 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset Podcast. We have a special episode today with all three founders of Option Omega. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, welcome back guys. I've been looking forward to this episode. I have all three founders of Option Omega with me here. And the idea here for me that I want to cover, and this could go a lot of different ways, but I want to jump into kind of the origin of Option Omega. This isn't going to be something where we're going to be talking about a lot of feature requests. I know these guys get bombarded with those on a daily basis, so we'll leave that for the Discord. But I really want to jump into kind of the origin of Option Omega, how it came to be what it is today, maybe a little bit about what's next with Option Omega, and I want to jump into a little bit about each of your back stories of how you got started with your trading journey and all of that good stuff. So to start with, we've got Rusty, we've got Matt, and we've got Troy. I've done a couple of joint webinars for our community with Troy, so I kind of have interacted with him the most. I've done some interaction with Matt just via chat in our Discord, and I've had very little interaction with Rusty, so look forward to hearing more about Rusty and his journey. So with that, let's start with the story of Option Omega. How did this whole thing come about? And any of you can jump in. Go ahead. I think Rusty is the perfect starter for that. So a lot of good things are going through pain and suffering, I feel like, and Option Omega is no different. The genesis of that would be Troy and I were trading options at the time. I guess we'll talk about that later. But there was a couple of trades that we had back-tested on a different product, and they did exceedingly well. These were extremely short-term trades, like too good to be true well. And so we traded them for a bit, and they did really well, until they did not, and then we had some pretty massive drawdowns. And we looked like, well, this is completely out of bounds, and the back-tested isn't that, and we kept poking and digging, and I can remember who found it, and we were like, wait a minute, this back-tester only has end-of-day data, and when you're doing one DTE option strategies, end-of-day data only is probably not good enough. It's going to hide some pretty massive drawdowns overnight, things like that. And so after we finished licking our wounds, we started talking like, surely we can just develop something for ourselves that can vet these kind of strategies in the future and hopefully save us a boatload of money. And so at the very beginning, it really was just a pet project between Troy and I, both being developers, where we downloaded the data and started messing around with it and iterating on it. It was like a little command-line utility at first, right? It was rarely, there was no front-end, there was nothing. And so sure enough, I ran that strategy. It was like a, I think it was like a 35 Delta, one DTE overnight condor, or something with like no stop-ball, or something ridiculous, right? It just, it just, it was terrible at the time. Anyway, and so sure enough, I ran it through this little program, and I was like, oh yeah, there's the drawdowns. There are the losses that we didn't see in the end of day-only data back-tester. And so that was sort of the beginning of Option Omega. And Rusty, not to cut you off, but on that topic of getting the data, I mean, you guys have multiple sources of data. Do you get it from an exchange, or where does this one-minute data feed come from? So we have multiple sources for the different components. The options component comes from an Oprah data vendor, right? So, I mean, Oprah is really the one that does all the data for everybody, which is pretty crazy when you think about that single source. So that's who we get our data from. And we've poked around, we've looked at different providers that are on that Oprah vendor list, and they're all pretty similar on this one. Cool. Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. No, you're good. No, no. So all that said, I think we just started thinking to ourselves, man, I think people might like this software. Like if we actually made it into a SaaS product, that people could just quickly and easily use. And that's where kind of Matt came in the picture. I mean, it's not the exact timeline, but his background being in business, and he and I going back to our college days, three of us started talking about formative business and being the software out there and seeing what kind of interest there was. Because we honestly had no idea, right? You just never know. So you sort of take a leap of faith and put the thing out there and if it succeeds, great. If it doesn't, onto the next thing. So that was the beginning of it. Cool. And so you guys just started kind of doing your own backtesting. And so what was the first point where you actually rolled it out for others to use? We had worked on it for a while and it coincided with the company that Rusty and I were working for. There was an acquisition and it got bought out. And so it was one of those fortuitous times in life where we're kind of sitting here saying, you know, Rusty and I really value working together. Devs, we developed a really deep friendship. So Dev work was a really joyful time together and all those things and we really wanted to keep going. And so rather than just try to go get another job, we said, well, let's just take a stab at this and it coincided right around the time. You guys have to correct me. I can't remember all the dates at this point, but basically like 