Author/Editor
Kim Klaiman
Description
Offers to educate readers about options, and publishes 10-15 trading ideas per month. Most ideas are short-term (2-5 days) and are based on evaluating Implied Volatility.
Overall Rating
Rating: 4.0/5. From 144 votes.
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4.2
Rating from 538 votes
If you’ve subscribed to Steady Options, please click the stars below to indicate your rating for this newsletter, and please share any other feedback about your experience using the comment box below.
Investment Performance
Rating from 141 votes
Rating: 4.1/5. From 141 votes.
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- 5 Stars 101 Votes
- 4 Stars 8 Votes
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- 1 Stars 25 Votes
Quality Of Writing/Analysis
Rating from 131 votes
Rating: 4.2/5. From 131 votes.
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- 5 Stars 97 Votes
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- 1 Stars 24 Votes
Value For Price
Rating from 122 votes
Rating: 4.3/5. From 122 votes.
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- 5 Stars 91 Votes
- 4 Stars 9 Votes
- 3 Stars 6 Votes
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- 1 Stars 13 Votes
Customer Service
Rating from 144 votes
Rating: 4.0/5. From 144 votes.
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- 5 Stars 98 Votes
- 4 Stars 10 Votes
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- 1 Stars 29 Votes
When i spend my hard earned money I can decide what is and is not my business……not you.
Dear “Guest”,
Our goal is to provide the best options education in the industry at very reasonable price. Over our 6 years in business, I found out that our most successful members prefer to focus on how much THEY make, not how much I make.
I’m glad that we were able to help you to become a better trader and do better than most traders in their first year. If and when you decide to come back, I’m sure you can improve over time, assuming that you will focus mostly on your education.
Thank you again for the review, I appreciate it.
Kim
Kims service is a fantastic community with lots of information sharing and looking out for each other.
The analysis, the trades and the strategies are well-formed, effective and very profitable (with few trades loosing). That said this spring has had quite a few curveballs from Mr. Trump so less profitable so far in 2018 than previously
Joined 2 years ago with zero practical options knowledge. Steep learning curve but you get the practical hands on approach. Expectations, trading platforms, commissions, and obviously potential trades are discussed, analysed and explained thoroughly. You will build your confidence. There is an excellent group of knowledgeable coaches who will explain and guide. Yes, you may lose a few times but you will learn how to control those. You will learn how to manage your capital.
very good service with clear direction on options. Good performance but sometimes difficult to get filled.
A great service that I have been using for 1.2 years now. The forum contains a ton of knowledge and if you use the service the right way you can match Kim’s performance (or even exceed it).
Been a subscriber for about 2 years. This service is great because it not only gives you specific “picks” and analyses, but also empowers you to learn how to trade on your own. It can be a bit overwhelming at first due to the vast amount of knowledge available, but is well worth the time and effort. Trading was already my primary source of income before subscribing, but I’ve become a much better trader from using this service.
I’ve been with SO for a while now, and at first I was sceptical – but I have been won over. I’ve been trading options for years before I joined the site, so I knew the markets, terminology, techniques, but was looking for a low-risk system to complement my other strategies (I’m a full-time trader).
Firstly, it is NOT an alert system – don’t expect to buy and sell by acting on the email alerts alone, and hope to become rich quick. The key is to learn the strategies and understand why they work (or don’t if the trade goes wrong once in a while).
Be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort (even if you know options well) mastering the SO technique.
It took me about 6 months of solid commitment. You’re mileage may vary.
Once you understand the SO trades and the when/why/how then you no longer need to even wait for the official trades, and you will have the confidence to make your own trades.
The best thing about this service is the transparency. There is no hard-sell, no BS, no pressure, and no sugar-coating of things. The trades that Kim puts on are real – members get a screenshot of the broker statement – in case someone says “But they can be photoshoped”, well, I thought the same at first, and then I verified them by looking at the “Time and Sales” part of my brokers platform, and I could see his exact trades on there.
