What Retirees Need to Know About Options with Lance Gaitan
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What Retirees Need to Know About Options Show Notes
Stock options aren’t for everybody. A lot of amateur investors get burned trying to play the options game, and there’s a very good reason for this: they require a deep knowledge of strategy, of the win-loss ratio, and a strong understanding of what’s out there.
My guest, Lance Gaitan, works for a financial publisher in Baltimore, where he authors two successful options strategies. His work helps individual and institutional investors capture gains by identifying overreactions in the market for both speculative and hedging purposes.
Today, Lance joins the podcast to talk about how to craft an options strategy, whether they belong in your portfolio, and if this is something you can do on your own – or if you’re going to need the help of a professional.
In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:
- What an option is and what the two types of options contracts do.
- Who should actually be thinking about using options as part of their portfolio and who should stay away from them completely.
- How options can be used as part of a hedging strategy.
- How to look at the risks vs. potential rewards of options – and why one major loss can wipe out an entire year of wins in options trading.
- Effective ways to learn about options trading – and why there’s no way to be a passive participant in options trading and also win.
Inspiring Quote
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- ““There’s risk involved in everything. Options are not that complicated but you have to have a good understanding of options in the first place before you try to get rich quick with somebody’s options strategy.” – Lance Gaitan
Interview Transcript
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[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:09] Dean Barber: Welcome to The Guided Retirement Show. I’m your host, Dean Barber, your guide for retirement. Look let’s face it. If you’re going on a huge vacation, somewhere you’ve never been, you want a guide. I’m your guide here for retirement. Today’s guest, Lance Gaitan. Lance publishes two successful options strategies that help individual investors capture gains by identifying overreactions in the market.
Now, make no mistake about it. Options is not a game for everybody. You have to understand the ins and outs of options strategies. You have to understand the win-loss ratio and what types of options are out there. I’ve asked Lance to join us today. I’ve known Lance for a number of years and I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with Lance about what are options strategies. Do they belong in your portfolio? And if you choose to employ options strategies, should you seek out the help of a professional, or is this something that you can do on your own?
Please enjoy this interview on The Guided Retirement Show with Lance Gaitan.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:16] Dean Barber: So, Lance Gaitan, welcome to The Guided Retirement Show. Great to have you here. I want to get us kicked off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself.
[00:01:26] Lance Gaitan: Well, thanks, Dean. Thanks for inviting me. I am working right now for a publisher, a financial publisher that’s based out of Baltimore, and we publish a number of strategies, financial strategies for individual investors, and my specialty is in the options field. I’d like to maybe tell you a little bit about how I use them and the way I use options for my investments is certainly just one way to do it. There are many ways that individuals and institutions use options in their day-to-day trading, whether it be for speculative purposes or for hedging purposes. My background, I’ve been in the financial services business for the last 30 years.
I used to manage a trading desk at a large regional firm in Minneapolis. I managed their futures trading desk. And I’ve since moved to owning my own commodity brokerage firm a number of years ago to where I currently write financial strategies that are based on options trading.
[00:02:48] Dean Barber: Alright. So, you got some experience. We know that and there are some things that you know that others don’t. And the idea of having you here on The Guided Retirement Show is to give some education to our listeners or our viewers, and what I want you to do, Lance, is just start by explaining what is an option and let’s try to keep this down at the second-grade level.
We don’t want to get too in the weeds, but I want people to have a good understanding after listening to The Guided Retirement Show here of what is an option, who should actually be thinking about using options, and who should stay completely away from options strategy. So, let’s start with what is an option?
[00:03:27] Lance Gaitan: Well, an option, there’s two types of options contracts. One gives you and it’s called a call option. One gives you the right to purchase a number of shares of stock at a certain price for a specific timeframe. So, for instance, if you wanted to buy 100 shares of Google, Alphabet, for let’s say around $1,500 a share, that’s going to cost you quite a bit of money out-of-pocket.
But if you’re thinking about buying who are just controlling Google and you think that their shares are going to go up to $200 or $2,000 per share, you just want to control that stock for a certain period of time. So, you can buy an option on Google that would expire at some point in the future and you’re going to speculate that it’s going to go to a certain price. So, you would buy an option for a fraction of what you would outlay cash for the actual stock price. That’s just one way you can use an option. So, that gives you…
[00:04:40] Dean Barber: So, let’s break that down just a little bit, Lance. So, let’s say that you said, “All right, I want to buy options on Alphabet for $1,500 a share.” I do that today and that option say is going to expire in what? Three months, six months? How long do you typically go out on something like that?
