DiscoverOptions

What I like about the OptionVue mentoring program. Let me count the ways. In order to place my answer in perspective it will be helpful to provide a brief background of my trading.

The first five years of my trading I researched newsletters and asset managers. Alternating between them I achieved an almost 22% yearly return and had about $500K in my IRA account. During this period of time I spent a fortune on tools (meta-stock, Omni-Trader, Vector Vest - to name a few) and newsletters recommended by Hulbert. I then used the tools to back test the newsletter recommendations as I didn't have the time to do the research my self and couldn't design a good system that would work consistently well after the back test period. Let the experts with consistent results do the research!

My first introduction to options was from a cold call. Based on a call from a salesperson at Spread Trade System randomly picking a stock and then using a vertical spread to show the benefit of leverage and limited risk. I was hooked and drawn into one of their seminars in Las Vegas (quite apt I would say). I spent $9K on their multi level (but fixed cost) training program. I also signed up for courses from Van Tharp on the general approach to trading (money management, psychology, systems design etc.). From there I started looking at option based newsletters promising huge gains based on their expertise but I had no means to back-test their claims until I came upon OptionVue.

I immediately ordered the product. Now I was on my way to untold riches. I selected a couple of promising option advisory services... I back-tested and paper traded with live data and convinced myself that this was a profitable approach. I then went live with serious money. Within a few months I had parlayed my 500K IRA trading account up to 640K using the recommendations and fractional bet position sizing algorithm along with various stop loss techniques. Then between Jan 2008 and August of 2008 I lost over half of the capital. I clearly was at the mercy of these services and I had no idea what went wrong. It wasn't their fault as their historical data was indeed accurate for the most part and it was my choice to take or not take a trade.

At the beginning of August it became clear that I needed better transparency and better knowledge of options. My random approach to reading various texts (I have an astounding library I collected in just two years) was too scattered and unfocused. I decided that individual study wasn't going to make anything happen soon. I clearly had no business trading and I closed all of my open positions and went to cash at the beginning of August. It was just coincidental that this was good timing as it was not based on any prescient knowledge of the market. I started collecting information on various mentorship programs. Most of the mentorship programs are just large classes with very little if any direct involvement. And what small amount of "personal" involvement there is usually occurs at the end. Additionally I developed a notion that income strategies better fit my profile. Most of the other programs teach stock market roulette.

I settled on OptonVue's (DiscoverOptions) mentoring for the following reasons.

Although not limited to income strategies, the core of the course is based on moderate, consistent, low risk yield approaches. This aligns with my beliefs about the randomness of the market and how to become more like the casino than the gambler.
I liked that individual attention right from the beginning which could detect at an early stage where problems occur and direct the individual to specific areas for improvement. In my case the course materials were well prepared but there were areas where clarification was needed.
The mentoring does not force the ownership of OptionVue as a necessary component. I could do the entire program using Think or Swim but the features of OptionVue make it easier and its offered free (well sort of) as part of the mentoring program.
The mentors are active traders who have made (and lost) money in actual trading. In my survey of programs, I talked to one company and when I asked what their average gain or loss using the methods they taught, they informed me that they were not allowed to trade their system.
It's not a come-on to continually bleed you of money. Some of the companies proposed Level 1, Level 2, ... Level n and all at increased costs -in some cases this was not clear from their program description.
Having access to different viewpoints of different mentors is a tremendous advantage. They are not hesitant to disagree with each other and explain the source of their biases. For example having a floor trader to talk to has been very helpful in learning how to work a trade.
I would say one of the more important benefits is the early introduction to the Greeks. In the other course and the short courses I've taken either via video or on site mentioned them in passing. I believe the mentors ability to relate these to practical trading has done more for me than any of the books, courses, or tools that I have paid for. Not that I'm an expert in these areas but I can apply them and now know what I don't know. This alone was probably worth the price of the course as it turned me around from a price predictor to a watcher of the interaction of volatility, time decay ... oh yeah and price every now and then.
The Inside Wire program is really helpful in learning about option trading as well as getting more out of the OptionVue tool.
Finally the slow progression from paper trading to trading full time all under supervision helps to avoid the costly mistakes I made earlier. While I paper traded, I would jump into committing serious capital if the trades were successful in both back trading and paper trading and were roughly correlated. I also had no plan for doing forensics (or even the possibility as the trades were picked by services).

In summary based on my huge wealth of bad starts and bad experiences, I believe the money for this program has been the best money I have ever spent. Without this course, if the market continued in an uptrend from December of 2007 instead of its maniacal behavior, I would have been a very rich person - almost tripling my money based on back-testing and the early successes. But I would have lost it most of what I had made and fair amount of my original capital had the market turned around. Thanks to the DiscoverOptions Mentoring program (of which I am still very much a beginner) I now realize how exposed I was and my initial success was based on luck rather than skill. Not that luck doesn't play some role in my current small successes, but it is a lot less luck and more due to my training.

Mike D.
Camano Island, WA