2021, I think we really got pretty serious about it and started talking through it and testing it internally. And we launched officially in March of 2022 and that's where Matt is a genius. That's the joy of like working with these guys is I'm by far the dumbest of the three and that's precisely like where I want to be in my roles. I would love to be the dumbest of them. You're the face guy though. But I'm the face guy and that's a double whammy for them because certainly not the prettiest face either. So I am, but Matt was great because Matt was able to come in and he had run a business, he's a businessman. And so he can talk more about that, but he just had a wealth of experience that Rusty and I did not have being kind of developers. And so he was able to help us, particularly in that like last half of 2021 and then the beginning of 2022 with launch, say, all right, what does it mean to actually own a SaaS business and go from there? So Matt, tell us about that. So you hook up with these two computer nerds that think they've got something cool and you say, oh yeah, we may have a business idea here. How does that go? Yeah, so I had a history with Rusty that goes back 20 years. We went to college together. So I've been in touch with Rusty. We're roommates. I mean, our families have been close for two decades now. And yeah, it was 2021. I came down and met Troy and the more, I'm the only non-developer. So they're both devs. And so the more they worked on it, it's like guys, this is if we find value in this, other people are going to find value in it as well. And I had a background in options, but nothing like we do in options Omega. I had started trading full-time basically in 2020, like the best slash worst time ever to start trading full-time, January of 2020. So like two months before COVID, I started trading full-time and I had quit a previous job and put a little bit of money aside. And I was like, I'm just going to use this set bucket and see if I can make a go, which I think is how a lot of people kind of do it. And I kept it separate from retirement. There were yolos involved, but no risky yolos. They were managed yolos, right? And so I saw the power of options super early in COVID at the time with spy puts. And I remember, I can remember I had, Boeing was in like the 300s. And I don't know what Boeing's at today, but it got down around 100, right? And I remember I had like 310 Boeing puts. And I remember I did the math and I was like, man, if I had moved the strike back like two months on those puts, that would have been a significant, you know, that would have been 100x options play. So I've been playing with options for a couple years, but the style of trading that is really, really helpful for back testing, which is doing index options, I'm actually newer than both the guys at. So I, some of the more advanced trade setups and styles, I'm still getting my, my feet wet on iron ducks and, you know, some of the more advanced strategies, I'm still learning, which is awesome. And it's just been a great, it's been a great ride. I think one of the really kind of interesting big stories going on is that as a retail person who's not an institution, we have access to great tools now. And tools that just, if you talk to people who have been trading 10 or 15 years ago, they just, they would have loved to have access to the things we have now. Starting with, you know, brokers that you can trade on your phone and trade after hours in bed and, you know, all these things, but the visualization, the visualization, the testing, and some of these other kind of peripheral things really, really have helped empower just normal people who understand kind of how powerful options can be if you, if you learn it. So, yeah. And I, I agree, you know, and, you know, not only the technology, but the commissions are reduced now. You know, it always makes me laugh when, when people complain about a 50 cent per contract commission when, you know, just not too long ago, it was a couple bucks per contract. And, you know, it's, you know, so the things have changed in technology. And I mean, I've looked at a variety of institutional type trading platforms. And to be honest, the retail space has better technology in a lot of cases and more, you know, you can be more nimble. You have a lot more tools, a lot more access to things. And, and so, yeah, I agree 100%. That's a, it's, it's a pretty amazing time to be a trader these days. So what I want to do now is, so anything else, anybody else wants to add about Option Omega and kind of the, the start of jumping in? I'll give you a shout out. We were just talking about this today. Going down to Knoxville where we were resting on our arm. We had a little business retreat slash meeting. And so we, we were talking about just some stuff and I was reminded, I think Rusty reminded me, at the office, I kind of jumped into options first via a weird route. It was like, they seem to live, but like, I would, on the whiteboard, we would talk options, you know, during lunch break, we would get on the board and just start doing stuff. But I remember to this day, because every option trader has to learn patience and it's an ongoing thing and discipline and all of those things with options trading. But you, and I've said this before, you are an OOG in the space. And so I subscribed to your classes and you really taught me a ton about options. And I remember you had an, I'll never forget it. You had a McDonald's call, long call spread, like just on McDonald's. I had never traded McDonald's. And that sucker just said, it was like a 60 day option or something great spread. And it just sat there and it didn't do anything. And