If you are a high net worth investor, preserving and growing your wealth is likely a high priority for you. You worked hard for your money. Now you feel it should be working hard for you.

But chasing maximum return and yield is hard, isn’t it? Stocks are great, until they aren’t. Getting responsibly diversified is more difficult than ever. Hedge funds can work, but you’re never really sure what they’re doing with your money. Options can be a great alternative, but most make the mistake of buying them. Stock option sellers may think they’ve found an answer, but premiums can be small, and margin requirements huge.

Most will simply give up and settle for what they get. The market will decide their fate – it goes up, they will feel good. If it goes down, they will feel bad. However, if you always felt there was a better way to invest and all you had to do was find it, you may finally be home.

It’s called selling options. Not in stocks, but in a completely separate asset class – commodities. This investment strategy can provide you with some flat out advantages as an investor. You won’t hear about it from your broker or financial advisor. But it exists and it’s real. There is only a small segment of the investment community that knows how to deploy it in a portfolio. The tough part is finding somebody that knows how to do it – right.

Having found this website, you’ve already done that. Whether you are seeking diversification from equities, an attractive rate of return or are simply tired of trying to pick market direction, here you will discover an approach that can potentially deliver all three. Option selling, of course, does involve its own set of risks as well. Here you can not only gain a wealth of option selling insights from real portfolio managers, you have the ability to work directly with two of the country’s top option selling experts – the authors of McGraw-Hills classic book on selling options – in managing your portfolio.

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OptionSellers.com is recognized as the global authority

on selling commodity options. Our flagship book, The Complete Guide to Option Selling, now in its third (McGraw Hill 2015) edition, was authored by OptionSellers.com’s James Cordier and Michael Gross. You may know them from regular media appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg Television, Fox Business, or their regularly published articles or market comments in The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Forbes, and MarketWatch. Founder James Cordier has been interviewed on his strategy and the markets by the likes of Larry Kudlow, Neil Cavuto, Robert Lenzner of Forbes and Dr. Donald Moine of Morningstar Advisors.. As a client of OptionSellers.com, you have the ability to work directly with the authors in the managing of your option selling portfolio.

Since 1999 OptionSellers.com has helped investors across the globe employ funds in an option selling approach. If you are a high net worth investor who qualifies for our program, perhaps we can help you too. To learn more, first get your complimentary e-report at the top of this page.

Michael: Hello everybody, this is Michael Gross of OptionSellers.com here with your Option Seller Radio Show. We have a very special guest for you this month. This month’s guest is Price Headley. Price is the founder and president of BigTrends.com. He is one of the nations most well known experts on options trading and technical analysis. Price was also inducted into the trader’s hall of fame in 2007. Price, welcome to the show.

Price: Thanks Michael, great to be here.

Michael: Price, I know you’re very familiar with many different types of options strategies. I’m sure several of our listeners have been to BigTrends.com. It’s a very informative website. Maybe we can start out, Price, by you just telling us a little bit about your background and how you got started in the trading industry.

Price: Sure. I was a student at Duke University, actually, studying to be an equine veterinarian. My family’s been in the thoroughbred horse business for generations, and I think I was going to go down that path and then got hooked into a trading contest, a collegiate contest, where ironically I was in the bottom quartile of participants in a four month contest with a month to go, and realized I needed to do something different. So I started actively trading it every day. This is just paper money back in the late 80’s. Turned around and finished in the top 1% of participants and said “Yeah, I think there’s some opportunity here, something I’m really good at, so I told my dad I wanted to do something more conservative than thoroughbred horse breeding. I wanted to trade stocks and options. He thought I was a little crazy, but actually it worked out really well. That was kind of a formative point for me of realizing I really enjoyed more active trading and saw lots of opportunities there. That was back in the day before the Internet, just reading the paper and seeing things that were happening. Now, of course, there’s just even more at all of our fingertips with the Internet, and the ease of access of information.

Michael: Okay. So tell us about BigTrends. What do you provide there? How can investors benefit from that?

Price: Yeah, sure. I launched BigTrends.com back in 1999 and did it because I thought such a push for information on the web. At the BigTrends.com site, for starters, a lot of free educational information about active trading, and, in particular, you allude to option trading. I’ve always felt like once you learn the core principals of how to find the right stock or market to trade, you of course then can learn option strategies to figure out how to trade that with a lot less capital and a lot more potential return on your investment and still control your risk. We teach people all kinds of strategies, not just in technical analysis, which is pretty much a driving factor for active traders, but then also aspects related to the psychology of trading related to how to build your trading plan. Really just all the different aspects that a trader’s going to go through to assess how to create essentially a business plan to be successful in trading over time.

