 Welcome to the Option Edge Condor Max Trading System, one of the most sophisticated systems to trade and manage iron condors. Iron condors are one of the most popular option strategies out there and for very good reasons which we'll get into. But they also have an ugly side and tackling this ugly side is what the Condor Max Trading System is all about. The Condor Max System is designed to produce a return of anywhere from 5 to 10% consistently on pretty much every iron condor you ever put on. But it's not a trade that you can put on and go to the beach for 30 days. So we'll look into what situations the Condor Max System can get into trouble and what we can expect to do in those situations. Let's get into the details so I can explain this proprietary trading system in much more detail. My name is Hari Swaminathan and I am the founder of OptionTiger.com, a cutting edge option trading and education company based in the Washington DC area. I have a bachelor's degree in engineering from India and an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York City. What you're watching now is part one. Part two will be a live session on Sundays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. In this live webinar you'll get an opportunity to ask all your questions but please be sure to watch this video completely so you'll be fully prepared with your questions on Sunday. A brief background about me and OptionTiger, I've been an options trader for over seven years now and just like many of you, I've learned options from a few different programs but mostly through making tough mistakes. All 47 options courses on OptionTiger are filled with deep insights on pitfalls from options trading and where things can go wrong. It's a very practical approach but with no compromise on the fundamental options concepts. OptionTiger is the home of proprietary strategies that gives every options trader a serious edge in every trade. The income max spreads and straddles system also gives every trader a powerful edge and is ideally suited for smaller accounts of $25,000 or less. Having an edge on every trade is critical and this is particularly important in the options market and there's a specific reason for this. The options market is very different from the stock market. In the stock market traders buy and sell against each other for the most part and only in rare circumstances where a market maker may step in trading is generally done in a peer-to-peer environment. In the options market every trade is done with a market maker on the other side. This is no different from walking into a casino and playing any of the games in the casino. We play against the house and the casino is the counterparty to our games. When we enter a trade in the options market it's no different. We trade against the market maker and they are the counterparty to all our trades. Let's first examine the facts around their business models. In both cases the market makers and the casinos it's important to understand that they create the rules of the game. Casinos create the rules for all the games like blackjack and roulette and market makers set the bid ask prices and they have considerable flexibility in setting option prices. The other critical element of their business model is that both parties take risk in their transactions and because they take risk they are legally allowed to have an edge in their business. With their ability to control the bid ask spread and option prices market makers are able to get a pretty serious edge on every trade. Although we are unable to see the profits of the market makers directly we can all see how well the casinos do under this model. Statistically in the long run both their business models are bulletproof. We traders may have a blockbuster day in the options market or we may have a blockbuster day in the casinos but in the long run we give this edge away little by little to the market maker. Perhaps now it may be better appreciated why even expert option traders may find themselves winning four out of five trades but they lose on the fifth and when you lose on the fifth you tend to give up what you made on the other four. This is not magic but it's simply the market makers long run statistical edge finding its way into reality and this should also not be surprising because if they did not have this edge why would they be a market maker? Why would the casinos or the market makers take risk being the counterparty if the tables were not tilted towards their side by design? No one would do that. The other way to think about the market maker is to consider what we traders do and what they do on a daily basis. We analyze and carefully construct every trade before we execute them. On the other hand the market maker has a few seconds at most to accept or reject our orders. If we believe we are getting into well thought out winning trades then this means the counterparty is getting into a bad trade. So let's think about this fact some more. Market makers are taking crappy trades all day from millions of traders but they still win and how could this be? It's because their business model is so bullet proof that they can sit and take bad trades all day and still come out ahead. We don't need any more proof and we don't need any more explanations to realize they have a serious edge. And this is precisely why we options traders need an edge and we need a serious edge at that to overcome the strengths of the market makers. And this is not easy. We may go to casinos for entertainment value but we enter the options markets for serious business and as if the bid ask spreads and the ability to set option prices weren't enough we traders also have transaction costs which can have a significant impact on our performance. We also make mistakes. We sometimes panic and do the wrong things whereas market makers can afford to act like robots. Not only do they have deep pockets to withstand losses they have sophisticated risk management and auto management systems and of course they are all options experts themselves. With these setbacks the odds against traders really become terrible. So every trade is a bit like going to box with Mike Tyson and you can imagine the chances of winning in this kind of a setting. It's no wonder that they say that 90% of options traders lose over their lifetime and there's probably a lot of truth to this. The general daily trading approach for most traders goes something like this. We fish for good trades whether it's through technical