The other good thing is the community forum – honestly, that is FAR more valuable than the trade alerts themselves IMO, cos I have done most of my learning from there. There are some very gifted traders there (other than myself, of course:-) ) – one guy called Yowster is truly awesome. If he was to start a hedge fund, I would happily subscribe. Members help each other, and post their trade entries/exists and it’s like you are looking over the shoulders of others as they trade.
Overall, I am very happy with the service, and even though I could probably trade this system alone now, I will be renewing my annual subscription, cos of the community forum alone. SO doesn’t raise expectations, but I am averaging around 10% gain a month. Oh…and I am hoping to beat the official returns this year.
Whats the yearly subscription cost?
$1,245/year
Never mind I found it….
Definitely not just a two star letter. Ok, its true the biggest issue is that the suggested trades are after Kim places his and tough to mimic. I am on them within one minute of them being put out since I am online trading all day long, I use Good until Canceled orders and still only can get half of the trades filled anywhere near the limit prices he gets. Kim says there are plenty of ideas under unofficial trades but those are not tracked,some are bad, nor are what you are paying for. it may be more about education and he does put out reminders to read the ideas behind the trades. He does line up discounts on other good services such as Trade Machine Pro from CML.
Gave this service about a year of my time and finally canceled. I should have canceled sooner. The community is great but since the trades are provided after Kim’s own fills, it’s nearly impossible to mimic his returns. You’ll need to devote a lot of time to submit all the trades. This will require being available during trading hours which can be difficult for most due to work. One could submit Good till Canceled orders to be executed at market open but if something happened overnight or just prior to the opening bell, that trade may not be a good idea. And getting out of a trade? If you have to work during market hours, you shouldn’t even be trading these alerts/suggestions. The volume of trades will require a lot in commissions too. Some trades were great but factoring in slippage from when Kim’s trade is published, commission fees, service fee, I was always playing catch up. My account is down since I joined this service and would’ve been up if I just bought ETFs.
I also find it odd that starting on June 26, 2018 at 4:11pm, 5 straight “positive” comments were posted just minutes after each other. It is pretty suspect and now casts a suspicious shadow on all the other “positive” comments.
I gave this service a trial for 7 days and decided to upgrade to a quarterly subscription (Been in this service around 2 weeks). So far 5 stars to all the categories here. I will elaborate my experience below.
Background:
a) Not a native speaker, but can read and write in English at an acceptable level.
b) Ph.D. student with Bioengineering major at Stanford. Have a three-year-old kid and need to cook for the family. So I am a mom with a full-time job, a lot of family duty and do not have a systematic finance learning experience. Do not have a lot of time to do screening and analysis.
c) Not completely new to trading. Been in crazy bitcoin market for a year and went through educational option trading on youtube for about a month before subscription. So I have a basic idea of how options work and how to build strategies like iron condors, iron butterflies, straddles et al… But do not have a feeling of how the market will move.
d) Be able to sue Robinhood to do multi-leg trading. So I don’t have any commission issues.
Comments/experience of this service:
a) Definitely, a huge amount of articles to read in the forum. I am a scientist, so I would like to figure out how things work. They have listed must-read topics in the forum, I spent two days go through them and decided to upgrade my subscription from monthly to quarterly plan (just to save some money and give this service a good period of time to work).
Then, I found I need to read these highlighted articles again and again. You will find yourself improved a lot and have different feelings every time you read them.
b) I believe most people reading my comments are not experienced traders and most people want to know whether you can make money by simply following the push notification. The short answer is yes, but I believe Kim does not like people to follow him blindly. The reason is simple. This is a paid service and people usually have unrealistic expectations. When they blindly follow some trades without knowing the big picture, they are highly possible to go crazy. I believe this is a pain for the administrator and no one wants to take $100 a month to deal with this kind of people.