I did all the things that all the retail traders do where I was just like, they don't know, he doesn't know this one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, sure enough, like 20, 30 days in, it just like banked. And I remember it like, oh, this is my discipline thing. Because even to this day, I don't know if I would have done it. So just shout out to like, you were very good just to do it always, but discipline, patience, that's options. That's cool. Well, I appreciate that. That's a, it's cool to see, you know, we, so navigation trading started in 2016. And it's just, it's so cool to see the cycle now of people, you know, maybe who are just starting trading when we first started and they, you know, took some of our courses and then they, you know, had the shiny object syndrome and wandered off and got all kinds of emails about thousands of percent returns. And then now they've made their way back because they understand that we, the way that we teach and, you know, actually provide realistic teaching about how to trade. So this is not a infomercial for you, but it might as well be. I mean, that's the other thing that we really appreciate about you is that you're very open about your monthly, yes, like trades and that, I mean, especially now working with educators all the time. That's so rare and it's so refreshing to see just someone who just says, hey, we lost on this trade. Oh, we lost three times in a row on this trade, you know, but still showing the P&L and obviously like people make their choices because it's like, well, you know what you're doing. You're consistent. You're all the things that a good trader should be. And so again, just shout out to navigation because they're just very, you guys are very upfront with everything. I appreciate that. And that kind of comes from the pain that, you know, kind of like you guys talked about, you know, you always find something of value through a pain. And for me, it was learning from all these educators who were just full of it. They just didn't show you what was really going on. And so you had these unrealist expectations. And so when I started navigation trading, that was my entire goal was like, I'm going to do it the anti-way of the industry. Yes, indeed. I appreciate that. Well, to that point about people being full of it, there was actually another impetus for the software. We wanted to create something because we knew there was a lot of bad signals out there and bad signal services and just a lot of sketchy people, a lot of sharks out there in the water. And so we wanted to create a tool where someone could say, okay, let's see if this is legit. Right, let's go back test it. They've been releasing a signal for the last, you know, five years where you can test that, right, on sdx or spy or the indices or whatever. And see if this person's actually making the returns they say they would make, you know, if you're going to pay and sign up for their services, you can go back and look at some of the trades that they're doing. And to me, that was a big motivation, you know, because, yeah, I've done that. I've gone down that route of someone comes and they have a newsletter and it's too good to be true and you're like, oh, but the sound's legit. They're good at talking. And so, yeah, I think it's nice to give people the tools to then basically check the BS, so to speak. So Rusty, go a little deeper into your trading history. So when did you start first trading and then when did you first get into options? I think it was a little bit after Troy. What's funny is I actually, so I have been reading, I seem to have quite a bit for years since essentially the crash of 2008, right, the original bubble crash. And so, but I was reading more like a philosophical level, on markets and different things. And then when I started deadlifting because of him anyway, that's a whole, whole nother story. But then Troy got into the options part of he's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. This guy's talking about tail hedging and this stuff. So Troy was really interested. And he and I are pretty conferient people. If that's not clear by now. And so we were like, well, what's a way if everyone, if VIX is 12, what's, you know, what's a good way to hedge against that? Well, I think Troy bought VXX and you were doing a couple other things and an SPX put, cheap SPX puts and different things. And so he did it first and I was kind of watching. I don't know if we sat there and you had a position go like, I don't know, 60X, 100X with during the, with all McGuiden of, what was it? February 2018. And I'll never forget like just staring at your computer and I was like that, that was how much of a position and now it's what? It's like mad. It's kind of a terrible way to get an option. But you see the allure, you see the asymmetry, right? Which goes back to kind of the, to Webb's thing. And so that kind of hooked me first was finding a way to hedge my own long positions in my various investment accounts. And so that was my initial interest. And then I would say more in 2020, 2021 is when we started looking at how to do it for income. How to do like repeatable, you know, SPX trading, right? With dependable, repeatable trades with high discipline instead of these once every three year, you know, asymmetrical bets. And so that's, that's sort of the path that I took. And that's what started the companies that we were, we were doing some of those income option trades and they're terrible. So I was tired of losing money to bad strategies. And where was your, where did your learning case take place? Were you watching tasty trade? Did you have somebody else you were kind of following