Michael: So, if somebody wanted to be a self-directed trader or, especially, self-directed options trader, your site would really show them a system of a way to get set up to do that.

Price: Exactly. Whether you trade stocks, options, even futures, you can apply those principals, but yes, the options is really our focus so that you can really take more control over that part of your portfolio that you want to control. We don’t tell people that you shouldn’t put all of your money into options strategies. We recommend diversification across a lot of different vehicles, but for that piece that you want more of a kicker on your portfolio for additional growth, and then come opportunities. We see more and more people taking that step to empower themselves, and, of course, education is really the starting point to have the proper knowledge to then do th(continued)

Good Afternoon, this is James Cordier of OptionSellers.com, with a market update for April 11th. In directing your portfolios, my staff and I are constantly scouring seasonal trades, we’re scouring fundamental facts going on in economic growth and sometimes lack thereof.

Following GDP in China, trying to count barrels of oil coming in and out of the Gulf of Mexico, all the way down to something not so sexy, and that’s counting cocoa beans. This is the work that we do trying to formulate your trading strategy for your account. We’re always looking for low hanging fruit. Every time it comes about, we try and get involved with it. We also try writing an article so that your clients can be involved with exactly what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what steps we’re going to take in order to, hopefully, help your account grow through 2016.

Approximately two weeks ago, we spotted fundamental facts that pointed to probably a very large corn crop here in the United States. We wrote what I think was a really nice article talking about supplies going into the end of the year. That report certainly talked about a very large corn crop. Everything that we digested, as far as that information, pointed towards a great deal of planting here in the United States.

The last day of March includes the government report of perspective plantings. We like waiting for that report because, simply, it is a huge market mover. The fundamental facts that we dug up pointed to a very large plantings for corn. Low and behold, that’s exactly what happened. The corn market plunged on the next day and I missed the trade. I wish I had that one back. I can’t get it back; however, there still may be some corn trading going on later this year, but right now that is certainly one that I missed.

Not trying to fix the corn trade, but there is something that’s coming up very similar. Needless to say, corn and soybeans are a similar product. They’re used for livestock feeding and such. They are grown in the same regions, the same countries around the world. Often, when planting reports come out like what we saw at the end of March, so one-sided to corn, what producers will do in many of the countries around the world is they will change from producing corn to possibly sowing seeds for soybeans. We see that happening in China right now. I recently read a report that suggests that.

Of course, here in the United States, we’re also going to see a lot of the plantings leave corn and go to soybeans. What does this mean? Quite often, as this develops, we are looking at larger acreage planting for soybeans. Soybean fundamentals are not quite as bearish as corn; however, we do think that, come October, November of this year, we’re going to have an ample supply of both corn and soybeans.

If you did open your statement recently, we did start selling soybean calls. We think that’s going to be an excellent opportunity for later this year. If the market rallies slightly more, we’re going to be looking at selling more for your portfolios. This, of course, is a seasonal trade, but it’s combined with the fundamentals that we look for when all is adapting to a trade before it takes place. We try and do all the research we can before the market opens that day, and then, as the market does trade, we try and put that in your account as soon as possible while we think it is still low hanging fruit.

Seasonal trades right now are looking very good for the months of May, June, and July. We are going to be keeping an eye on that, and we’re going to keep you, our client, abreast of exactly what we’re looking for. If, in fact, we do find some options selling coming up in these couple of months, we will be putting these into the newsletters that you’ll be receiving, hopefully one to two weeks prior so that you can keep very well informed with your account.

For those of you listening today that still don’t have an account with OptionSellers.com, yo(continued)

Michael: Hello everybody, this is Michael Gross of OptionSellers.com, here with James Cordier for your March Option Seller Radio Show. James, welcome to the show.

James: Michael, as always, a pleasure doing this and speaking to our audience and everyone worldwide.

Michael: Well, we have a lot going on in commodity markets this month. James, let’s start off with the metals markets. We are having another surge higher here as we enter into late March. What’s going on over there?

James: Well, we started rallying here, over the last week or two, with negative interest rates worldwide. Certainly, both in Europe, China, and Japan the first time people have been discussing negative interest rates. That certainly gives the catalyst for investors in these parts of the world rationale to get into precious metals. Obviously, when you’re putting your money in a bank and you have to pay the bank, that certainly gets under people’s tragh, and why not look for other investments? Certainly, Michael, when interest rates are negative, people think about inflation and we haven’t seen inflation yet. It appears to be right around the corner, and that’s what gold is pointing out with this recent rally.