This is how I use the service now. Kim usually sends out trades in the daytime. If this is an opening, I will not try to open that immediately because I have a full-time job and it is not good to do this in the lab. I will do some analysis on TOS when my kid is asleep and make sure I know the big picture. Then, I will place the order before sleep. However, for some closing notifications, I will just close them when I receive the notification. So far working pretty good and have some paper gains in my portfolio even the SPY is not doing very well during these two weeks.
c) I appreciate the people who can answer my questions and comment on my trades in the forum. They appear to be very experienced traders and I learn a lot from them. Sometimes they can provide different/opposite views about Kim’s trade. This kind of discussion appears to have the most value IMO. In addition, as we know, straddles, iron condors are not new. However, the forum has its own pre-earning strategies. It appears to be started by an early member in the forum. After few years improvement by all members (not only Kim) in the forum, it is quite profitable and becomes a major strategy now. Now, I usually spend an hour to go over people’s discussion about the trade Kim sent out every day. No want to miss these
d) Kim replies to every private message I sent. Very responsible.
Suggestion:
Each trade has their own discussion thread now, but kind of scattered. It would be nice if we can have a weekly/bi-weekly review of all the trades we made. It can help all the people stay on the same page IMO. It also helps us see the big picture clearly.
Kim Klaiman runs a first class service. All strategies are extensively backtested and well researched. There are well written tutorials about the strategies. The questions are answered in a timely matter by Kim and other experienced members.
The community is a real gem. This is where the real value is. There are dozens of very good traders who not only help new members, but also share their own trading ideas.
Wealth of information can be overwhelming, so make sure to spend some time and learn the strategies. I cancelled all other services I was using, and now SO is the only service I’m using. Highly recommended.
Kim and Yowster are very good at what they do. But, I started their service probably during the worst part of their trading in the last 3 yrs, Jan to Mar 2019. The fills are usually a huge problem. Strategies are for advanced traders which is acceptable since they do disclose that upfront. Fills being an issue and me not able to be on the computer most of the day, it is a bit difficult to get into a trade in a fast moving market. I couldnt get in some profitable trades that they had which affected my results negatively more than they did. So, I got fills in all the losing trades but not in all profitable trade. They also used ~80% of the account during this time period which is not common.
Posting reply on your own website instead of here speaks volumes. Bravo. I am still waiting to hear explanation about 20% draw down. Thats 20K loss in a 100K account.
Dear S K,
SteadyOptions produced triple digit returns in 6 out of 8 previous years. We encourage members to focus on our long term performance instead of one bad month. We know that some members join based on 8 years track record, but quit based on one bad month. Classic “buy high sell low” mentality. 6 months from now, they are going to feel a bit silly.
This is from Kim at SO – told him that as a SG member and SO member – would be happy to post it here:
Dear S K,
SteadyOptions produced triple digit returns in 6 out of 8 previous years. We encourage members to focus on our long term performance instead of one bad month. We know that some members join based on 8 years track record, but quit based on one bad month. Classic “buy high sell low” mentality. 6 months from now, they are going to feel a bit silly.
I encourage “S K” (whoever you are) to post their comments and criticism here, instead of hiding behind their anonymity.
Kim
I’m a new member to SO – joined in January as SK did. I’m very experienced in regular stock trades (long and short), futures, etc. My primary goal in joining (originally) was to get with a group of talented, experienced and communicative folks who REALLY know options and have proven strategies they use. I’ve tried the ‘spray and pray’ approach with other options newsletters – and they tend to rely on more gut feel and ‘opinion’ that solid research that is proven over time.
SO tends to use a set of known strategies, a set of great research tools and then members post ideas and the following opinions/discussions are public and then trading ideas are posted. This is the type of group that I want – and I’ve been welcomed with open arms and folks really try to help one another. I’m not looking for magic, I’m not looking for an auto-trader (have done that) – I’m looking for REAL education, help, resources and a community that cares about one another. This I have found in SO. Lastly, there is complete transparency, with commentary about what worked, what didn’t, ideas as to why, etc.. This commentary is as valuable as the specific trade ideas – it is how we ALL learn.