or what was your, how did you? I took some of your classes. I took classes from Dan Sheridan. Shout out to Dan Sheridan. Also a very honest, forthright person. Doesn't get enough respect. He's amazing. And then tasty work stuff as well. Like you're saying, watch the videos. They have a lot of good documentation out there. So respect for them as well. I think those are the big three now. So what was your, what was your first, do you, do you have a memory of like a turning point in your trading or, you know, just kind of clicked. You had that aha light bulb moment. Yeah. So it was totally like a having the right mindset thing. Right. So there's a term and software development without getting too geeky and putting everyone to sleep instantly where the industry pivoted before software was hosted on these very bespoke computers and servers and people treated them like pets, right? You didn't want them to ever crash and you had to manage all the widow's updates. Now, like option omega and most cloud based services, it's on a whole fleet of servers out in the cloud. And if a server goes down or dies, another one pops up instantly. And so the term is at all not pets. So apologies to any vegans in the audience. But the whole point is that like, you know, how get sick, you put it down and you eat it and you don't, you're not, they're not your pets. You're not naming them. And so the same thing applies to trading, I think, right? So you're putting the trades on every day and multiple trades, hopefully at a variety of positions. You get a sick trade. It goes against you. Then you just put, you know, you just get rid of it. It's not your pet. You don't need to name it. You're not going to get out of shape. It goes down and then you put the next trade on, right? It's a herd of trades that you're putting on and they're not your little babies and you shouldn't be too attached to them. So that was a big turning point for me in my trading. What about, what about the flip side of that? What was a, what was a big blunder? What was a big mistake that you learned a lot from and you don't have to give a dollar amount or anything like that. But in a specific trade that comes to mind. Yeah. So at one point I was doing some pretty low delta. Zero DTE credit spreads, right? So for anyone who hates getting gamma, this is a story for you. So it's like the end of day and you just watch it approaching your short strike all day. And you know, you have the mental, like I didn't actually have the stops. I had like emergency stops, but I had my own stops in my head that I would do and then you talk yourself out of it. Like it'll mean revert like this level. This is like, there's market make a game. There's like all these reasons you have, right? This price action, it's going to revert. So you just talk yourself out of, out of that stop. And then it keeps going. They're like, well, you just double down on it. Like, well, definitely. This is ridiculous. Like the market never does this. And then next thing you know, you're at like a just a worse loss of your life because you had an outside position and you were selling, you know, like seven delta call credit spreads. And so the end of the day at 345 gamma is very cruel. I'll just say that. So then you're trying to get out of this position. That's really gone against you in the, and it's very spreading and it's just not fun for anybody. And then I just remember sitting out on my patty on this happening. I could clearly remember like even like the type of way it was like hot and I was sweaty. It was like everything was going against that day. And I was so bent out of shape at the end of it, but only at myself because I knew. I knew that I had the right system in place, but I chose to ignore it and chose to talk myself out of it. So that was that was probably one of my biggest blunders. It was, it was a bad day. And so today what are your favorite strategies? Are you big calendarized trade guys, zero DTE, longer duration? What's your what's kind of your bread and butter? I since I hate gamma or getting gamma, I should say. I enjoy calendars of all sorts, double calendar, single calendars. I love them. They're a short term, long term, middle term calendars that work. And so that's pretty, I trade probably 90% calendars these days. I just love them. They are probably the, I think the most advanced trade out there because of the way that those different X-rays work. Having to know like the term structure of whatever underlying your trading, it's really tough to do. And I certainly have not mastered it, but I love the challenge of getting better and better at that because it's, but I think spreads are easy, right? Selling a credit spread is pretty straightforward, right? If it's into the money, how the money, you know, you're going to make the money or lose the money, but with a calendar, there are times you lose money. You're like, I have no idea why. I mean, and you like that. Yeah. I like the challenge of it. It's a whole brain kind of challenge. It's very creative. And so, um, yeah, I'm a calendar guy. And so how many on average, how many positions do you have on at any given time, typically? Uh, probably between five to 10 active calendars at any time, double calendars mostly. Yeah. Cool. Good stuff. I love it. It's, it's, it's, it's just, it's, I love hearing, uh, people's kind of trading journey where they came from, where they're at now, what they like to focus on, what they gravitate to. Cause it's just, it's, it's so, it's like a snowflake, right? Nobody knows the same. Everybody's just a little bit different. It's true. Matt, what about you? Tell us a little bit about your trading journey. Yeah. So I