Michael: Yeah, they’ve been interesting markets to watch. Also, over in the energy markets, a market we’ve been talking about a lot over the last couple of months – crude oil, pushing the $40 level. Where do you think we’re going from here?

James: Michael, you and I talk about seasonalities, especially in crude oil and gasoline, we’ve been trading these markets for over a decade. In regards to seasonality, one of the most ideal setups right now is taking place in energy. We are looking at perfectly fairly priced oil market, based on both supply and demand. We will often see energy prices fall October, November, December, going into what we call “shoulder season”. Then we expect this seasonal rally as driving-season approaches, and that’s exactly what’s happening now. So many people are pointing toward OPEC getting together and cutting production, and, actually, this past week they didn’t do that. They simply froze production at what level? The highest level ever. Yet, crude oil rallies $15 a barrel and gasoline rallies 20%, simply on seasonalities, and I think that’s what’s going on right now. Certainly, here in the United States, we have crude oil supplies at all time highs. You have Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran producing the most oil ever, and yet the market rallies. This is the power of seasonality and it’s certainly flexing it’s muscles again this year.

Michael: Well, I’ll say in a big kind of way, and bringing up seasonals, this is a very active time for seasonals in commodities. We’re going to talk a lot about that today, simply because we’re entering into a time period here… April, May, where you have a lot of strong seasonality in a commodities markets. James brought a great one up, crude oil… perfect example. We also have some strong seasonals in the grain markets this time of year, and even over into softs markets in coffee. Coffee is a highly seasonal market, as well. Grown in Brazil, their seasons are opposite of ours, where we’re having spring right now they’re having autumn. James, I know coffee is one of your favorite markets to trade. What’s going on right now? First of all, let’s talk about the seasonal. What’s the typical seasonal for coffee this time of year?

James: Generally, the seasonal factors have switched to demand for this time of year. Fourth quarter and first quarter, in the Western Hemisphere of course, is the largest demand season. It’s thought that people drink a lot more coffee when it’s cold, and down here in Florida, I think we drink the same amount, but certainly the populations, northeast especially, and also regions in Europe, it’s thought that someone drinks 150% of the coffee they do in the winter, versus the summer. Generally speaking, demand is largest in the United St(continued)

Stock Market Volatility is Spilling over into several commodities markets. Professional Option Seller James Cordier Highlights Strategies for selling put options in Crude Oil, Writing Call options and writing put options in other commodities currently benefiting from swings in the VIX.

James Cordier discusses Gasoline, Crude Following Seasonal Tendencies – “Low Hanging Fruit” now in play for Option Sellers

Michael: Hello everyone, this is Michael Gross of OptionSellers.com. I’m here with James Cordier in our home offices in Tampa, Florida. James, what a month of volatility this month.

James: It certainly has been. The commodities markets for the last 18 months have been doing a slow drip to the downside. Mainly because of the slow down in China and the demand for raw goods: nickel, zinc, copper, lead, and iron ore have been slowly falling, and, finally, with the idea that interest rates are not going to go up four times this year, which everyone had plugged in to their calculations, meaning a strong US Dollar, which means lower commodity prices. That has completely reversed. Again, here in the United States, we don’t think that’s going to happen, but that has certainly shot some volatility into the commodities market, something as Option Sellers, we really wanted and waited to see.

Michael: James, I know when we talk about commodities, some commodities are more volatile than others, what we saw a lot of this month was some volatility in the metals markets, particularly gold and silver. We had discussed last month a strangle in the gold market, where we sold puts and calls. I know we adjusted those positions a little bit, and I think our listeners would be eager to hear how that’s done or how you would adjust a strangle in a situation like that.

James: The gold market, like anything else that we put a strangle around, has a very good chance of increasing on one side or the other. In other words, moving towards the put or the call. Often, when we sell a strangle, whether it be gold or any other market, Michael, as you know, normally we are trying to highlight around a $1,200-$1,400 strangle around the market. If one side starts moving up, in other words, the rally that we’ve had in gold, just about $100 an ounce basically overnight, did increase volatility especially on the call side, what we would certainly want to do is protect our clients at all times. Even though the gold market is still some $250-$300 away from those original strike prices, we were able to now roll up into positions that are now $500 and $600 above the current price. It’s a strategy, as far as strangling goes, of selling puts and calls simultaneously. It’s certainly one of our favorite trades, especially when you’re looking at fairly priced commodities. The fact that gold rallied $125 rapidly, certainly did make the call side much more interesting. We did roll up several of our positions to levels that we really don’t think gold can hit. We have no inflation, we have a much more stable stock market right now, the banks in the United States are much more well-capitalized, and the chances of gold going to $1,900 or $2,000 in the next several months, looks like a pretty good thing to bet against, and that’s what we’re doing.

