Author/Editor
Serge Berger
Publisher
Investors Alley
Description
Options trading advisory.
Overall Rating
Rating: 3.2/5. From 5 votes.
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2.5
Rating from 23 votes
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Investment Performance
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Quality Of Writing/Analysis
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Value For Price
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Customer Service
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This is an appraisal of the ’11 Day Trader’ Options trading service provided by Serge Berger via Investors Alley.
I joined 11 Day Trader at is inception around April 2020 and made notes of each trade. The service offers 1 or 2 trades per week, a weekly market appraisal and a monthly Webinar incorporating a questions and answers session.
Trades are advised via SMS and email, and can occur at any time, especially for closing trades.
Costs are $197 per month or $800 per year, or were when I joined, I haven’t checked recently.
A typical trade comprises selling Put option spreads for bullish trades and Call option spreads for bearish. These Vertical Spreads offer a defined maximum loss at the expense of potential profit.
A distinct feature of the service is that the Option Strike prices for the spread are a long way from the current stock price and the Option Expiry date is 2 to 4 months into the future in an effort to minimize volatility.
The trades are always exited weeks before expiry eliminating the possibility of early or automatic assignment. The average trade length is apparently 11 days, hence the name.
Roll-overs and more complex trades such as Iron Condors are largely avoided, I believe this only occurred on one trade in 2020.
Only Securities with high liquidity are selected to avoid large bid/offer price spreads and problems with trade entry and exits. They are chosen using a mixture of techniques including Technical and Fundamental analysis, but no specific rules are given. A broad outline is sometimes forthcoming when making a trade or during a weekly market roundup session.
Moving onto performance, the theoretical results utilizing 5 contracts at each trade from the end of April to the end of December 2020
would have yielded an accumulated profit of $1745 with a maximum drawdown in one month of $680 occuring in June.
However, this profit does not include trading costs and the price figures in the trades are the buy/sell figures given by the service. Real life buy/sell figures differ from these theoretical figures due to time lag and other factors. For example if an equity price is falling, that will often be a trigger to close the position, but by the time the ‘close’ signal is sent, received and actioned the equity price can have changed considerably. In fact, earlier today I received a ‘buy back to close’ instruction of the March 19th MU call option for $0.50 but I ended up paying $0.61. So over 5 contracts my profit was $113 instead of a theoretical $175.
Trading costs vary widely depending on the supplier; in the UK, the number of available suppliers is very limited; using Tradestation each trade costs me $5 plus $1 for each contract on both the entry and exit trades. I tend to trade 5 contracts at a time, so the costs are $10 for the entry and $10 for the exit trade which reduces the April to the end of December figures to a $1065 profit and maximum drawdown of $760.
Tables of the Monthly results and the full data set of trades can be viewed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ge7bqYz46eYx8MayQXW_44jql2ZGAcALd81Fwwfmm2M/edit?usp=sharing
I will endevour to keep these up to date until April 2021 so there is a full year of results.
On a historical note, using a similar trading method started early in 2019 I made about $7000 on $15000 capital, but had lost all my gains by March 2020, of course this is when the effects of the pandemic first started.
I hope this is of benefit to someone looking at Option Trading, if anyone is interested look back and the table link to get a full year of results.
Interesting, but you didn’t either recommend Serge Berger or not. So, do you recommend him and his services or not?
Well, this was a work in progress which I have now abandoned. But to answer your question – no I would not recommend Serge based on my experiences. Just about broke even without trading cost but when you add in the costs plus about $800 p.a for the service Iām looking at a significant loss.
I started the 11 Day Trader in Oct 2021. Mark Lawson described the trades in detail. There are probably an average of 4-6 trades a month. I basically wanted some monthly income, so I usually collected around $1000-1200 premium per trade. The idea is to wait an average of 11 days, and buy back the credit spread, while ( hopefully) keeping 30-50% of the premium received. Some trades were closed after 2 days, some were kept up to 3 weeks.
As anyone knows, the maximum profit on credit spreads is limited to initial premium received. The maximum loss is also capped, but is much higher than max profit. This is where the problem arises. You can have several profitable trades, ( in my case, $200-400 each) and then one losing trade where you will lose thousands. After 6 months I was underwater by about $500, and I had spent over $1500 in trading fees. Not to mention the $500 yearly subscription fee.
So, would I recommend the 11 Day Trader service? Absolutely not.