Can you share your yearly return percentages? What percentage of your account do you commit to each trade? I am doing 35% per week. There is a few days of overlap.
I don't really keep track of yearly returns anymore. I retired 6 years ago at age 46 and now just trade for income with capital preservation my biggest priority. So I keep more in cash and/or do more longer term catastrophic adverse trades such as Bear Call Spreads on SPX. I also will sell weekly Puts on stocks that are at over-sold levels so worse case is I am assigned the stock at a pretty good entry point.
It looks like you have developed a nice analysis tool. My tool uses the historical % moves on SPX over whatever time frame the trade covers and I use data back to 2004. It then converts those % moves to todays $$. I like using actual historical move data versus something like ToS probabilities.
I can limit it to only times when VIX was below a certain level if desired. I can also just look at data for monthly op ex versus every week. And I added the ability to see how SPX trades after it hit a new high.
When I run a scenario on my calculator I can then look at the far right to see what dates the larger moves happened. I can decide if I discount any of those for some reason.
For a couple years I did a "double your money" strategy with weekly spreads. It worked out well but you had to be very disciplined to take take a loss and move on. Some had a problem with this strategy as they held too long and a loss that could have been recovered in 2-3 weeks then became a big loss that wiped out months of gains.
Here is an example of the first 6 months of 2015 results. 41% gain for 6 months even with starting out with a 5% loss on the first trade of the year. This was done with $15,000 starting capital and reinvesting the capital each week.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rbaqma702y0tw5k/Screenshot 2017-06-17 08.15.36.png?dl=0
I also did this in 2014 and I hit 135% return by October of that year. Here is a screenshot of those trades through June and about an 83% return. I was doing weekly and also overnight Thur-Fri trades. The Overnights is where I had the losses so I dropped those in 2015.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9du867y8aofp4of/Screenshot 2017-06-17 08.20.39.png?dl=0
As for % of capital in a trade, I always recommend keeping that to less than 10-15% if there is a catastrophic exposure present in the trade. For example, weekly Bull Put Spreads could be wiped out if there was some big terrorist attack overnight in the US.
I am trying to enjoy life a bit more now. We have our first grandson (9 months old) and during the school year we watch him during the week. So I've been focusing less on the short term / weekly trading and more on longer term spreads (6 months or longer). I will still do day-trades using some good indicators on a 2-minute chart. I typically am in / out of those trades within a few minutes.
I do have a website where I post my tools and some other information. I focus a lot on AAPL as I know that company well and it has great option volume for trading. Note: most of the website requires a password and I ask for an annual donation to help cover my time in collecting and posting the data. But you can click on a couple of the sample pages such as the SPX calculator that uses data back to Jan 2015. Just give the calculator a few seconds to load the interactive spreadsheet.
http://activetrader999.wixsite.com/online-tools
I also have a chat room where we discuss some trading that is free for anyone to enjoy.
http://us20.chatzy.com/19161210620658
I have my own personal version of the SPX calculator that feeds live premiums from ToS so I can see the actual returns for spreads I am considering.