[00:04:59] Lance Gaitan: Well, it depends on what your strategy is, what you think is going to happen, what you intend to do in that period of time, how you think that underlying stock is going to behave. And you can do the same thing on the other side. If you own Google and you think the stock price is going to go down and you want to hedge yourself, you would buy a put option, which gives you the right but not the obligation to sell Google at a certain price for a certain period of time.
So, it goes both ways. Those are two types of options contracts. One is basically you’re controlling the upside of the stock and the other, you’re controlling the downside of that stock.
[00:05:43] Dean Barber: So, when you buy the option strategy, there’s ways that you can buy it where you don’t actually have to own the stock. That’s what we’d consider a naked option and then you have an option where you actually own the stock and that’s something different.
[00:05:59] Lance Gaitan: Right. When you own a stock and you want to derive extra income from that stock, you can sell stock or you can sell options on that stock and then you’re not naked. You’re actually covered. A lot of fairly simple ways to derive additional income from your portfolio would be selling covered calls. And that’s one strategy that investors use pretty regularly. In a flat market, it’s just a way to derive a little bit extra gains from your portfolio than just letting the stock sit there.
[00:06:43] Dean Barber: But when you do that, you can limit some of the upside, right? So, I want people to understand that if you’re selling those covered call options and the stock price goes up well above where your covered call price is on those options, you can actually lose some of the upside potential of that stock if the stock were to go up too fast.
[00:07:01] Lance Gaitan: You absolutely could lose the upside potential of that. And that’s kind of a balance. When you’re doing a covered call strategy, you have to actually be willing to sell that stock at whatever strike price you decide you want to sell.
[00:07:18] Dean Barber: So, let’s use Alphabet again. At $1,500 a share, you sell a covered call at $1,750, and all of a sudden, Alphabet runs up to $2,000. Well, guess what, you are forced out at $1,750. Right?
[00:07:32] Lance Gaitan: Yeah. And you no longer own that stock. So, your flexibility is pretty much gone. You’re going to have to find a way to deploy that capital somewhere else.
[00:07:41] Dean Barber: So, who would that make sense for? You do the covered calls on more growth type stocks or do you like to do the cover calls on more value-oriented stocks, stocks that are more stable? Do you want to do that when stock prices have been down? Do you want to do it when you think the markets are peak? When are these types of things appropriate?
[00:08:03] Lance Gaitan: Well, it’s kind of there’s benefits and drawbacks to whatever you want to do because options are priced based on the underlying stock. They’re based on how volatile that stock is. So, when a stock is not very volatile, when it’s just, let’s say, a plain vanilla stock that’s just been rising 2% or 3% a year for the last five years, there’s not going to be a lot of volatility.
So, you’re not going to get a lot of income from doing a covered call option on that. But then, again, on the other hand, whatever income you get is probably going to be yours to keep because the stock, the chance that stock just blowing out to the upside and you having your stock called away, the odds are very low.
So, it really kind of depends on what you want to do. Now, you’re going to get more premium from a volatile stock like in the technology sector. That’s one of the strategies that I deploy in the various strategies that I use because there is a high probability that this stock is going to move in one direction or another. So, premiums are higher and what you can do in that particular strategy is really unlimited.
[00:09:45] Dean Barber: Interesting. Okay. So, now let’s talk about using – I want to use like an insurance company for an example or some portfolio managers. They’ll use options to hedge the portfolio to reduce risk. The interesting thing is options are a zero-sum game, right? So, for every winner on an options trade, there’s a loser on the other side of it. So, it kind of seems strange for us to think about you can have a portfolio manager or an insurance company that uses options to hedge risk or to reduce risk in an overall investment strategy. How does that work?
[00:10:27] Lance Gaitan: Well, when you’re hedging, you are taking some of – you’re either paying to take some of the risk out of that portfolio by purchasing options or using, let’s say, an index like the S&P 500 that might track the way your stock moves and using kind of an unrelated index to hedge your portfolio. So, if the entire market were to crash, you could put options on the market that follows your particular stock the best or you could put options on the company that you own.