mean, my background, Troy always asks everybody when we have people on our, uh, podcast, he always, or his cigar lounge, he always asks people what their favorite Greek is. And my favorite Greek has to be Delta because my trading journey really, you know, I started right before COVID. And made a bunch of money on puts because I was actually on, um, read it quite a bit then. And there was a time, this in my opinion is not true today, where wall street bets actually had really good content before it kind of exploded into what it is today, which is basically unusable. And there were like, I, I have texts talking to people in January of 2020 about COVID. Like, hey, this might, this might actually be something and whatnot. And I had bought just a couple spy puts because I was brand new at trading. I didn't even know what spx was. And I saw those spy puts go parabolic, you know, and, um, I ended up all the money I made on those puts. I ended up losing because I bought more puts. So I learned about ball crush. And I started learning about Greeks the hard way. Um, the other thing I did in 2020 that really sealed the deal for me with options is in the end of the month in March, 2020, I found 20 blue chip companies, all different sectors, McDonald's steel dynamics, Pfizer, like just a random assortment companies. And I bought the longest leap I could buy on every single one of them. An even amount. Put leaps. Call leaps calls. Okay. So I had, I had hedged myself inadvertently because I had all these spy puts and I remember I lost a significant amount of money spy to 12 puts. Um, and you know, spx got down, I don't know, 2300 Maybe I don't remember exactly it never got down to my Puts. But those calls went, some of them went six, seven X because I had bought leaps. I had bought some of them were 20, 21, some of them were 2022 leaps. And so I saw in kind of in real time that unfortunately Mr. Market is the best way to learn a lot of these Lessons. So in 2020 I learned some bad lessons and I also Learned some good lessons. And up until we started optional mega and I got super Heavy into index testing. I did mostly fundamental trading. So I was involved in me main mainy a little bit with GameStop and did pretty well on GameStop. Not life changing money, but nice dinner money like it Was good. So, um, and then during the bull market of 2021 I was Just long a bunch of undervalued companies and i Saw like i mean i bought leaps on new core when it was $55 and it's over 150, right? You know, i don't have them anymore, but i think it's Over 150 now. I mean, and so you can see how powerful options are. Now to rusty's point, i learned about income from Options instead of buying a position, waiting a long time Or yoloing a zero d t and waiting a short time. Backtesting really has helped me personally understand these Trade setups and at the end of the day, one of the Lessons i feel like is the market is going to Disappoint you on a short term basis. Like whatever you think you can have you can think About the news you can think about gamma levels You're going to be right some of the time you're going to be Wrong some of the time and that's for me that's where Backtesting has been valuable because i'm trying to get less And less emotional about the positions which is hard. It's hard for me because i come from a background of being Like hey, i'm going to and i still i still do a lot of Single stock trading totally separate from options trading. I look at these companies feel like they're undervalued Listen to the calls read the filings you get really Invested in a single company that's a totally different as Almost not useful when you're trying to trade an option on qqq Or an spx credit spread or whatever and it's kind of a Different mindset and that's been something i've been really Learning lately is the kind of trading that a lot of retail Traders are gravitating towards with trading these very Mechanical strategies that they understand very well that's a That's a completely different style of thinking about companies And what their future is and what nvidia is going to do or What these you know minority report apple pro goggles or Whatever impact that's going to have on the p e that's a Totally different thing so like rusty was saying he doesn't Name his pets sounds like you name your pets i'm trying Not to i'm trying not to i mean i'm still long my biggest Gainer for the year was an international oil company that Nobody in the us trades and the companies for x in the last Six months and i had the longest leaps i could have on and i'm Out of it now but i mean those kind of positions it's hard Not to get attached it's hard not to get attached when you See new core go from $50 to $130 you know like it's tough Versus when you're trading an s p x calendar and you have a Back test that says okay once my call once my short call gets Violated or once my call side gets violated by ten points i Need to close it and then you don't close it and then it Gets violated by 15 points and then 20 points and then 30 Points and then you close it for a lot less money That's mr market teaching a lesson and i'm i'm still learning Lessons every day steve so what what percentage of your trading Is is kind of that longer duration leaps individual stocks Versus short duration index option trading i think about Them in totally separate buckets so i have a bucket for I have a spreadsheet person i have a spreadsheet that Has all my individual trades and i have a totally separate Tab that is my s p x trading and most of my all pretty much all Of my back tested trades most of them i do on s p x i will Occasionally do a q q q or a spy if i want to test something But it's