Options Meet-Up Recap

Hey guys, I attended that options meet-up group on Wednesday. It's not something I will be attending again, however, it might be something we want to spearhead ourselves and start our own group. I was the first to arrive and the first to leave after about an hour. I was skeptical as to the motive of the group administrator. I wondered if maybe he was a broker or fund manager that was looking to recruit. I didn't get to talk to him that much. He was kind of unpersonable. It was surprising to me for someone putting together a social group how unsocial he was. He didn't look anybody in the eye, didn't try to monitor the meeting. There didn't seem to be a theme or purpose. He said that last week only one person showed up so he was taken back that there were 12 of us this time.

We started out by going around the table and introducing ourselves and give some information on our trading background and/or interests. There weren't any two of us that were alike. I htink this part scared him because he just learned about options two years ago. He passed out some packet of simulation trade ideas to talk about the risk/reward. Once he learned he wasn't the most experienced in the group he ran a disclaimer that said if anyone sees anything I did wrong to tell him because he's still kind of new to this. He definitely knows all the strategies and terminologies. One person was a broker who just started his own firm and he was there to recruit clients. This guy was a yahoo. His didn't even proofread his own business cards, if he did then he's a moron. There is a P.O. Box but no city or state listed. His phone number is listed twice and there was a grammatical error. You turn the card over and there is a web address where he got his "free business cards". Between the errors and acknowledging that you're too cheap to spend $20 for 1000 business cards I don't see this firm going anywhere.

One guy was holding himself out as a "trading coach/mentor" with a P.H.d., though he never said what his degree was in. I'm not sure what his background is with investments. I told him I sold naked puts occasionally and his eyes bulged out. He asked me if I knew how dangerous that could be. I said I only sold them if I actually had the cash to take possession of the stock so it was no more risky than selling an ITM CC. This got him excited and he asked for my business card, that's when I knew he probably didn't have that much experience with options. He hit me up in person before I left and with email the next day offering me 10% of any fees he makes from referring clients to him.

The group quickly broke up in to six groups of two people talking about whatever, so at that point I left. One of the guys was a Elliot Wave theorist who wouldn't stop talking about Nov. 22 being the day the market crashes because we're at the end of wave 5. One woman next to me told me she believed the five biggest bankers engineered the market crash so they could profit from it. There wasn't anybody who worked in the industry and other than myself and an older man who said he had been trading for 20 years, nobody had more than two or three years experience. So it was kind of a joke, perhaps the few people I didn't get to talk to had something interesting to offer. I don't know. Everybody seemed concerned with trying to predict what the market was going to do for the rest of the year.

In general I didn't see the potential to learn or benefit from idea sharing from anybody with more experience than I currently have, and I didn't learn anything in particular about options or investing, but from a social standpoint it was interesting to see people from different backgrounds and both sexes all want to be a part of the market. All had different opinions on how to go about it. And obviously that's what makes a market. It reminded me of the Texas hold em' phenomenon that swept the country or even world a few years back. There were so many people that just wanted to be a part of it that if you had an average skill level you could make money off the people who had none. Maybe the market is the same way. There will always be people like I met that are willing to lose money just to be a part of the game. Since the market is a zero sum game, that means for every dollar they lose someone else makes it.