Back in the mid-2000’s iron condors, bullish verticals and covered calls were the big thing. We had an extended period of time with a low volatility up trending market and those strategies were working great. All you needed to do was to follow a basic set of rules and all of a sudden you were a great trader. Click here to see the many other M3 configurations that have been developed as well.  

I know several people who did so well that they ramped up their trading size, left their jobs and realized their dreams by becoming full-time traders.

Unfortunately, market conditions change, and in 2007 these iron condors and neutral or bullish bias strategies started taking losses. Because the traders were merely following a set of rules and didn’t understand how to adapt to the market, they didn’t know what to do. So they started panicking.

They would take on too much risk and trade differently without understanding the consequences. They started jumping around and implementing unfamiliar systems without proper testing.

As a result, by late 2008 many of these traders had lost a majority of their money and ended up back in their old jobs, only this time with no savings.

The lesson here, don’t just follow some system that happens to be working well without learning how to really trade and adapt to market conditions.

If you’re someone who wants to create a serious business out of options trading, you need more than a set of rules. Let’s face it market conditions change and no single set of rules is going to be able to do well all the time. The last thing you need is to finally decide to go full time with your trading, have conditions change and then go out of business.

So I decided to come up with a way to educate traders on how to manage their risk in complex options spreads so I could help them improve their game.

What I came up with was the M3 Trading System.

The M3 is not just a not a “trade in the box” where you blindly follow a set of strict rules, it is a market neutral trading system that I have been developing over the last seven years specifically designed to teach and educate options traders how to identify and control risk in their positions.

The M3 system gives you the tools you need to help you understand your position and then explains how, why and when to apply those tools to help you become a better trader.

Some of the things my students love about the M3 as a high probability “income trade”, is that there is no searching for stocks, no need to pick direction, no need to perfectly time the market and no need to sit in front of the computer all day. The M3 keeps your options Greeks under control and is designed to keep your stress and risk to a minimum.

In this four-part video series, I walk you step by step through the M3 concepts. Then we thoroughly go through multiple examples where I walk you through some extremely difficult months to show the trade in action.

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