Maybe Karen the Supertrader was on to something: 1 Standard Dev isn't enough!

First, the AMZN trade that looked to be "risk 1 to make 1.41" turned out to be an end-of-day pricing anomaly that I didn't see this week. But I did put on a 6-day (since Good Friday is a market day off next week) 1 standard deviation Iron Condor on AMZN today anyway ...

I have been watching TastyTrade for several years ... you can just search YouTube for their conversations with "Karen the Supertrader."

One of her key strategies is going wider on credit spreads than 1 standard deviation. Based on what I've seen from my SPX trades over these first several, that's just what I need to do. I barely lost the one ending earlier today; the 1 standard deviation short strike was at 2590 ... but SPX closed at 2588.26. Not a total loss (since the spread was 5 dollars wide, but just a small L in the record.)

But clearly if I'd gone just 1 strike wider, this L becomes a W. And the VIX closed today at 24.78, making a spread with the short delta options at the .10 delta rather than .16 still return around 17% when held to expiration. And that should bring the win rate up to 90% at least; the Kelly Criterion run on those numbers suggests risking 31% of one's stake on such a trade.

I'm going into "production" next week with this .10 delta trade risking 10% of the accounts I'm running for the first 8 or 10 trades, then possibly move up to 1/2 Kelly after that ...

And as for SPX, so for AMZN and TSLA; I'm going to try them with .10 deltas too.

Here we go ....