[00:11:12] Dean Barber: So, your idea here is that you want to control the downside, right? So, if you wanted to say, “I want to set an option strategy up so that if the markets crash, I lose no more than 10% in my portfolio.” Those are ways that you can use the put options as a hedging strategy.
[00:11:30] Lance Gaitan: Absolutely. That’s one of the best ways to do it. On the other hand, you could be buying a put option but you could also be selling call options that are further out of the money than the stock is likely to go anyway. So, if the risk is the downside like it has been over the past month or so, you’re going to pay some premium to protect the downside. But on the other hand, you could also use call options to derive a little income to offset the price that you’re paying for that hedge to the upside.
[00:12:10] Dean Barber: So, if you’re going to protect yourself on the downside, does that automatically mean that you’re going to limit yourself on the upside as well?
[00:12:17] Lance Gaitan: Well, you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to the upside but you can see, for instance, you’re talking about an insurance company for instance. You can track to see what the upside, what the logical upside of that stock is over the next six months to a year. And the same time that you protect your downside, you could be selling call options that are above that threshold.
Obviously, you’re not going to get a lot of income out of that when it’s going way above where the stock would most likely reach in a normal market but you’ll get some income to offset your hedge on the downside. And remember, the options expire so your outlook, you’re only hedging for a certain period of time, whether it’s three months or if you really want to hedge for a long period of time, you’re going to go out a year, but you have to analyze how much that’s going to cost you to do that.
[00:13:20] Dean Barber: So, there are these products out there and you get to tell me whether or not you’re comfortable talking about this, but things like indexed annuities or structured notes and those types of things that people will tend to say, “Well, I’m going to do this because I know that I’m not going to have a loss of principal or my loss of principal is going to be limited to a very small amount.
I have the ability to participate in some of the upside of the market.” And so, what’s happening is, and I think I understand this right, Lance, and correct me if I’m wrong is that you’ll have a company that will say, let’s take 80% of your money. We’ll put that in a treasury or something that’s going to give us some sort of a guaranteed yield and then we’ll take 10% or 20% and we’ll buy options strategies on an index, whether it be the technology index or the S&P 500 index or broader index. And so, they can make enough money on that options strategy that you can get some participation in the upside, but you also limit your downside because you know that you have some money in a fixed position. Am I explaining that right?
[00:14:24] Lance Gaitan: Yeah. I mean, that’s certainly one way to do it. As you know, there are many ways that you can invest and there’s going to be risk factors, there’s going to be a certain upside and downside that you have to prepare for, no matter how conservative you get or how risky you get. It really kind of depends on what your overall objective is.
[00:14:52] Dean Barber: So, we’re talking about again the safe stuff when it comes to options strategies. A lot of people that will listen to our Guided Retirement Show, sometimes they’ll be drawn into things that they don’t necessarily understand. The idea here is to give some education so that you don’t fall into a trap and you don’t do something that isn’t the right thing for you.
Options can seem sexy and they can seem like there’s this great thing, but I think you always have to look at both sides what’s the potential risk versus what’s the potential reward. One of the things out there that a lot of people have money, and again, I’ll go back to those index annuities, the insurance companies simply running an option strategy behind the scenes for that index annuity.
So, we’re recording this episode of the podcast here in 2020, but 2019 would have been a perfect example where I see people that have that they had an indexed annuity, the markets were up 20 plus percent, yet they were capped out on their returns at 4% on that index annuity, and people go, “How in the world can that work?” The markets had this great year yet you stocked my return. You capped me out at 4%.
[00:16:07] Lance Gaitan: Right. And that’s the choice that they made when they made that investment. And you as a financial advisor, obviously, you’re doing this all day long. You’re explaining what that means to them.
Now, for an option strategy for an individual investor, that’s a lot of work and the reason is, is during a great year, you’re invested in stocks and bonds, you’re just letting it sit. You as an advisor are managing that to some extent but when you’re talking about an option strategy, that’s hands-on because these options expire whether it’s in a month, three months, or a year. You always have to be on top of what exactly it is that you’re doing with these options.
And either redeploying your investments into those options into other options or rolling them forward on a calendar because they’re always expiring. When you’re buying options, you’re paying for time value. That’s a large component of what you’re paying for and that option is the time value to control that stock. And obviously, there’s other components to that depending on the relative value of the stock and where the strike price is where you intend to buy or sell that particular stock, whether it be a put option or a call option.