nearly all s p x so i just have them in totally Separate buckets so last year my s p x trading carried Everything else so this year it's much more even so it's Been a it's been a you know i've heard a lot of people say this Has been a very challenging environment to trade for s p x Because it seems like it sometimes in the beginning part Of the year the vix was maybe a little overpriced and then You look at where the vix is now or 14 15 16 vix and Every week it seems like we have a day that has a percent Of move or you know maybe even a little more and it's like Man this is tricky so some of those positions i'm not a big Condor person dealt as my dealt as my favorite greek thanks to Gme gamma is my least favorite greek thanks to zero day Condors it's it's tough out there you know and some of These some of the risk reward on these trades are are Tough when you look at the inner day moves so it's it's Send everybody back to the back testing table so this I think yeah as as of this recording which is Tuesday June 6th i was looking at vix on our live stream towards The end of the day and it came down to 14 the 14 Handle looking back on the charts last time that happened Was pre covid in 20 february 2020 i know and that That seems kind of wild considering some of the I'm not a macro expert this is not financial advice Just some guy but you look at the world the geopolitical Situation the financial situation and feels a little Bit low you know feels feels like maybe vix is a little Lower than it could be and then you look at some of these Inner day moves and if you have positions on that get Blown out when you have these candles from nowhere come Out or a trend day that just keeps going it's it's Tough so on your shorter shorter term trades are you You're still primarily more of a delta guy in other words You're being more directional like credit spreads or i do Some credit spreads delta is my favorite greek but i trade Mostly calendars as well so right now i've got i can tell You i've got seven calendars on and then some just some Credit spreads as well so and i you know i i trade Short term i trade short term trades that i hold Overnight so there's nights when i try not to check the Phone and look at what futures are doing because i've got you Know i've got trading at scale and that's part of the game Is you know managing your risk and managing how much you Have on and some of these big moves it's it's you know i Don't want to get too deep into calendars but i think About them i've been taught to think of them as a ten a Double calendar so you've got two poles and a calendar will Win every time if you can get the cold the poles in the right Spot so it's how wide how narrow and and of course that's That's the whole that's the whole trick right there right Very cool Troy McNeil yes sir you're on the you're on The hot hot seat so i didn't realize this until we were Doing a joint webinar but you're a you're a pastor of a Church is that correct i am yeah yeah i've passed For about ten years eleven years actually so that's you Know you don't mean it's too many actually you know what What's funny is the the pastor of the church that i go to Loves trading that's we've we've had we've had sessions Together where he's you know we sit down and and He's trying to learn some of the navigation trading and he's Probably his favorite congregant so it's just it's Interesting i never would have thought the the pastor and the Trading thing would have mixed but that's awesome yeah No that's that's what's funny that dan shared and go Star church so it's a similar situation where i have to Mentally go into breakfast saying this is not a trading Session but he loves trading so inevitably we talk trading That's awesome so i i i've heard a little bit about Your your background obviously and so some of our Community has as well but tell us a little bit more about Your kind of trading journey and when did you actually start Trading options yeah no i think i i started trading Around twenty eighteen maybe twenty seven to late twenty Seventeen and i started almost exclusively with the Idea of tel hedging and the worst thing happened to me And i was like bomb again was like one of my first trades And so that worked out very well for me and then i went Down the route of saying options are easy so you're Asking them like their worst trade and their favorite Trade i'm trying to like i have a list of fifty worse Trades that you know i keep on my backyard i went Through the you know i went through the journey like I've traded everything i've traded any type of option That you can trade i've traded it and that's more it's to You know the good side of that would be because i like to Learn and i like to try new things and i like to just Breath of knowledge is important to me in this industry And so there's that but then also i'm a degenerate Gameboy i mean i really am so i just it's addicting And i love the idea of just trading in general and so I've gone through the full gambit of stuff and it's part Around twenty nineteen twenty eighteen twenty nineteen I started to shift into income trading and i i too Love calendars like i'm kind of all in on calendars I thought calendars give you so many so many More ways to make money than just a spread or Directional spread and so i was trying to think Of someone asked me what my favorite Greek would be Probably be vega but you know gamma shortly behind And so i've done a lot of calendars last year Was like calendar mania we just did calendars all the time But i've really just i've just done a lot of dumb Things and smart things to the years and tried it all And how active are you how many positions Do you typically have