a late night infomercial or free hotel seminar conducted by slick salesmen touting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread) – very few seem to able to resist the temptation to jump right into trading them head first – with actual real hard earned money on the line – and usually way too much of it.

And unfortunately what always seems to happen to a high percentage of them is that they promptly wind up getting their trading accounts demolished and their heads handed to them on a platter.

Now wait -

Let me explain something here before you start to get the wrong impression.

I actually LIKE iron condors. I like them ALOT.

And yes – I really do think it’s a great and dependable way to trade.

And yes, I absolutely believe all those stories and claims you hear swirling around about iron condors generating ten percent plus monthly returns and providing trades that have the probability of winning somewhere in the range of eighty to ninety percent. In fact, I KNOW those stories are true because I see it happen all the time in my very own trading account.

The problem is – there is something big that is being left out of all those claims and stories – and this something is causing way too many fresh new doe eyed option traders to misunderstand this strategy right from the beginning and blindly jump into them with completely wrong expectations.

See what isn’t being talked about with iron condors is that while yes, they can provide great monthly returns and high probabilities of winning- they also come attached with a horrendous risk to reward ratio – sometimes as poor as 10 to 1!

This means that in order to achieve those 80 to 90 percent probability trades – you need to risk ten dollars to make just one – or to be more realistic – you need to put at risk $10,000.00 for the chance to make just $1,000.00.

And as my dear old mammy used to say: ‘that smells a lot like an awful bad egg’. Which in fact it is. That risk to reward ratio is nothing but a low down, no good, smelly rotten deal!

Even with the ten percent monthly returns and the high probabilities – all that needs to happen is for a problem month to come along (and it WILL, believe me) – and the next thing you know you’ll be staring at a gigantic loss and a zero balance account!

But…

All is not lost…

Like I said before, I LOVE the iron condor trade.

Over the last ten years it’s been extremely profitable for me.

So apparently, even with that atrocious risk to reward quandary, there must be a method to generate consistent income with this trade.

And there is.

It all revolves around how you go about handling the trade.

As soon as you discover the ‘right way’ to place these trades initially – and then how to properly go about managing and adjusting them – that risk to reward dilemma instantly vanishes and goes away.

You just need to take the time BEFORE jumping into the iron condor pool to equip yourself with this little bit of knowledge. A few simple ‘tricks of the trade’ – so when those problem months DO come along (and they WILL believe me) – you will know exactly what you need to do to immediately squash that threat, easily adjust yourself out of the problem, and experience the iron condor for all it’s ‘really’ cracked up to be.

To learn a much ‘better’ way to trade the Iron Condor spread for monthly income, visit this Iron Condor Adjustments site for simple step-by-step instructions on how to correctly place, manage, and ADJUST iron condor trades.