So, as an individual investor, it’s a lot of your time that is going to go into managing options but there are a lot of great strategies out there if you want to focus on one or two areas of your investment that it might be worthwhile to some people to use option strategies in their own portfolios.
[00:18:07] Dean Barber: Okay. Let’s take a quick break. This is The Guided Retirement Show. I’m Dean Barber. We’ll be right back.
[ANNOUNCEMENT]
[00:18:14] At some point in everyone’s life, you have to go to school because let’s face it, a good education is important and just because you’re nearing retirement age or you’re already there, it doesn’t mean the learning stops. One of the easiest ways to learn about retirement is at Modern Wealth Management’s Education Center. There, you’ll find things to read, to watch, and to listen to about important retirement topics. So, go to BarberFinancialGroup.com. Click on the menu dropdown. It’s in the upper right-hand corner and select Education Center.
There you can download and read our Social Security checklist, watch Dean Barber’s latest video on the current state of the markets, or listen to an audio recording about tax reduction strategies and so much more. There’s no cost. Just sign up for access at BarberFinancialGroup.com. It’s as simple as that. Besides, there’s no tests, no textbooks, and I promise, not to move your seat even if you talk too much. There’s so much to learn about retirement. Just go to BarberFinancialGroup.com. Click on the menu drop down and select Education Center.
[00:19:30] Lance Gaitan: For an option strategy for an individual investor, that’s a lot of work and the reason is during a great year, you’re invested in stocks and bonds, you’re just letting it sit. You as an advisor are managing that to some extent but when you’re talking about an option strategy that’s hands-on because these options expire whether it’s in a month, three months, or a year.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:20:03] Dean Barber: Alright. You’re listening to The Guided Retirement Show. I’m Dean Barber. Let’s get back to the topic at hand. So, Lance, let’s talk about the win-lose ratio. We mentioned earlier that options are a zero-sum game. For every winner, there’s a loser. And so, there was a couple of different things that you said. You said option expirations. And so, before we talk about the win-lose ratio, is it ever a good idea to just let an option expire or do you want to exercise that option prior to expiration?
[00:20:37] Lance Gaitan: Okay. Remember, the options seller is acting like an insurance company. So, when an insurance company sells you life insurance, they’re betting that you’re not going to die before this policy expires.
[00:20:53] Dean Barber: Right. You’re going to trade it in or you’re going to redo it or whatever.
[00:20:57] Lance Gaitan: Exactly. So, as an option seller, you’re waiting for the price not to get to that strike price. You’re selling options in hopes that they’ll expire worthless. So, in that case, yeah, hang on to them until they expire worthless. If you’re an options purchaser and you’re doing it to control the underlying stock to because you think a stock is going to go up or down, you’re typically not going to exercise that stock unless you really want to own it.
But you know that beforehand. Before you purchase the option, you know whether or not you’re going to exercise that stock because you want that stock in your portfolio or not. 99% of the time options purchasers are covering or selling their options before expiration.
[00:21:56] Dean Barber: So, if you’re a seller, if you’re trying to gain extra income, how do you prevent that from happening?
[00:22:03] Lance Gaitan: If you’re a seller, if you’re selling covered calls, and that’s the main investment way to use options in one’s individual portfolio, you’re probably not going to let those expire because you don’t want to chance that your stock is going to be called away from you. So, you’re going to be monitoring the stock price and if it’s getting close to the danger zone where that stock can be called away, you probably want to sell your option at that time, or excuse me, buy it back at that time. And if that happens, if you’re worried that it’s going to get called away, you’re probably going to lose money on that option because it’s going to be valued higher than where you originally sold it.
[00:22:54] Dean Barber: Because your timeframe is shortened and the stock is closer to whatever your strike price was.
[00:22:59] Lance Gaitan: Correct. But if your stock, if you sold calls let’s say a few weeks ago on some stocks and the entire market is down let’s say 4% or whatever, chances are that those call options that you sold are going to be worth much, much less. And as that gets closer to the option expiring, you might just want to sell it and keep the difference between where you sold it and the value where it’s at right now.
So, if you sold an option for $1 a month ago, and today it’s worth $0.25, you might want to just grab that $0.75 profit on each option and not worry about having to risk over the next week that stock rocketing back up and you getting your stocks called away.
[00:23:58] Dean Barber: Okay. So, now we understand that. Let’s talk now about the win-lose ratio. And somebody says, “Well, I want to win.” I mean, look, we’re both competitive guys. I always want to win. You always want to win but you get that options game and you’re going to lose sometimes, right?
