My portfolio value is around 85k and I started trading exactly two months ago, mid-June.
Currently, I'm going more conservative with lower deltas, currently going for 0.05-0.15 range, and larger companies. Should I start taking on more risk even though my system is working quite well?
For a few years now, I've been helping working on a new FinTech startup called Puthouse that is essentially an automation tool for investors trade use covered calls and cash-secured puts (essentially small bets you can make alongside your stocks).
The interesting thing about Puthouse.com is that its centered around safety first, rather than trying to max returns. Before placing a trade, it checks dozens of criteria (e.g. earnings, liquidity, volatility, risk, etc.) and if a trade doesn't meet these rules, it just does nothing. This fundamentally means that total earnings are capped around 2-3% a month, and we actively inform our users about this.
Currently, we have around $600,000 under management from our users.
Our tool is around $20/m for simplicity-sake. However, due to the nature of investing and the variations in portfolio / earnings sizes, we're unsure if a scaling pricing model would be better (perhaps based on their portfolio size, earnings per month / year, or some other factor). But we also want our pricing to be transparent and as intuitive to understand as possible. Thus, we must strike a balance.
How would you guys approach this puzzle?
I helped build Puthouse.com which is an automation tool for investors who use covered calls and cash-secured puts (essentially small bets you can make alongside your stocks). Been working on this for a few years now and I can finally share it! Currently, we have around $600,000 under management.
The interesting thing about Puthouse is that its centered around safety first, rather than trying to max returns. Before placing a trade, it checks dozens of criteria (e.g. earnings, liquidity, volatility, risk, etc.) and if a trade doesn't meet these rules, it just does nothing.
The goal in creating this wasn't to beat the market. Rather, it was to automate a conservative trading strategy that removes emotional decision-making and to stick to consistent risk management.
But I primarily want more feedback from a wider range of individuals. Does the safety-first-automation angle sound interesting, or are there assumptions / risks you think Im overlooking??
As a disclosure, these are my genuine personal earnings within the past three months. I got ~250 trades and 1.9% return on capital.
I do systematic covered Calls and CSPs. .05 delta, 7-14 DTE, hard filters on iv, VRP ratio, liquidity, earnings blackouts. Additionally, rules based exits at 50% profit / 0.30 delta.
How do you decide when an edge justifies its execution count? Is there a rule-of-thumb for edge-per-trade vs. round-trip cost? And is return on capital even the correct denominator, when that capital is doing double duty (holding the equity and securing the position)?
My results for this past month are attached. Here are my genuine, honest stack for a trade to clear before it's entered:
Exits: take profit at 50% and cut if delta reaches 0.30. If nothing clears, nothing gets entered. Which is most days.
The Thing I actually learned:
Honestly, the filters aren't the hard part (anyone could adopt them in 10 mins). What I've learned is that an individual with these exact rules can still override them, bc a fat premium on a stock that fails the vrp check feels like free money in that moment.
But I'm genuinely curious what you guys would change. The VRP threshold especially (1.10 feels a tad conservative to me but Im not too experienced, so feel free to impart your wisdom on me if I am wrong).
Not really asking about strategy. Mostly asking about what occurs psychologically.
This is because Ive noticed that a good month creates this weird sense of pressure where I'm either trying to protect it, or to top it (maybe this is just me?) and neither of those is the same headspace as just trading my process.
So I'm curious if that sort of psychological "residue" from the near past is something more experienced traders actively manage or perhaps just quietly deal with.
I just started using Obsidian and I've already fallen in love with it. However, I'm trying to build out vaults for two pretty disparate subjects Im studying from scratch, one more technical and maths focused, the other more humanities-heavy.
My main issue is that I don't know the lay-of-the-land well enough to know how to organize it.
Perhaps this is the "writer" vs. "editor" dilemma that's creating this mental block. I've gotten advice to not think too much about organization when using Obsidian to learn a new topic. Should I start with a general structure and fill it in? Or just dump everything and let the connections organically create organization?
Real quick disclosure up front... I work at PutHouse, though I'm not the founder (that's Janson; he's posted here before). I'm the youngest on the team by nearly a decade. But before I joined, I did exactly what any rational investor would do if their money was on the line; I tried to talk myself out of it.
We've all seen enough "AI fintech tool will make you rich instantly" slop to be allergic to it lol. So these are my honest thoughts of a startup / tool that I’ve been personally using for my own portfolio for a few months now, what actually held up, how it simplified my life and passive earnings and what I've learned from working with a genuinely ambitious and transparent founder.
PutHouse.com is a safety-first trading platform that automatically sells CSPs and covered calls on the stocks you already have. From our backtesting since 2012, we've found that the total benefit is 1-3% compounding per month in options premium, on top of the underlying stock as well. As simple and straightforward as that.
Currently, the product is live and its users average around $50k in account size.
It connects securely to a brokerage account via Alpaca. Before it really executes anything, it checks a stack of filters which include:
- 7-14 DTE
- 0.05-0.15 delta
- IV of at least 30%
- Min VRP ratio of 1.10
- Earnings and event risk
- RSI
- Open interest and ask / bid spread (liquidity)
- Position size and existing underwater positions
And in regards to its strategy, I learned that its goal isn't to get assigned. Rather, its main goal is for long-term stock holding plus compounding with the options premium as an income layer on top. In addition, exits are rule based: pull profit at 50%, cut risk if delta hits 0.30.
In terms of risk control, PutHouse treats losses on options income as inevitable, the cost of doing business (e.g. like an insurance company, paying out claims). I.e. the point isn't to never lose; it's to size trades so that you can eat the losses while the user still holds the underlying stock for upside.
