Steve Sarnoff Options Hotline - LOSER
Dear Curious members about Options Hotline,
Just to cut the long story short, do not subscribe to it. The published results are based on the benefit of hindsight which as live traders, we do not have that privileage. He manipulated the results of his picks by finding the highest selling price of his option picks and subtract it from the lowest entry price which was not even his recommended entry price with the benefit of hindsight. Again live traders do not have this hindsight benefit as we will never know when was the lowest price and when would be the highest price until the trade was over.
When I followed his picks the majority of trades lost money. I came to realise his deception was when one option pick lost money but he claimed it made 60+%, again that was with hindsight benefit.
Profiting from options is still possible but you will have to learn it from good books and the many available option website out there but certainly not from self proclaimed gurus who claim they can make you rich by you doing nothing.
I've tried Sarnoff's "service" twice, and it's just guessing and wishing.
The majority of Steve's recent picks often barely get above his entry price, and
then very quickly crashed to a fraction of the buy price. No way to have avoided taking a loss, as even breakeven stop-loss points would have been triggered virtually immediately.
Without real exit points, Steve just takes the highest point that any recommendation gets to and says that's what "could" have been made. But impossible by him or any reader to duplicate in real life. I've tried his service twice (cancelled both for refunds), and am convinced more than ever that's it's useless. Without an exit strategy and recommendations, it's just masturbatory fantasies of what he wishes could be made. Not anything that can be traded in the real world for real money.
Any "trading service" that doesn't specify stop-losses (and a 100% loss is not a workable "stop-loss strategy" in my book), as well as a true exit strategy to capture real profits, is just a waste of time.
All of his recommendations are well under water
at the moment. All the recommendations were bought near
the top of their pricing, and are now anywhere from 25 to 75%
down, with little hope of recovery. His "trading style" is a
sham, claiming "profits" based on the highest swing of the
move, which then quickly disappear the next day for good.
CSX Nov 09 $40 Put - Bought $200 / High 215 - Expired worthless.
CAT Nov 09 $50 Put - Bought 335 / High 535 - Expired worthless
XLF Dec 09 $15 Put - Bought 110 / High 170 - Now $61
QQQQ Dec 09 $40 Put - Bought 280 / High 290 - Now $11
TXN Jan 10 $24 call - Bought $150 - High 178 - Now $85
I tried waiting until the options lost half their value to buy them, from his original buy price, and still couldn't make money. The way to make money from his "service" is to take the other side of his trades and sell the options, as the majority of them expire worthless, and he buys them for high premiums.
I've come to believe, after trying several vaunted and hyped advisories in options, that you cannot make money consistently by buying options, either in stocks or futures. The odds are weighted too highly in favor of those who sell the options, with the constantly eroding time premiums. It's easier to manage risk in futures markets, with stops, etc., than to pay for that time premium, as well as the bid/ask spreads. Options may have a "defined risk", but a risk of 100% will in the long run be a losing strategy.
Most of Agora's services are nowhere near as good as they're claimed to be. Sarnoff is the worst, but Master FX Options Traders (Bill Jenkins) and Resource Trader Alert (Alan Knuckman) make great claims of high returns, but ignore the losing positions, and the options ridden down to 0 value (Knuckman is especially bad at this). You can trade their recommendations, and in the long run, I think you'll at best just break even. But with Sarnoff, you're guaranteed to lose most of your money.