Michael: James, we’ve gotten a lot of mail in this month from people talking about trading metals and some of the moves there, and types of strategies we might recommend. One point you made, that was a great point when we were talking last week, was that now that the volatility is in the market, it’s a …..

A great point you made, James, is that a lot of people trading gold and silver look at it and say “Well, I don’t want to trade that market. It’s too volatile”, and, if you’re an options seller, it’s exactly the opposite. The more volatile it gets, the better it is for you as an option seller, and, the point you made was, now that the volatility is in the market, there’s actually less risk for an option seller.

James: That’s true, Michael. As we both know, having volatility makes it seem actually more risky than it is, in my opinion. When you’re able to sell options 20%-30% out of the money in a quiet market, is that better than selling options 50-60% out of the money in a volatile market, and I would say that the latter is true. Certainly, the higher probability is in markets where you’re able to sell options fu(continued)

Michael: Hello everybody. This is Michael Gross, of OptionSellers.com. I’m here with our monthly guest expert series. This month’s guest expert is Jerry Toepke, of Moore Research Center, that’s MRCI.com. For those of you who read our book and followed some of the seasonal charts, in the book, Jerry is the man behind those charts. He works heavily with Moore Research in their seasonal research. He does a lot of the price comparisons, coming up with the charts you see and I think he’s going to have some great information for you here today. Jerry, welcome to Option Sellers Radio.

Jerry: Thank you, Michael, good to be here.

Michael: Jerry, to get started, why don’t you start by telling us a little more about Moore Research and what you guys do over there.

Jerry: Okay, at Moore Research Center, we’re a small research company situated on a 73 acre ranch, a hillside ranch, about 8 miles outside of Eugene, Oregon. We actually started out as a computer research facility for a major commodity firm back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. That kind of evolved into a separate independent research firm here where our stock in trade basically is seasonal analysis of futures markets in the publication era.

Michael: Okay, great! Now as far as your position there what do you do at Moore Research?

Jerry: Well, my official title is Editor, but I’m kind of an analyst, a researcher, and basically all around gopher is pretty much my position. Again, we’re a small firm. We can be light on our feet, we can move quickly. Everybody kind of pitches in and tries to help with everything else. So we’re a small team.

Michael: Okay. Now as far as your background or how you got into this field of study, studying seasonals, what was your journey to get there?

Jerry: Well, I grew up on a farm in central Illinois, so I was pretty familiar with corn and soybeans and wheat and cattle and hogs and those kind of markets. When I was little, I remember my father would load up our truck with cattle and we would haul them up to the Chicago stockyards. I even remember him taking me to the old Chicago Mercantile Exchange when they were still doing prices on chalkboards. That was one of my earlier memories there. So anyway, after going to school in Chicago, to college, why there was the calling for me to go west, young man, and so I actually moved out to Oregon for several years and then my father, who had dabbled in the commodity market for years and actually did quite well in the early 70’s, mid 70’s commodity boom, thought maybe this might be something I would like because I was good at math and I enjoyed numbers and he thought maybe this would be something that I could help him with. So I went back to Illinois, learned the business, did some trading, became a broker, but then I found out about Steve Moore and his research and I loved the idea of research and analyzing. So it gave me a chance also to come back out to Oregon, where I owned some property already, get involved in research. And again, we did some brokerage in the early 90’s and then turned into the independent computer research firm we are today. I’ve enjoyed it ever since.

Michael: That’s a fascinating journey. So you have a pretty good foundation for what you’re doing, growing up around these types of products, working in the industry and I guess that probably helped in giving you a little bit of insight into the actual products you’re studying.

Jerry: Yeah, it gives me some perspective, again some fundamental background we as a company don’t really deal in fundamental analysis, but our research depends on market responses to fundamentals, so it helps us to know the more fundamentals, underlying fundamentals that we know to a market, the better off we are in being able to analyze the seasonal tendencies, is maybe the best way I could put it.

Michael: Yeah, I think that’s one of the most fascinating parts of your website. I think it’s in your subscriptio(continued)

Good Afternoon, this is James Cordier of OptionSellers.com, with a market update for March 11th. For those of you who have read some of our books, The Complete Guide to Option Selling and the different editions, on the very front cover we talk about hopefully making stellar returns in bull and bear markets.