Yes, I lost money in January – in my case a small price to pay for the education I received. I’m starting to make money now – and I have a LONG ways to go on the education/experience front – I will be sticking with them . . . and contributing as much as I can.
Given the volatility in the market (across almost all sectors) – it is HARD to make money if you trade the way you did in 2017 and the first half of 2018 . . . we all have to get better, make changes and adapt to the changing market — I see this going on daily in SO. There will be bad months – but I anticipate more good than bad . . . and WHAT I get out of it, and how I apply it to my trading is on me.
SteadyOptions website has been down repeatedly this month. The site is currently down (at least 3 hours so far). No communication to paying clients.
My apologies for the downtime. This was our longest downtime since inception. We are working around the clock with the hosting company to fix it. We have sent numerous email updates to all members and we post real time updates via Twitter.
I had similar experience to the person above., if they meant updates about the site downtime. For me there was no email updates about the downtime on 4/23, and only a one-line reply to a user on the forum after they raised the issue of the bsite having been down that day. Yesterday 4/24 after market closed and the site was down all day, there was one email update dedicated to this.
The bigger issue is that the hosting company must be changed asap. They are not reliable and have proven that (three down days in a single month, others experience may be different). There is nothing you can do on your end (re working round the clock) to fix it other than migrating to a better hosting solution (maybe AWS). Cost must not be an issue. Twitter cannot replace the forum.
SO has value that needs to be protected. I would never complain about a down performance of a month or two. You are providing a good service, please maintain the site’s infrastructure.
Thank you for your comment and your kind words.
It has been confirmed that the site has been attacked (we have a pretty good idea who was behind it). We have installed a more powerful firewall and things seem to be working fine now. We will be looking for a backup for our email system as well, so we can send more timely updates.
I have been a member of SteadyOptions for almost six months, but unfortunately I must cancel my subscription. There are a lot of positives about this service: the owners provide a lot of education material to help understand the trades and they are very active and responsive to the subscribers. The trades though are hard for me to follow since I work a full time job. Most of my personal trading strategies have entries and exits that flexible – if I don’t execute today then I can set an order and get in tomorrow. With SO however, sometimes you can get a better entry than the official trade, but in my experience if you miss the exact timing of the entry or exit, the trade is much less profitable or even a loss.
In the time I’ve been a member I have about 1/2 of the trades – some of these were for large losses, but even so this is a drag on performance. Of the trades I’ve entered, the official SO result is about a 6% loss, but my loss is 16%. Kim preaches not to chase trades, but this is why I didn’t get into 1/2 of the trades. I would set orders at the official price or a small amount more or less, but the timing is key – I simply didn’t get the trade.
Exits can also be challenging. I beat the SO official trades a few times by closing early, but tried to focus on hitting the official exits. Due to work I would sometimes miss these exits and have to chase the price.
If you are able to watch the forums, stay on top of the trades, get in and out with the exact timing, you should be able to get close to the official SO performance. Before paying for the service though, be sure you understand Broken Wing Butterfly trades, hedged straddles, iron butterfly, calendar, ratio, iron condor and reverse iron condor trades. DO NOT THINK you can sign up for this service and learn how to make these trades while following the forums for entries!
I would also say that if you understand these options strategies and when to use them, especially around earnings, you probably do not need to pay for SteadyOptions. I did not understand these strategies very well, so the education material at the site was helpful and so was placing the trades as they were published in the member forums.
Kim would suggest that new members paper trade the strategies, however the service is too expensive in my opinion to pay for it and paper trade the entries. Learn the strategies first, trade those for a few months, and then sign up if you are still interested. I think though if you learn the strategies that SO uses, you can do just as well on your own.
Dear Clint,
Thank you for being a member and for commenting. We are always looking to improve, and feedback from members is very important to us.