on at any given time We were just talking about this i mean when i say I get addicted to trading one of the things last year And coinciding was we started this business and i would Just sit in front of my screen just eighteen hours a day I mean it was just ridiculous like the kids go to bed i would Trade more you know i would trade futures i would do all of it And this year i kind of had during the years actually My wife and i went on vacation towards the end of last year And sat there and had some time to think and i was like Vicks was already in december starting to make its descent A little bit and i think i'm perhaps the most Contrary and which isn't good these other two guys But i have just i think i maybe were trading options A little bit before them where i think at least with Income resty mat you can correct me if i'm wrong like I don't think you guys have traded a fourteen fix environment You might have i don't remember Not with this kind of trades that we're doing today Yeah so i've traded when vicks is eleven before And so going into this year i just i really Enjoyed the macro trading stuff and i've realized that Just my personality i really income trading While i love it it's just not my favorite i get anxious About it i spend too much time on it and things like that So i've started shifting the last couple of months to really Just going back to kind of my first love which is teleaging And so i'm kind of right now just sitting here and Working on option to make it a lot thinking through trades Which is fun because it's still i get to scratch my itch Of thinking through trading you know on income stuff Without necessarily playing right now and so if we get Down to like a twelve vicks i'll probably start loading The old gun up a little bit more but for right now i'm Kind of just enjoying enjoying watching the slow descent From twenty to i think it's thirteen ninety five At close so yeah vicks to me is i've kind of Learned to just having gone through this this you Know seventeen to twenty twenty seventeen to twenty twenty Like i'm just not interested as much in playing The game at this point partly just because i don't have to And so i just i'm back to like the research phase of my life If that makes sense very cool well real quick too i And one thing i wanted to hit on with with each of you Before we until we can do kind of a little bit of a rapid fire Roundtable here but Troy what what what are some of your Favorite things to do outside of trading well pasturing Takes up a lot of my time which i'm thankful for We had a meet we met again like till like five or six Eastern yesterday and this morning we had breakfast And i was like what you guys what you do last night And i had to go out like forty five minutes to meet with A couple of just that's just kind of what i do at night Is i meet with a lot of people and so i enjoy it i love it It's an honor to do it but that keeps me pretty busy And then i have two children that are autistic So a lot of my world revolves around my house And taking my son driving a lot he loves driving So we spend a lot of time in kitchen for Tennessee Very cool what about you Rusty what do you do Outside of trading and programming So i love to do anything that doesn't involve a computer I enjoy going for hikes walks Troy and i have been fly fishing he also likes to fly Fish he didn't say that but here in East Tennessee There's a lot of beautiful places to fly fish I love reading books I'm a huge book nerd love history So those are my big stitches and then of course Spending time with my family i have a couple teenage kids now Married so i play a lot of board games with the kids And card games again anything off the computer that i can do Is just kind of nice to balance that out because By the way starting on the screen all day gets a little old after twenty something years Sure what about you Matt what passions do you have Outside of trading and programming and business Two kids as well so that's a lot of the time there and then I play guitar a little bit when i have time How old are your kids i have a twelve and a seven So they're both boys both I've been muting myself whenever i'm not talking because they're getting ready To go swimming and it sounds like a herd of elephants downstairs And there's only two of them so between them I just play a little music and try to read when i have Time away from option omega or trading What do you do Steve i'm interested in You do stuff all the time with navigation So what do you do for fun So i've got two boys as well They're age thirteen and eleven And i coached my thirteen year old baseball team So from january first through the middle of july It is baseball baseball baseball every weekend there's a tournament We've got practice three days a week on top of that And so i really don't have time for much else other than that This year was the first year that i was kind of like Man do i want to do this again but he's got one more year after this And then he's off to high school so i gotta finish it I think i'd regret it if i bailed at this point That pretty much consumes my life and then outside of that We live on a house that sits on a property Of almost seventy acres and so we've got chickens And billers and ponds and the fish in them So we like to hang out and just do stuff around the house When we have a minute of free time Is that arrow head stadium behind you on the wall That's the home of the chiefs, the super bowl Kansas City chiefs Where's the best barbecue joint in Kansas City Best barbecue joint in Kansas City in my humble opinion It's on this in Kansas City if you can imagine but there's one called Q39 That was what i was looking for I've