Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. On episode number 800, we’re going to be talking about why the daily call podcast is going all in on video podcasting. If you haven’t seen the updates from the daily call podcast in about a month or so, it’s not because we stopped the daily podcast. It’s because we’re actually changing up the show format. And so, what you’re going to see moving forward in 2020 in just a couple of weeks is a brand-new...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why every 18 years on average, investors lose half of their money. As we kind of wrap up 2019 and we start getting towards 2020, a brand-new decade, I think it’s important that we just remind ourselves of just how volatile markets can be moving forward in the future and how good we’ve really had it over the last 13 years as far as volatility, market shocks and...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be answering the question, “How is the CBOE VIX calculated?” The VIX is actually a measure of 30-day expected volatility for the S&P 500. You could basically say that the VIX is a gauge for judging the implied or the expected movement in the S&P 500 over the next 30 days. And so, what they do is they have a bunch of formulas and ways that they do it which they have on...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Can I buy VIX stock?” No. You cannot buy VIX stock itself. It’s actually not anything that you can trade. It’s not an ETF. It’s not an underlying stock security. The VIX is an index, but you can trade options on it and you can trade derivative products that are based on the VIX. One of the derivative products that’s very popular to trade is VXX which is an...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Why is back-testing important?” I actually get a lot of pushback on this and I think that many people look at back-testing as irrelevant and I think that back-testing has a lot of relevance if you use it correctly. Sure, back-testing is not perfect in the sense that a perfect back-test is not going to be the perfect expectation of what we should expect moving...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about a very hot topic which is, “Do you allocate everything now in lump sum or do you allocate over time if you’re just getting started in investing?” The good news here is that I think that a lot of data and research has already been done on this and in particular, Vanguard did a bunch of research on this which you can find online on Vanguard’s website that has the...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Is VIX actually implied volatility?” The simple answer to this question is yes, it’s implied volatility, but only for the S&P 500. The VIX itself is basically derived off of the expected future S&P 500 move and the S&P 500 index options over the next 30 days. You could look at VIX as actually the implied volatility reading on the S&P 500. Now,...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “What makes a stock volatile?” The simple answer to this question is just changes in expectation and when changes and expectation are not in alignment with what people had thought previously, that’s what causes stocks to become volatile. If you really think about how stocks get really volatile particularly around earnings events, it’s only driven by the fact...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “What is implied volatility rank or what’s commonly referred to as IVR?” IVR is way for us to normalize implied volatility readings across different ticker symbols and ETFs to get basically an apples to apples comparison. When we are looking at a trade and we are searching for and scanning for high implied volatility setups, it’s not enough in our particular...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Is TD Ameritrade’s Thinkorswim free?” The short answer is that yes, the platform is free to investors and traders. However, if you do want to have options trading privileges and get the ability to trade on margin, usually, they require a $2,000 deposit. Now, this is the time of this recording, so it may be different in the future and always check TD...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why you cannot start trading options with $100. Now, I know that there’s a lot of people out there online who suggest that you can start trading options with a little bit of money. And while that’s true, we actually suggest that you start with somewhere around $3,000 to $5,000. Hopefully on the upper end of that range, around $5,000 is really where you start to...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why I believe you should trade on desktop and manage on mobile. I’ve said this a number of times, but actually, I think it’s a really good technique to use because as the brokerage industry continues to evolve and move towards more of a mobile friendly style and platform, I think it’s really important that you still make a lot of your trades on desktop especially...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “What is a good amount of money to start investing?” I think that honestly, you should start investing with whatever you have, so as much money as you can possibly sock away into an investing account or a retirement account, you should start doing that right away. In fact, it’s often been said that the best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago or today. And...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why fear comes from a loss of control. This is actually really interesting if you think about it, but we have this really strong primitive desire to control everything in our environment and really, the people and the things that we interact with. We see this all the time in markets because people will pay thousands of dollars for indicator signals and for...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “What is long volatility?” Long volatility can just be described as an options trading strategy or a trading strategy in general that profits from an increase in volatility. When someone says that they’re long volatility, that basically just means that they’ve bought into a volatility product that would profit if implied volatility in the underlying shares or...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why you should trade without technical analysis first. I’m a big proponent of using technical analysis, but I think that technical analysis is a secondary type of analysis that you should do when you’re trading. I do not think it’s a primary source of analysis. And what I mean by this is that a lot of people when they start trading, they get into technical...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “How much do you need to start trading.” I think this is a two-part answer. I think the first part of this answer is if you’re going to start trading and just learning the mechanics, learning how brokers work, how order entry and position flow works, then you don’t need any money to do that. You can use a paper trading account at many of the brokerages that...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “How do I stop feeling impatient when trading options?” Now, look. I think this is a really important topic because a lot of traders feel like when they start trading options, they have this sense of anxiety that starts to swell up in their body where they get impatient waiting for trades to come around or for positions to come in after they’ve been waiting...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be answering the question, “Is trading really profitable?” I think the short answer to this question is of course, yes, trading is profitable, but it’s profitable for those people who frankly just stick with it and have a system in place. We hear all the time this quote that’s thrown around which is that 90% of traders lose money. I don’t think that’s actually true. I think that...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be talking about why you should go beyond outcomes and focus on the process. This is something that I talk about often with coaching clients and especially with our Pro and Elite members here at Option Alpha and it’s this idea of focusing really, really hard on the process and not so much the outcome. Now, this doesn’t mean that you totally reject the outcome of what you’re doing....

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Is TD Ameritrade good?” Truth be told, I actually get this question a lot. It comes from a lot of our members and subscribers here at Option Alpha and they always ask me, “Hey, look. I know you use TD Ameritrade, but is TD Ameritrade good to use?” And my answer is always the same, is I think that they’re one of the better brokers out there. I think that...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Do you need a lot of money to invest in stocks?” The short answer to this is yes, you do, relative to something like options trading. Now, you don’t need a lot of money to buy any particular stock in and of itself, but if you don’t have a lot of money to start with and you have a smaller account, many brokerages defines smaller accounts as accounts under...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be answering the question, “What is the process of online trading?” Online trading is simply the process of buying and selling securities, whether it’s stocks, options, futures, Forex, commodities, etcetera through the internet. This process is actually relatively new because say 25, 30 years ago, very few, if any, brokers were actually allowing retail traders to go online and...

Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to be answering the question, “How does a put option make money?” A put option contract (and we’re probably specifically talking about a long put option contract) makes money in two different scenarios. The first scenario is that the stock continues to move lower or makes a large move lower during the time that you’re holding that put option contract. This would be the most obvious...