The commodities markets over the last three years now have been certainly trending lower, and we feel that low has taken place. Over the last several weeks, we talked about looking for stabilization in commodities, so that they’re not constantly going down and pressuring option prices. As the market slowly declines, and as commodities have over the last several years, put increases, as far as premium, increases at a very slow rate. Of course, call premiums on the top side doesn’t increase at all, making for a very difficult or sometimes stagnant way of option selling. That has now changed.

Volatility is now in the market. Many commodities, which have been in down trends over the last several years, are now in sideways to upward trends, and this is what we describe as low hanging fruit. Anyone watching the crude oil market the last few weeks have seen a trade from approximately $30. Now, we’re looking at some of the spring and summer contracts trading in the low 40’s. We expect that rally to continue going into April and May, making some of the puts that we sold in the $20 level, practically worthless. We also are looking at gasoline. It is probably going to rally until April or May, as well. We expect this rally to continue.

Seasonal factors for energy prices, especially in the United States, is extremely strong. Simply put, January and February is the time to get long gasoline. It happened again in this year. We’ll be looking at doing it again in 2017. This rally is not based on fundamentals, it is based on technical and seasonal factors, which are fully in charge right now.

We see the market probably plateauing at around May or June. At that point, if crude oil prices are high enough, in order to sell calls for some of the weaker contract months, like November and December, we’ll be looking at selling the $75 and $80 strike prices above the market, as we probably tip over in June and July and probably start heading lower into fall of this coming year.

In the meantime, we’re going to enjoy this rally. We do have some puts sold below the market. Anyone who’s been following our videos for the last several weeks, we’ve been talking about selling puts around $20, $22, $24. Those will be worthless probably in the next 30 days, and certainly a trade that we certainly favor.

Welcome to the Strategic Investor. Join us as we interview some of the world’s most productive asset managers and uncover sophisticated and unique investment strategies in the markets. Here is your host, Charley Wright:

Charley: Hello and welcome to Strategic Investor Radio on OCTalkradio.net where we bring new investment strategies you are not hearing elsewhere. I’m Charley Wright and today is February 26th, 2016. We’re very pleased to welcome back to our show, as a guest, James Cordier of OptionSellers.com. James speaks to us from their headquarters in Tampa, Florida. James, welcome back to StrategicInvestorRadio.com.

James: Charley, it’s certainly my pleasure to be here. I always enjoy doing your show, and the fact that we are speaking to investors that think outside the box, it makes us that much more inviting to do your show.

Charley: Well, we’re very pleased to have you and you folks are certainly an out of the box thinking crowd here. James, first of all, let me recommend to all of our listeners, we last interviewed James about a year ago, and the date of the post on our website is February 11, 2015. We recommend to all of our listeners to go back to that and listen to it, as well. It provides a very strong foundation and much of information that we will not be covering today. So, James, give us 30 seconds on your background here.

James: Charley, basically our background is commodities, it is spent futures trading in the far, far past. So often, people want to get diversified and they want to get involved with real markets, crude oil, gasoline, coffee, soybeans… things that they use and they enjoy every day. However, trading futures certainly, it is too much like trading, too much like gambling. We have discovered and tried to perfect, we’re not there yet, a strategy that allows the average investor to get involved with commodities, and it’s been a great way to diversity. We have certainly been very busy with new clients just because of that reason.

Charley: So James, a little more focused on your background here, you were an employee for a couple of decades, right, working out of the pits of Chicago?

James: Yes, my background is in the Midwest. I started in the Chicago-land area, basically understanding the fundamentals of the market. Chicago is certainly not northern California where everything is computerized, and everything is driven by databases. I learned a great deal of fundamental information, why the price of coffee goes up and down, why the price of crude oil goes up and down, and the such. Basically, we’ve been trading the exact same commodities for over two decades. It allows us to have a rationale and thesis as to why we should be in the market, as opposed to just charting and technical analysis. Certainly, those two forms of approaching the market have their day; however, we base everything we do on rationales of supply and demand, probably the best way to approach trading commodities.

Charley: You know, we want to get into that later, because that certainly causes you to stand apart from most commodities traders, most futures market traders, and, certainly, most options traders, because they’re so technical analysis focused. Let’s start here, James, with a few questions. Question number one: why sell options?

James: For you having the thinking audience, very easily to start out by saying selling options is going to put the odds in the client’s favor. It said that approximately 82% of options sold out of the money will expire worthless. So that would be assuming a darted aboard 82% of the time, selling options would become profitable. The fact that you’re able to sell options further out of the money, if in fact an investor does that, the odds of it expiring worthless increases even more so, so certainly putting the odds in your favor, I think the largest investors in the world, and I get to speak to some of them just every once in a while, I run into them and they’ll (continued)