analysis charting skills or any other approach. We take up a particular strategy for a trade and we try to manage this trade through decisions we make on the spot based on how the stock moves. Today we could be trading an iron condor on Google and tomorrow we could be trading a calendar on Apple and how do we approach adjustments on an ad hoc basis. There's no system or there's no systematic approach to our trading style. This kind of trading plays right into the market makers edge and because we don't follow a system we tend to make mistakes and our adjustments could go wrong and so on and so forth. This is the surest way to lose money. If you don't have a system or a method to bring this edge seriously on our side we're going to lose money in the medium and long term and this aspect goes to the core of all the intellectual property of the option edge products. With every option edge system whether it's the condor max, the income max or any of our other products you'll have a 75-25 edge in your favor from the time you construct the base trade and the balance 25% is handled through a set of systematic adjustments and techniques all of which are part of the system itself. The key to success in the options markets is to trade with the system and this is the only way to overcome the serious edge that market makers have. Without this approach you may win a few trades here and there but what you really have to think of is consistency in the long run. If you're not performing consistently even if you're a fairly advanced options trader then these are the reasons why. The rules of the game are not designed for us traders to win consistently. We need more than just good options trading skills to be a consistent winner in the markets. We need a system and we need a systematic approach that can put a 75-25 edge on our side on each and every trade. Let's talk about the condor max trading system itself. The trade construct is unique and it gives that 75% edge in our favor from the time we start the trade. This trading system will work on stocks, ETFs and indices but we must avoid the one month prior to earnings. It's best to trade an ETF or the indices at this time. The trade is obviously non-directional and will profit from a move in either direction. The next three features are the most important for an iron condor and deals with the most problematic issues with the iron condor strategy itself. First of all the trade is flash crash proof and it's also capable of handling big moves and lastly it will not create big drawdowns. So let's think of the basic iron condor. It does not like big moves and you may see a drawdown of 50 to 60% on the margin of the trade if there was a huge move against either one of the short strike prices. If you have a $10,000 iron condor trade with a credit of $2,000 then a large move can result in a paper loss of up to $6,000 or $7,000. We all fall into the hopeless trap of hoping the stock turns around and this is how we end up taking a big loss. This in my opinion is the weakest point of the iron condor strategy itself and it's also the weakest point of us traders. The condomax trading system protects this critical aspect which turns most iron condors into losing trades. This is the core of the intellectual property in the condomax trading system and allows pretty much every iron condor trade you put on to be successful. The techniques that are part of the system is designed to not have a drawdown of more than 10 to 15% at any time. These techniques are simple and when we know ahead of time what we have to do we don't make mistakes. We also start to operate like robots just like the market makers and this is the only way to beat them at their game. When we don't have to think about what we should do we have a system and we can follow it successfully. I want to discuss the trade parameters and what you can expect to do in a typical trading cycle. This is a monthly income trade just like any iron condor trade so we'd expect to hold it for about a month. The trade setup itself will take about an hour to properly set up the base trade and all the risk parameters and the conditional orders. Once this is done you can expect to tweak the trade about one to two maybe three times a week. Many or most of these tweaks are small adjustment techniques but are very powerful and these techniques can be highly automated with the use of conditional orders. In fast moving markets we may need to step in at times. Major adjustments to the base structure are done only if needed and we limit that to two major adjustments in any given cycle. No trading system can be hundred percent perfect and if we find ourselves in a bad month you'll definitely have the opportunity to come out of the trade with either a small gain of maybe two or three percent or in the worst case scenario we take a scratch trade but the system itself is designed to make every iron condor trade pay at five to ten percent returns. Out of ten iron condor trades you should generally expect to produce in the range of five to ten percent on about seven trades and you should be able to produce at ten percent on at least one of them and between zero and five percent on one or two trades. Risk management is critical to limit the bad months especially the months that we are going to be dealing between zero and five percent and the system comes with all the techniques to protect every iron condor trade for either a no loss or a very small gain and these risk management techniques must be applied at all times and this is the key to the consistent success of the condor max system. Even if you can't monitor the markets you'll know exactly what to do in terms of risk management and almost all of these techniques can be highly automated. Once again all these techniques are part of the system so you don't have to go about thinking what you need to do and there's only four or five techniques you need to master and these techniques don't change they are the same month after month after month so once you learn to manage these trades in a robotic manner you have the recipe to make every iron condor pay. Now that's what I mean by trading with an edge. If you have any questions you can always email me at info at optiontiger.com or you can even call me at 301-760-7658. Please register for the free live webinar on Sundays simply fill out your name and email address on this page and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday. Thank you for watching this presentation and have a great day.