So Are You Making Any Money?

[larry]

This is the bottom line, isn't it?

No long posts in this thread please, just the date you opened your Options Xpress account, the amount you initially funded it with and the date and current account value now. If you have closed you account put "Closed" instead of "Current" - see examples below. Then add no more than a couple of lines of comments.

You can give your full stories in another thread but here please lets just keep it to hard facts which anyone can scan through quickly.

Example.

Opened 9th February 2009 $50,000
Current 30th July 2009 $50,600
It's been an effort to hold onto my original capital. I have not achieved 3-6% monthly, as you can see.

or

Opened 9th February 2009 $50,000
Current 30th July 2009 $60,600
Doing great, pretty pleased so far!

or

Opened 9th February 2009 $50,000
Closed 30th July 2009 $40,600
No longer believe that this works. Disappointed would be an understatement!

[rupenshah]

Open 19th Nov 2008 $102000.87
Closed 5th June 2009 $102500
Disapointed beyond belief

[francisco]

Open 25th February 2009 $61,418
Current 2nd August 2009 $55,873
Mostly lost by selling calls and having to buy back at a higher price in a continuously up-moving market.

[Ian]

I started with $29,950 on 25th Feb
I now have $26,640 on 4th August.

I was consistently around $27,800 until last week when we were advised to take profits on stocks leaving just the puts. If the market does correct by a minimum of 7% I will be back in the black for the first time since starting! On the other hand if it continues to go up I will be down to about $24k.

The main problem was that the market went up quickly after we opened the positions at the start of the course and we were not told to manage them until we were paying way over the odds to buy calls back e.g $4 to buy a $1 call back.

[johnall]

Opened account Jan 09 $125,000
Finished mentoship july $126.500
Paid over $7000 to our friends at CFL
Numerous hours wasted taking it all in
Exchange rate gone against us
Dissapointed to say the least and keep it polite.

[rickplayer]

one of the first to start mentorship.
Started with $180,000
now $32,000.....
during crash rolled puts out & down etc, as advised, talking to A&M almost every day.
3 lots of mentorship money
2 years,
am I happy?

[smith]

ouch................ presumably all the mentorship fees have been repaid

[raj]

Started 4th Feb 09 - $109,920
Current -- $94,000

Only have long puts in account which expire shortly and was selling puts against these as stock got called away.

[demps2323]

started 14/7/08 - $50,000
added extra 9/10/08 - $55,786
total = $105,786

Closed Account 26/2/09 - $100,418.68

l did take 5% out once 6 month down the track but for this execise l have added that amount back in.

So to sum up l have lost a total of -$5,367.32 over the 6-7 months that l was doing it. Not including what l paid out for mentorship and course fees.

To make things worse exchange rates have also gone the other way for me as well and l lost even more money once transfered funds back to pounds.

Not impressed but did learn a good lesson.

By the way l am still being charged for the PT sub each month even though l cancelled it and asked for a refund 4 times now and to top it off l have been charged twice this month for it.

[smith]

i have had similiar issues where payments have been taken twice-still looking for refund

there is a webinar tomorrow-maybe some of these issues shooul dbe raised

[Guest]

Hi, I'm currently on the mentorship, started in June, so I'll keep it anonymous for the time being.

Opened at $115,212 on May
Currently $112,212 on August

No great losses, but no profits either. Within the $3000 drop in account value are trading commissions of $900, and dividends less margin interest is a positive $140. My leverage is very low at the moment because I only want to take on that additional risk once I have things working. The volatility on the pricing of the Long Puts is the aspect that really is the pain - some days the stock stays flat and the Put plummets - yes it'll probably even itself out in the long-run but movements in the Long Put price appear pretty arbitrary much of the time.

Overall I understand the concept of making money out of the deterioration in time value, but I think the technique needs a more subjective approach (e.g. choosing when not to sell a call) than the Rule based approach they are teaching, but for the time being I'm following the rules, because that's what I paid to be taught, and if it works, then it'll be much easier to continue with.

Incidentally much of what Ash & Minesh teach is very, very similar to "The Blueprint" by Kurt Frankenburg/RadioActive Trading/Power Options. The fundamental difference I can see is that Kurt waits to have an upward trend confirmed before selling a call rather than selling one at the outset.

With regard to the additional income possible from a high dividend paying stock as opposed to an ETF, it's a bit of a smokescreen in my opinion. The Protected Trader system either works with liquid optionable stocks or it doesn't. Getting a dividend is just icing on the cake.

I'm sticking with things for the time being certainly, but in terms of getting anything like Minesh promotes as being possible, no, nothing of the sort. At this rate I'd be happy with even 1% per month.

Remember they started with Cash For Life, and then when the market tanked revised it to the Protected Trader and now that the market is soaring they're trying to boost returns with talk of dividends. The worst case scenario is that they are just changing things as they go along to bring in more students. If everything worked fine with one system, they'd have stuck with it - the fact that they keep tweaking it means, to my mind, that they don't have all the answers, which is not what you would believe, talking to Minesh. Alternatively, if the Protected Trader system really does work, they're not teaching it very well !!

I'll post again as I learn more.

[smith]

interesting.......two observations

1) what % did you pay in mentoring fees

2) I agree with what you say about the Blueprint-but the Blueprint has 7 other ways to extract cash from the arrangement. Kurt has not done a trade involving the sale of a covered call for maybe 3 mts as the conditions were not conducive-see my comments elsewhere

Remember under the arrangement, we would be delta negative (shares+1, put -0.7 and short call -0.5), so if the market rallies, we would loose maoney

3) going forward the PT may (I emphasise may) come into its own as we are in overbought territory.

[Saby]

I started with $30,000 on 25th Feb
Currently $25,640
Very disappointed.

[james]

Ashwin Bhindi, Minesh Bhindi, Soni Finance LTD and Soni Financial Management are being sued in the US by Compound Stock Earnings Seminars Inc for Copyright Infringement. You can check here: dockets.justia.com/docket/court-txndce/case_no-3:2008cv01054/case_id-177907/

I have read the CSE book. Whole paragraphs and pages appear to have been copied and pasted into the CFL manual and courses e.g. the rules to enter into positions seem to be identical. The rest that has not been copied and pasted, seems to have been "re-structured". I have not gone to any CSE courses or subscribed to their trades/screener, etc. Were the workshops and webminars also copied? Were the subscription trades taken from some American screener?

There is a well known book by Ron Groenke about selling covered calls and naked put options for monthly cash income. The name of this book is "Ca$h for Life". Yes, spelled with a "$" instead of an "s", the same as CFL called their company. This illustrates the originality of what we have paid for.

Now they seem to be copying the dividend material from other websites, as posted elsewhere in this forum.

We were promised 3-5% per month in any market, unless we did something stupid. After being "mentored", most (all?) of us have lost money instead of making money. Even the demonstration account that Minesh was running for the virtual mentorship lost 10%+, before he stopped showing it.

The system they teach works in a certain market, and does not work in other markets. We were ill advised to use this system in this market, and if they were "experts" they would have advised a different strategy.

When we paid £1,000s, we were under the impression that their system was developed by them and better than anything else out there; not that we could get the same information for free in internet or by reading the books ourselves. And we were told personally that we would achieve 3-5% monthly.

In my opinion we have been scammed.

[rickplayer]

Once again this month I have a loss, however you measure it, either by using the profit and loss spreadsheet, both on a month end, or period/period basis (3rd Friday etc)

My account balance has also reduced from last month, and that includes some of the "fantastic" dividend trades, as well as receiving some dividends.

One more month and I'm giving up!