Our newest Rising Star is Skip N. Skip and his wife (high school sweethearts) have two children, eight grandchildren and live in the Atlanta area. Skip was a CPA with Arthur Andersen and was the CFO of a Real Estate and Development Company. His father had traded and he always knew he wanted to trade, both real estate and equities. Skip was successful in his first career and was able to retire early, doing so in 2005. He became involved in non-profits and was a board member. He also started learning about trading equities.
During the summer of 2008 the real estate market was already in huge trouble but the worst was yet to come for stocks. He called his broker and asked what the plan was. The broker’s idea was to stay in stocks and wait things out. Skip didn’t think that he knew how to trade but upon hearing his broker’s answer he didn’t think the broker had any serious plan either which went against Skip's motto of "plan your work, work your plan." He told his broker to go to cash.
He first learned about technical analysis and saw that it was easy to see in hindsight what he should have done but that it was far more difficult in the moment. He began active trading in 2010 and eventually began shorting Puts as a way of improving his cost basis. He then added selling Calls at his target area. He was selling Strangles before he ever heard of such a strategy. He realized that this was performing better than buying and holding stock.
He sought out more information and found an interview with Karen The Supertrader, Further investigation told him that the thinkorswim platform was the best to use. Since Tom and others at tastylive had created thinkorswim that gave tastylive even more credibility. Skip risked too much trading capital in 2014 and paid the price. Skip started trading the tastylive way in 2015. He wants to trade small and trade often to make sure his number of occurrences is high enough. He divided his account in half and left half in cash and traded half. The traded half was divided up into stock index products and uncorrelated underlyings. He produced a 42% return on the traded portion of his portfolio and is at about the same rate this year.
Skip is enjoying his retirement and is not constantly involved in trading. He believes that the buy and hold approach is actually more risky than the tastylive way. Skip believes you should manage your trading the same way you manage a business. When something goes wrong you learn from it and adjust. He is very happy that he took control of his finances and adopted tastylive’s methodology. He is convinced that many others can do the same thing.
Watch this segment of “Rising Stars” with Tom Sosnoff, Tony Battista and our Rising Star Skip N. to hear some of the details of his "incredibly inspirational" trading journey and how tastylive has helped him along the way.
This video and its content are provided solely by tastylive, Inc. (“tastylive”) and are for informational and educational purposes only. tastylive was previously known as tastytrade, Inc. (“tastytrade”). This video and its content were created prior to the legal name change of tastylive. As a result, this video may reference tastytrade, its prior legal name.