Our mantra is “learn first, trade later”. Yes, it is very important to learn the strategies before placing live trades. This is where some members fail – they are rushing into live trading, thinking that “it is too expensive to paper trade while paying for the service”. They usually find out the hard way that trading without proper understanding of what you are doing could be much more expensive. The most successful members learn the strategies for few months, then become more independent.
Your are correct, our trades are mostly short term and time sensitive. Earnings trades have to be closed before earnings. Our members know that and place limit orders ahead of time. Most of the time this is not an issue at all
The biggest value of our service is the community. Regarding the rates, we are very competitive in the market place and provide a substantial value over other services unless your sole purpose is to purchase the lowest price product possible. We recognize that is the goal of some traders, however, many traders appreciate the value we provide in terms of performance, community, education etc.
I guess you get what you pay for. As we know, there’s always free cheese in a mousetrap, but I never saw a happy mouse there!
Thanks for replying.
The community at Steady Options is valuable – I found the forums to be informative and the traders engaged, versus the generally useless comments on free trading websites. I also liked that Steady Options members shared trading ideas, and some of those have been incorporated into the trading schema.
I highly recommend SO for people looking for a trading community. I’m a member of a local trading club that meets monthly but SO is “always on”.
I don’t think the fee is excessive, but I am accountable to my family in how I invest and what I pay for my tools; since I’ve struggled to execute and feel I need more time to understand the trades I have to step back. If my situation changes then I will join the group again.
To reiterate some facts abut SO:
The claim that SO produced XX %return in such and such time period in real life is misleading at best (a lie.)
The published trades are for 1 unit of a 4-leg strategies, published after the fact, executed by the service owner, Mr. Kim.
Specifically:
He repeatedly refused to post his trade recommendation **before** he set up his trade. These are **his** trades, **after** they have been executed. He never gave any reasons why he doesn’t post his intentions even one minute before he places the trade. [ Incidentally he repeatedly refused (no reason given) to visit the US, all expenses paid, for a live demonstration of his methodology.]
Contrary to the claim that these are “non-directional” strategies he often times “legs in” into the trade. Obviously when only parts of the trade are set up, the trade is directional. He is betting on the trade going his way.
The published results don’t include commission and subscription fees. Given that these trades can not be set up in a medium–to-large account (see below) and given that subsxcription runs to thousands of dollars, this can be substantial.
He trades a single unit. These are quite esoteric trading vehicles, thinly traded. Some of the traded companies themselves are thinly traded. A 4-leg unit bought for $0.40 and sold for $0.60 produced 50% return. Sounds wonderful. But there is absolutely no way one can do this with 100 units (for $4,000) or with 1,000 (for $40,000) He publishes “historical data” on the trades, but this does not include volume.
As others noted, the community is nice and helpful. But to reiterate Clint’s advise: “Before paying for the service though, be sure you understand Broken Wing Butterfly trades, hedged straddles, iron butterfly, calendar, ratio, iron condor and reverse iron condor trades. DO NOT THINK you can sign up for this service and learn how to make these trades while following the forums for entries!” Once you consider Clin’t advise AND all you want is some continuing education AND you don’t mind that in addition to the thousands of dollars going to Mr. Kim you may lose (but maybe you will win!) a few thousands dollars, then by all means, subscribe. Do NOT let Mr. Kim intimidate you into believing that just because his service is expensive (it is), it has great value.
For the record:
jozsika was a SO member for 5 weeks. He never made a real effort to learn the strategies as recommended and started trading with real money from day 1 . His approach was: “”I don’t care to learn about options or their various strategies. In fact, I just want someone to book profitable trades into my account, because I also don’t care why a trade is initiated or why they may/may not make money.” This is a real quote from him that can be found on our forum.
Since cancelling 6 years ago, this individual feels obligated to take every opportunity to comment on our service. It feels like a personal vendetta. To comment on just one of his claims “These are quite esoteric trading vehicles, thinly traded”: Our latest trades include NVDA, WMT, CSCO, EEM, FB, AMZN, MSFT, NFLX, AAPL, SPX, NKE, GS, MCD, VXX, BABA, PEP, IBM, and more. I guess we have different definitions of “esoteric thinly traded vehicles”.