heard this from other people so haha Which is pretty amazing because they are a fairly new barbecue place in Kansas City And when they popped up i was like really another barbecue place In Kansas City come on but they quickly became my favorite Gates and Arthur Bryant are kind of the old school Famous ones, jack stack is a big one but yeah Q39 has got my nod Yeah, you guys are in Kansas City My treat Q39 I'm really hungry now I want to end it with one last thing related to option Omega, what's coming with option omega I don't want to make this a feature request kind of a conversation Like i said you get bombarded with those but anything that you want to share With the community or the listeners about where you see option omega going In the near future and maybe in the distant future as well Well we just came out with apple and tesla which for us Was a big move going into equities but Feel good about that so that gives us a lot of work To do with people who have never traded indexes but they have Traded liquid stocks and so that will keep us busy For a while of just teaching and educating and getting people like you Who trade these stocks involved in that and so That's definitely going to keep us busy but then there's always things On the road map we get asked a lot about a lot of different things All the time so resty can speak to that as he's A chief developer yeah i think i mean there's a lot Of popularity right now around zero dte credit spreads obviously We all know that and so just anything we can continue to do To support that so looking at things like intraminet stops Because right now our resolution is one minute data which is pretty dang good But you could certainly get even better with stops Usually people don't want intraminet profit targets because The price will bounce all over the place it doesn't mean you actually get filled right Limitation about testing something a simulation is not a live market But people do want like intraminet stops they want Maybe more like tronched entries a lot of people are doing like mechanical Tronched entries on things and so we're definitely looking at like VWAP is a signal a lot of people use for trading Difficult because spx doesn't have volume right and it's a volume based indicator Then you have to try to tie it to something whether that's CFD's Or ES or something and then anyway that one's a little bit tricky Like toss doesn't support it for example or taste it works out of the box You can't see a spx VWAP on their charting And so but we want to try to do as many of those Intra day and zero day really short term Strategy support features as we can like we just did Intra day EMAs right different like crossovers and things like that and that's been A hit so trade re-entering Throughout the day you know if you get stopped out put it on again after five minutes things like that so We'll probably continue in that direction that's where most of the requests are Awesome anything else long term Or anything else you want to share about where option omega is going any Anything I mean we it's a huge industry and now we get all asked All the time about could we trade these tests on a bot Things like that and so we don't know what the future is going to hold but we're paying attention to that And talking about it and all those things so botting is different Than back testing so that'd be something that would be new to us But it's an exciting time in the options market like you said earlier Retail is kind of at the forefront of all these tools right now And so we definitely want to be a part of that through the process And so we're trying to think through that as well What about have you all had any conversations with brokers Around just tying the option omega platform Into a broker so somebody could run a pack test say hey I like this And you know send it to like a trader or some type of broker Have you had those kind of conversations? If a broker wants to reach out to us and And do that we will spend the first month in Kansas City That's our promise to you we will just vacation in Kansas City afterwards We do think that that's probably we are probably heading in that direction Inevitably in some ways just because brokers we Think we provide a valuable service and I think brokers From what I've seen and the brief interactions I've had do as well And so we don't know what the future is going to hold with that but It's an exciting time and then brokers themselves are kind of consolidating In some ways you know I'm a sharp up to you And so who knows what it's going to look like but that's definitely to us It makes complete sense you know cool well guys it's been great I really appreciate your time I know our community at navigation Trading is gone you know pretty hog wild with the option omega Backtesting tool and so it's just been awesome to get to know you guys Get to understand kind of why why it is what it is and where you guys Came from I think that's pretty cool and will provide a lot of value And a lot of people will kind of help better understand Kind of where you guys are going and why it is what it is so that's good stuff So just so you know we appreciate you keep doing what you're doing We love everything about it we appreciate you Steve you guys have been Awesome great educator and you run a fantastic Service so it's an honor to get to partner with you this way Absolutely awesome thanks guys thank you Hope this was helpful look forward to seeing you in the next episode And as always feel free to check us out at community.navigationtrading.com We have a vibrant community of awesome traders always trying to help each other So we look forward to seeing you on the inside cheers