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| FEBRUARY 13, 2025 If you’ve never been in your kitchen 30 minutes after midnight, your hands covered in chicken tikka masala that you’re making ahead to freeze for the next several months, your time management skills are probably better than mine. Let me explain… The last few weeks have been brutal in my schedule. Working overtime to get projects done, a ton on my plate, making time for friends and calling family as often as I can — plus trying to get an hour at the gym every day. There hasn’t been a ton of “me time” in there. But then, for SOME reason, I decided this weekend that I’d get the ingredients for not one, but TWO meals that I could make ahead, freeze in bulk, and eat for a month or more to come. As I mentioned recently, I found these GREAT cookbooks online with healthier replacements for favorite meals — high protein, low calories, great for weight loss. And they’re a ton of fun to make, too! Except there’s just one problem: they usually take a good amount of time. Now, when you think about spending two hours to cook 11 meals for the next two weeks, it’s a pretty fair tradeoff. But when you’ve got chicken that’s been in the fridge for a few days, that might be close to expiring, and you need to get it cooked before bed, but your workload has kept you working into the late hours of the night… Well, it leads pretty quickly to you questioning all your decisions in life. Why didn’t I invest in Apple 15 years ago? Why did I think the Pontiac Vibe was, like, the coolest car on earth for a few years? And why, why, why oh why did I pick THIS week to make tikka masala burritos? The truth is we all make mistakes. And we certainly all have weeks where it feels like everything is on fire. I’m sure you can relate. Maybe for you, it feels like every week is that way. Every time I see this tweet it makes me chuckle a little TOO hard, if you know what I mean…
Not because I don’t love my job — I’m unbelievably lucky to work where I do. But “the other type of week” is increasingly few and far between for me, and I’m sure for many of you, too. So unless you’re retired (congratulations!!) or have some other way to rid yourself of the chaos in life (please share!!), you, like me, probably find it hard to find time to trade. Fitting trading in on top of everything else you’re working on can seem like a real challenge. I certainly haven’t mastered a balance yet, but here are a few tips I’ve discovered that really help: Find strategies that do the work of picking stocks for youThere are a lot of ways to accomplish this: scanners, indicators, and any of our many excellent trade alert strategies can all help. But if you don’t have time to spend hours in front of the computer, you certainly don’t have time to check stocks one by one looking for the best setups. So either let someone else do that work for you, or find a tool or process that can help you accomplish hours of work in minutes. Get really comfortable with 100% losersYou know how they talk about a “compliment sandwich?” Where when you have something critical to say, you wrap it in more positive things? That’s kind of what this is… Listen, everyone should be comfortable with 100% losers on options plays. The beauty of most options setups, especially simple calls and puts and spreads, is that you know your max loss before you enter a trade. So if you’re not comfortable losing any more than $50 on a position, you can limit your trade size to $50. If you can do $500, do $500. But too many traders get hung up on the idea of a “100% loss” being the worst case scenario. So ask yourself this question: which is worse, losing 100% of $500 or 20% of $5,000? In the second scenario, you’re actually losing $1,000, even if the percentage in your balance sheet looks more positive. So stop getting hung up on percents, especially if you have little time to trade. If you’re constantly sweating a trade that’s going against you, wondering whether to close out at -35%, -40%, -50%... etc… that’s just more time in front of your computer and less time making other trades. If you’re comfortable with a 100% loss, you’ll both take all of that time and stress out of the equation, and you’ll actually open yourself up to some trades turning into winners that you would have closed as big losers. That’s actually happened to me on a setup on PG. The options expire tomorrow, so I had all but given up on the trade as the stock moved lower over the first few days of this week – but I was willing to take a 100% loser, so I staid in… and this morning it returned as a 56.7% winner!
That’s the trade I threw out last week (02/06 issue) from Alex Reid’s Wave Indicator — so you’ll hear more about that very soon. Use the Beautiful GTCAnother reason I won that trade above, and honestly, most of my successful trades, is the GTC order, short for “Good ‘Til Cancelled.” I didn’t know about these setups until I started having the first trading success of my life with Nate’s incredible Automated Options strategy (you can learn more about it here). These GTC orders let you set a profit target and they just sit there until you hit it, or the option goes to zero, which I just told you you need to be comfortable with! :) With Nate’s setup, he targets a 50% return within two weeks, and for my first eight trades in a row, we hit it! But I was never looking at my computer when one of those trades closed out… I was on the road, in the car, in business meetings… all kinds of places except looking at ThinkorSwim. And the same thing just happened with that trade on PG! I was focused on writing this newsletter this morning, still getting the tikka masala fumes out of my head, and then I flipped over to check on it and saw a big winner. Those GTC orders are a godsend for folks with too little time on their hands — which I really think is all of us these days. Try them out on your next options trade, and thank me later (you really need to thank Nate for introducing me to them, but we don’t want to swell his ego, do we?) To your prosperity, Stephen Ground Editor-in-Chief, ProsperityPub |
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ABOUT US: We believe that the opportunity for financial literacy and freedom belongs to all people, not just those who already have years of investing experience. Prosperity Pub provides an array of educational services and products that will help you navigate the markets and become a better investor. Trading is made simple through our online forum full of trading techniques to give you the best tools to kick-start your investing journey. We offer collaborative webinars and training; we love to teach. No matter the opportunity, we bring together a strong community of like-minded traders to focus on analyzing market news as it’s presented each day. |
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