[00:24:17] Lance Gaitan: Yeah, you’re going to lose. Even if you have a 90% win-loss ratio, you’re going to lose 10% of the time. And on some option selling strategies, you have guys that don’t lose for a year or so. But one big loss can take away 100 little gains. So, you really have to kind of be careful. It’s not really the win-loss ratio that’s important. It is important.
Obviously, you want to win more than 50% of the time but it’s also how much you win. So, if we’re talking speculation, your normal options trader that’s just buying options to speculate on the direction of the stock price or on the market, the loss ratios are pretty high for individual investors.
Now, in my strategy, just like in when you manage a portfolio, I use a number of risk management techniques to help curtail some of those losses. And just like in any sort of investment strategy, you have to employ risk management as part of your overall strategy.
[00:25:39] Dean Barber: So, Lance, knowing what you know being in the financial services industry as long as you’ve been, you hear people saying, “Hey, come and take my options trading class. We’ve got a proven strategy that you can employ to make money and income every single month,” and you hear those ads, right? And they entice a lot of people to come in. They’ll pay a fee, get them trained, and use their software program or whatever it is to employ that options strategy to generate they say reliable income every single month. I mean, are those things real or is there significant risk involved in that?
[00:26:23] Lance Gaitan: There’s risk involved in everything. I would suggest to anybody who’s interested in options, you don’t have to pay to get educated. You can go online. Options are not that complicated but you have to have a good understanding of options in the first place before you want to try to get rich quick with somebody’s options strategy.
So, I think just having a good understanding of what an option is, how you can use it for speculation or for hedging or for whatever, there’s a lot of great information out there that whether it be from the Chicago Options Exchange or a number of sources for just getting educated in what options can do for you before you go off and spend money on somebody else’s ideas that will probably not work out for you.
[00:27:18] Dean Barber: Yeah. So, kind of the way I think about that is you guys are going to charge $5,000 to come teach how to trade options. I mean, he’s making his money on his class, right? If it was that simple, I mean, he wouldn’t need to tell anybody about it.
[00:27:31] Lance Gaitan: No, exactly. Unless he has a proven strategy and he’s showing you exactly what he does to be profitable. And most people aren’t really willing to just give that up for free or you could follow somebody’s strategy like mine for instance. Like you said, there are losses. I mean, everybody’s going to have a loss and that could come immediately or become a month down the road, but there are going to be losses.
[00:28:09] Dean Barber: So, in the options world, how many of the options traders are individual investors that are not experts in it versus how many are professional options traders? Do you have any idea what that makeup is? If I was an individual, I want to go out and start trading options, who am I competing against? Because in my mind, if for every winner, there’s got to be a loser, I’ve got to compete, right? I’ve got to figure out how I can win and so am I betting against or coming up against an individual that is trading options or am I really going up against the professional options traders?
[00:28:49] Lance Gaitan: Well, you’re always going to go up against professional options traders and whether your strategy makes money all the time, like 90% of the time, and you’re just Mr. Superstar individual investor trader, the professional is always going to win. And it’s not just a zero-sum game. It’s also the way in which options are priced. The professional market maker, those who are providing market liquidity for the options market.
On the New York Stock Exchange, there are individual market makers. On the NASDAQ, they’re electronically done, and they’re backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, the brokerage firms that are providing electronic liquidity, but the way they make their money is by how they price those options. That’s not going to be to your advantage. It’s going to be that theirs all the time.
So, over time, they’re going to make money and they’re not in it to beat you as an individual investor but you’re going to make money by keeping investment strategy based on discipline, on risk management.
[00:30:12] Dean Barber: So, could I compare what you just said to the oddsmakers in Vegas on sports vets, or is it like the casinos where you go in there sometimes to win but the casino knows I’m always going to win, right? They don’t build those buildings and fancy places for free, right? It’s all come at the back of the gambler.
[00:30:31] Lance Gaitan: Yeah.
[00:30:33] Dean Barber: Is that a good analogy?
[00:30:35] Lance Gaitan: It’s very similar to an oddsmaker. The oddsmaker, they’re going to make money on the spread and that’s basically how your professional market makers make their money is on the spread, and they’re in and out of these trades every day, and they’re going to be profitable every day but they are taking some risks. So, maybe they lose money one day out of 100 but they’re generally going to make money based on how they price the options.
