You quite easily spend 11 years trying to learn to trade and not get anywhere. It's simply a matter of fact that most information available publicly about trading is total nonsense.
If you stick to trading books, trading forums as your source of information on how to trade, then you could spend a lifetime not getting it.
I believe you have been equipped with a fair amount of knowledge on what doesn't work. I do not believe you have any knowledge on what does.
Now - why not outline one of your option trades for us? You don't have to give up the methodology, just show us a few of your SIM trades.
Books are small part of the story, veteran traders are the most valuable source of real information, and most of what I learned comes from these, I don't claim to have reinvented the wheel.
my techniques come down to 2 types of trading: high probability / poor probability but with way to gain most losses back.
1) directional trades where probability of making a profit is very high, but still highly stressful as all trades open as losers, and in the case of FX scalping, it's really stressful, Risk/Reward ratio on the average trade is like 3:1, most trades reach -$3X before finally reaching $x and I close fora profit, ugly RR ratio but given a very high probability of winning,it works more than any popular method I have seen. this only works around 7-8 days, in the month, the other days cannot be scalped safely using this method.
2) Directional stock trading, much lesss accurate than the fx scalping, at least the timing is not accurate, but most trades sooner or later make a profit, and I can even hedge a losing trade. (profitability is good enough)
3) Asymmetrical hedging, hedge a long stock so that hedging does not work dollar for dollar, more specifically, makes $1000 when the commodity /stock rises X%,
but only lose $300 if the same commodity drops by X%
(This kind of trading very few people know, even most economics gaduates don't know, I only saw one English investor once in London who claimed to have been using such a technique, and I suspect he uses 4 different brokers, not even the brokerage firm emploees can figure it out), it's very difficult to fiure out because it's essentially arbitrage whose conditions are not always there, and are very difficultto spot because you are dealing with a multivariable problem.
Just like in sports arbitrage you cannot figure out if there's riskless a profit margin
by just looking at the odds, you have to use the arbitrage formula
1/a + 1/b + 1/c etc this is how much you need to place to make $1, if the sum comes to less than $1, there's riskless profit margin, and you cannot tell by just looking at the numbers.
There's also appears to be a riskless CARRY trade between crude oil and USD:CAD when the interest rate differentials are right, those of you that have the money and the courage, might want to investigate further. (I have not tested tis trade in full so cannot confirm anything)
In the simulated Options acc, I traded from $150K to $250K, small magnitude directional moves in sideways market, no extensive or riskless hedging, and this includes losses too, but overall getting the direction of the market right.
Why options and not futures? I am affraid of sudden crashes like we saw 2 years ago, where the Dow fell 1000 points in a day, out of the blue, a futures trade would have been stopped, an Option or a stock would not have suffered.
Options have their own limitations, but so be it.
I am probably using the same indicators as you do, some TA, the COT report, some intersector analysis etc. and few indicators specific to detecting tops and bottoms.
Simple, boring profitable systems like those winning traders here at the site use, I never really invented anything new
🙂