IRON CONDOR 101

How good do you think you would get at managing Iron Condor trades if you could manage 100 different trades in a day?

By comparison, in real time, placing one trade a per option cycle, managing 3000 trades would take you…



The day I was scheduled for the procedure, the market moved against my position. An Iron Condor trade I had placed was in a bad way. I stood to loose a lot of money.

I didn’t know if I should close the trade….or if I should adjust the trade…I didn’t know how to manage it…honestly I didn’t have enough experience to know what I was doing. Really honestly; I shouldn’t have been in that trade to begin with.

All I could think was: I wish I had traded Iron Condors a thousand times before so I had the experience to know what to do.

But I hadn’t. And I was going to be unconscious under general anesthetic for hours while the doctors worked on me.

I can’t tell you how stressed out I was….I should have been focused on my health…but all I could think about was what would the index do while I was out on the operating table.

I woke up in the hospital, and the first question I asked by wife was: "Did the S&P index go down at all?"

Not "Hey, did they find any cancer in there?" or "Hey, am I going to live or die?"

Needless to say I wasn’t popular around the house for a few days. Fortunately for me, I got lucky; the doctors gave me a clean bill of health and the S&P moved back into a place where my trade was profitable again. Whew.

But that experience got me thinking about how hard it is to really learn how to manage Iron Condor trades.

And there are good back-trading programs and paper-trading platforms…but it’s genuinely painstaking to place and click through trades over and over and over again.

And most of the focus of all of the above is on how to place the trade. But placing the trade isn’t most of the battle.

Managing the trade is what you really need to practice…because once you place the trade, you have to manage it for a full option cycle…which lasts from the third Friday of the month you are in now to the third Friday of the next month.

So I set out to create a tool that would help myself, and other traders like me. I wanted to practice managing Iron Condor trades over and over and over again. I wanted to learn what to do when the index went up….or down…or didn’t move much at all. I wanted to create a tool that would help me train so the next time I was in an Iron Condor trade, I would know what to do.

And I didn’t want to wait for years of trading experience to have the equivalent of years of trading experience.

Because with Iron Condor trades, when Mr. Market cooperates, it’s easy money, no stress, and a good return.

This is Level One of the game, and with a trade placed on the S&P….about to expire with almost a thousand dollars in profit:

Once that trading cycle expires, another cycle automatically begins….and you manage the next trade till expiration as well.

You choose the index to trade – the game contains the historical index data for the S&P, the NASDAQ, and the RUSSELL. So you can practice on any or all of these indexes.

And in Level Two of the game, you can also decide whether or not to adjust the position with additional puts and calls.

Here’s a Level Two trade on the NASDAQ where buying an additional couple of puts has really paid off…with only one day left till expiration!

We know this is a brand new paradigm for learning about stock options, and you must have questions about this amazing product.

Iron Condor 101 contains historical stock index prices. It’s like a DVR for the stock market. It plays back month after month for you automatically. And it automatically places an Iron Condor trade so you can focus on learning how to manage the trade.

There is no predicting the market…so working with real data is the only way to really get the experience of what it’s like to be in one of these trades.

YES! You control the speed that the market plays back at. Set it to the slowest setting and it takes about a minute and a half to go through an option cycle. Which, trust me, is plenty of time to make your decisions. We experimented with having it run slower…and it was deathly boring.

Most of the time with these trades you have three decisions you can make: ride it out till expiration, close the position, or adjust the position.

At the slower speed settings in the game, you can really watch the market move at a measured pace, and make your decisions.

Or..if you are impatient like me….set it to the fastest setting, and you can tear through a trading cycle in about 8 seconds.

YES! Level two of the game (included in your download) allows you to practice adjusting Iron Condor trades buying additional puts and calls.

Sure, no problem. Iron Condor 101 contains the historical index information of the NASDAQ from 1971-2011, the S&P from 1962-2011 and the RUSSELL from 1987-2011. 

We plan to update the indexes annually to keep the game current, at no additional cost to you. So future index data updates for NASDAQ, RUSSEL and S&P will be at no cost to you, ever.

Just like in real life, you have to trade the month that the market gives you. The game randomly selects a month from the chosen index….once that month… Read more…