(While on vacation until Oct 26th, I'm going to be sharing you some anecdotes on my favorite trading strategies: why I use them, when, and how I manage them once they are on.)

Here's the thing about options trading: you can make it as complicated as your heart's content. And there are plenty of incredibly smart practitioners out there who run amazingly complex strategies involving all kinds of volatility and statistical arbitrage.

They analyze 3D volatility surface graphs, use lesser understood greeks, and interpret things like "volatility smile" and dispersion.

If that works for you, great! I always say: if it works, do more of it!

But another beautiful thing about options trading is that there are many different ways to pull profits out of the market, and most of them aren't as complicated as they may sound -- even if the strategies have exotic sounding names like "iron condor" or "broken-wing butterfly."

And my absolute favorite options strategy isn't even really a strategy at all -- it's simply buying long calls when I'm bullish!

Shame on me for using the word "Hope" in the headline for this post, but I cannot resist a good pun ;)

We've got a play here in an old school Aerospace & Defense company that is on the verge of making new all-time highs. And it just so happens it's approaching the magical $100 a share price point that often tends to act as a price magnet. We call this the hundred-dolla-roll!

This is the video recording of October 8th 2021 Weekly Jam Session with Sean McLaughlin.

One thing the team and I have observed during recent market volatility is how well big banks have held up. Yes, they've pulled back like everybody else. But their relative strength remained in tact, and most charts in the sector held above significant support levels. In other words, the big picture is still pointing to higher prices.

So with that being the world we're living in right now, its time to place a bullish bet on a name everyone loves to hate.

The short puts we entered on $SPY on Monday hit our profit target today and we are out. Profit target hit in under 4 trading days. We’ll take it!

Meanwhile, the $FCX Bullish Risk Reversal we entered yesterday has quickly moved in our direction.

I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I’m going to take this opportunity to remove the risk from the trade.

For details on the trade, you can review it here. In short, we sold naked short puts to pay for the cost of our long calls. Thanks to today’s move, we’re able to sell some of our calls to pay for closing our entire naked short puts position. And we did that today… 

During today's internal Analyst Call, JC asked me what I was looking at for a trade today.

I mentioned I hadn't fully fleshed it out yet, but whatever I did would likely involve selling premium. With the $VIX hovering around 24 at the time, it felt like the edge was on the side of the premium sellers.

At this point, Steve Strazza piped in that he liked Freeport McMoran $FCX as a likely candidate for a bounce here. And then JC got excited about the idea of a bullish Risk Reversal spread to express this idea.

Selling elevated puts premium to offset the cost of a long call position? Yes... I liked the sound of that.

If one were to simply observe the daily charts for $SPY or $QQQ while listening to the teevee, one would easily conclude the sky is falling. And that would be an easy conclusion to come to.

But when we take a step back from the noise and look elsewhere, the details under the hood are suggesting a different story. And that is giving me some confidence to fade the hysteria here.

This is the video recording of October 1st 2021 Weekly Jam Session with Sean McLaughlin.

If you like action, then you've enjoyed this week so far.

The markets looked ho-hum for most of the day Monday. But then the last hour offered us a harbinger of things to come. And Tuesday's gap and crap confirmed the bulls' worst fears.

But as usual, bears might have gotten a bit ahead of themselves as today's action seems to suggest.

Either way, the indecision and confusion in the markets is resulting in elevated options premiums -- which is what we can expect. As options players, this puts us in the position of wanting to look for opportunities to take the other side of this fear by getting short these elevated premiums.

Scanning my list of my liquid ETFs, I've found a great candidate to sell premium in.

Is risk back on?

The price action in the broader stock market during the second half of last week and continuing into this morning suggests this is a strong possibility. Meanwhile, the action in the dollar and metals space offers a sneaky way to play this shift.

Sometimes, we play 3D chess to look for opportunities in one place when everyone else is distracted by the headline-grabbing moves.

This is the video recording of September 24th 2021 Weekly Jam Session with Sean McLaughlin.

The ASC team did their monthly conference call this week, where they rip though a million charts and highlight the things we need to pay attention to -- the trends, the divergences, and particular setups in stocks that we like.

The blizzard of information they throw at us can be overwhelming at times. This is why you come to me to cull through it all and find my favorite setups that can be played with options.

Today's pick comes out of that call and its focused on the small business side of things.