Rest of his claims are equally absurd.
This does not align completely with my experience.
The trades were almost all discussed before hand. If you follow the comments by Kim and Yowster you’ll get them in your email. Each month there is a discussion about which tickers to trade for earnings, so this is transparent.
The trades are often non-directional, or Iron Condors or some such setup. I didn’t notice any issues with legging in that created a performance issue.
Commissions are negligible if you have a good platform. I use tastyworks so paying $10 for a trade that targets $150 profit isn’t bad.
Most of the tickers have good volume, some though were a bit thin. In my opinion, a few were too thin to trade short term where timing is important. I’m not a very experience options trader though so I could be wrong. SO has published all of their trades – review the stock symbols and decide for yourself if they are too thin to get in and out of in a few weeks to capture a 10% to 30% move.
I would agree that the subscription is a significant cost if you are trading a $10,000 account – that’s a 1.25% drag each month (15% per year). SO also recommends not trading more than $100,000, a tacit acknowledgment that getting in and out of these trades in large volume won’t be easy. Probably trading $30,000-$60,000 with SO is optimal to get good execution and keep the subscription fee reasonable as a percentage of funds traded.
Go in with eyes open. You will probably not match the SO official performance – targeting 30%-40% per year is probably doable, and if you have the time during the day to read the forums, get the trade alerts, and execute then I think it will improve as you use the service. Is 30% enough to cover the cost of the subscription, and is that better than what you are doing now? Are you looking for an active trader community to share ideas with?
It’s a good service for the right person – for me it’s just not a good fit at this time.
Thank you Clint. I believe your summary is fairly accurate.
We always have been very transparent about the fact the SO strategies are not scalable to big accounts, and $100k is the maximum we would recommend. It would be unrealistic to expect from ANY strategy to make the returns we achieve on a multi million dollar account.
Everyone is different, and as you mentioned, the returns will depend on the time and effort members put, and usually improve over time. Members absolutely will have to put the time and the effort, we have been very transparent about this. That said, even 30-40% per year on 10k portfolio is still 3 times the subscription fee, in addition to all education members get (not to mention all exclusive members discounts and benefits). Members who trade 50k account and make even 2-3% per month cover their yearly subscription in a single month.
I have been a member for about a year now. This is an outstanding service. During the August market meltdown, Kim and Yowster navigated the ship brilliantly, without taking unnecessary risks, but also adapting to new market conditions. The community value is priceless, and this alone separates SO from other services.
I will be a member as long as the service will exist.
SteadyOptions is a 1st class service, period. This isn’t a simple investment direction service, but rather an exceptional community of brilliant people working around a specific set of risk-managed strategies. The ability to collaborate and learn sets SteadyOptions far above the rest. Kim and his team are supportive, responsive, and diligent. There was a never a time that I felt I didn’t understand what was going on and any questions I had were quickly and thoroughly answered. If you’re looking for best ‘next step’ as an options trader, you’ve found it.
Steady Option provides quality of service , incomparable with any others , they are highly interactive , and they explain you the core of the proposed strategies.
I am learning every day , and they provide true interactive service , so your questions answered quickly by truly senior traders.
This is easily the best options trading service out there and a tremendous value at the price. The trade recommendations are well thought out with an emphasis on risk control and loss mitigation. Each trade is clearly explained and there is a ton of educational material for new members. The performance record is accurate and possible to replicate in real world trading conditions. There is just not one strategy so you don’t have the issue of having the strategy blow up in unfavorable market conditions like a lot of the other options newsletter services.
The trades and concepts are not easy and require effort and concentration to learn and execute. But if you put in the work, you will be rewarded. Kim and Yowster genuinely care about the subscriber’s experience and success and are making the same trades right alongside the subscribers.
I’m a subscriber for life.