I’ll be honest here, it’s still pretty early days. We have a tight albiet small user base which is something we don't want to hide. The edge over just holding the stock is modest, especially in calmer markets. However, our user's money sits in their respective Alpaca accounts, not with us, which is a principle I personally subscribe to, but that does ultimately mean you're connecting a tool to a genuine brokerage account and you should understand that before you do.
I’ve personally been using PutHouse for a few months now (refer to screenshots for summary) and speaking as a user, it has profoundly streamlined how I manage my portfolio.
I know that there'll be some warranted skepticism and further questioning, so I'm more than happy to answer anything that y'all may be wondering!
I'll try to value brevity. Most of the time, belief feels like something that just happens to an individual. But people talk about domains such as faith, commitment and even selfdeception in certain ways that imply some degree of voluntary control over what we believe. And there's also a whole pragmatist perspective that seems to suggest belief can be chosen on the basis of its function rather than its truth.
So is genuine, doxastic voluntarism actually coherent? In other words, can you decide to believe something the way you decide to act, or is what we choose to call "chosen belief" always just chosen behavior with belief following later down the line on its own?
And if the belief is entirely involuntary, what does that do to concepts like faith or rationality as a standard (normative).
Ive been thinking about this recently. E.g. stock runs past your strike. Shares get called away, you miss the upside. Technically, you did exactly what the strategy was supposed to do, and you still made money.
But is that genuinely how you feel about it in that given moment? Or rather, is there a small part of you doing the math on what you left?
As Im currently trying to grow my network, I had an interesting conversation with another trader not too long ago who said that he physically closes his platform at around 11 AM, regardless of what's happening.
Personally, I've always traded until I've felt like my mind is fried and I can't think rationally anymore, and I'm starting to think that that strategy is becoming unsustainable for me in the long run. So I'm curious if a hard "cutoff" time is something more experienced traders employ consistently.
Im currently in the act of getting into statistics on a more formal level. And I'm curious regarding what one actually reaches for repeatedly and consistently when real data is in front of them (not necessarily the most important theoretically).
But I'm honestly actually asking because I'd imagine a biostatistician and a financial analyst to give completely different answers regarding which concepts make that short list.
This is a genuine question as I think Ive been overthinking it a bit recently. At some point in the past few days, I started wondering if more info was helping me or just giving me more excuses to second-guess clean setups.
Been observing this in other areas as well (e.g. in Poker and other games containing party-based strategy). Beginners can act sometimes on instinct and sometimes nail it on the dot. While experienced individuals can talk themselves out of a perfectly fine trade.
And there's certainly a factor of diminishing marginal return of course, but I honestly don't believe that I've hit that yet and I'm still observing this.
Is there a ceiling to how much studying actually helps or is that often just an excuse individuals use to avoid doing the work?
Im genuinely curious about how people handle this is real life as I just had a talk at a "network" dinner a few days back where I had to go through many new introductions.
Because saying "I trade options" usually gets a very different reaction than simply "I invest in the market". Technically the same activity, one's just more specified, yet signals a different perception and oftentimes leads to a different discussion.
Perhaps Im overthinking it a bit.
Do you clarify only if they show curiosity? And does the way you describe it to people ever change depending on who is asking (e.g. someone who is in finance or business)?
I'm curious regarding what everyone's morning actually looks like before the open. This may sound like a niche question but recently I've personally been overthinking this a bit.
Do you wake up early to prep? Or do you get out of bed and just jump straight in?
And honestly do you notice a significant difference in how you traded on days you slept well and had a real morning vs. days you didn't? Or is it perception?
I'm 17M, deeply into business, economics and systems thinking. I am planning to go further with them formally. However, I've oddly always been drawn to the humanities and am recently getting into philosophy, specifically the why behind things, not just the how.
But when I'm thinking long term, the most salient issue is opportunity cost.
If I'm going to invest some serious time into philosophy alongside a business-heavy path, I want to know which branches actually transfer into the real world rather than staying purely theoretical.
Ethics feels quite applicable (though I've only explored it superficially). Logic and argumentation feel like obvious wins for any serious decision-makers or builders.
I've touched most areas superficially and have enjoyed all of it. But of course, time and energy are finite. Thus, I have to prioritize. So honestly, which branches / areas are worth going deeper on for someone with my profile, and which ones are better left at a surface level?
And specific recommendations or starting points would be of great help too!
Not rhetorical. Just a young trader with a family who grew up in finance but even they cant converge on an answer. I genuinely don't know the answer and I've been thinking about it for weeks.
I'll give you context first so this doesn't sound like a rant.
I'm 17 in the US, senior in high school and a student athlete. I dabbled with entrepreneurship and currently run a small grassroots sports organizer with an active community. I also recently joined a small fintech company called PutHouse as an intern and currently work closely with a brilliant, more experienced founder.
Here's my problem with the content ecosystem around entrepreneurship.
Everything is framed around speed. Build fast. Launch fast. Grow fast. The entire conversation optimizes for the exciting parts and completely skips the infrastructure that makes any of it sustainable. Nobody talks about how to build a system that works when you're exhausted. Nobody talks about the fact that most 17 year olds starting in business don't need more inspiration, they need actual operational frameworks.
The content gets young founders addicted to the idea of building instead of the work of building. And I think it's making us worse on average, not better.
But maybe I'm wrong. I'm 17, I don't have much to compare against. But I'm genuinely curious whether experienced founders see this too or whether this is just what every generation thinks about the media they grew up with.
What actually helped you in the early stages of entrepreneurship that nobody was talking about publicly?