[00:31:07] Dean Barber: So, since I’m a Kansas City native, and my Chiefs won the Super Bowl. Yeah, yeah. The thing is I was watching the oddsmakers out of Vegas and when you began the game, there was I think a 1 point or a 1.5 point spread. The Chiefs were favored to win by 1 point or 1.5 points depending upon the timing. But as the game started, the odds of the Chiefs winning went up and the odds of the 49ers winning went down, and then you go into the fourth quarter and the odds were now 95.3% chance that San Francisco is going to win.
So, that really is something like you’re saying, that’s when your options getting close to an expiration, but then it went the other way and the Chiefs scored 21 points in the last seven-and-a-half minutes of the game and wound up winning by 10 points, blew the odds completely out. So, the option strategies are going to move like that throughout the time that you own them.
[00:32:13] Lance Gaitan: Sure. Yeah. The market itself is going to move. When the underlying value of the stock price moves, the option price is going to move. And remember, every day this options contract is out there, it loses a little bit of value because that timing grows every day. So, these options are always repricing.
[00:32:34] Dean Barber: Interesting stuff. So, if somebody’s interested in doing option strategies, you being a person that does this for a living, writes the strategies and the newsletter and all that, would you suggest somebody go out and try to get educated on this on their own and do the trading themselves or should they seek out the help of professional options traders to give them better odds of winning?
[00:32:59] Lance Gaitan: Well, it depends on the strategy. If they’re just looking to sell options on stocks they own, they can talk to you or somebody in your office about doing that I’m sure. If they’re looking to speculate with options, whatever it is, if you’re interested in being involved in options, just get a basic understanding of what you can do with options.
There are a lot of ways to get educated without actually having to pay for it. You can open up a paper trading account with a lot of these electronic firms like Schwab or whatever, just to maybe practice an option strategy without having to risk your money just to see how the options behave, how leverage can work for you or against you, and just kind of try it out on your own.
And if it’s something that you have continued interest in, there certainly are people that are willing to teach you how to go about putting together your own strategy.
[00:34:09] Dean Barber: So, if you’re a person that is still working and you got a busy job, and you got to be kind of on all day long, do you have any business trying to trade those options on your own? Or do you have to be looking at this stuff throughout the day, every day?
[00:34:24] Lance Gaitan: The only options that I would say a person like that will want to use is selling options on their own portfolio to derive additional income because then at the end of the day, you can kind of see where your positions are at and react accordingly. But any other type of option strategy, no. You have to be involved all the time and most people just simply don’t have the time to do that.
[00:34:52] Dean Barber: Right. It’s not a passive strategy, in other words, if you’re really going to get in there and trade those options.
[00:34:57] Lance Gaitan: It’s an active strategy. It’s definitely an active strategy. Somebody who wants like if any of your clients asked you about it, I would suggest that they maybe start, just take a couple of thousand dollars and put it into a speculative account and let them practice on their own. And that way they can see firsthand how much time it takes to manage even a handful of options on a daily basis. And if it’s something that they say, “Okay, Dean. I’m really good at this. I think I’m going to manage my entire account.” I’d be kind of nervous, but that’s a decision that they have to make.
[00:35:37] Dean Barber: Yeah, for sure. Well, Lance, this has been good and I appreciate you joining us here on The Guided Retirement Show and you’ve shed a lot of light to our listeners. And the way that I think about it is the reason why I created The Guided Retirement Show is because, hey, if I’m going to go do something, let’s say I’m going to go on a trip that I have never been on before to a location that I’ve never been before, I want a guide. I want somebody that’s been there before that’s done it so that I make sure that I’m getting the experience that I want.
I think educating people on what an option is, how does it work, the pros, the cons, if I were going to do option strategies, you know what I do? I’d hire somebody that did it for a living, right? Full-time. Look, I’ve been in the financial services industry for 32 years and I don’t want to trade my own option strategies. I don’t have time to do it. So, I’m going to hire somebody that does it full-time. That’s my opinion.
[00:36:40] Lance Gaitan: Yep. It’s totally understandable. It’s a lot of work. I think options are a little too demonized for individual investors, but if you understand what they’re used for, I think you’ll just be better off even if don’t deploy your own options strategies. Or if you want to have somebody do it for you, I still think it’s a good idea to understand what they’re doing with your money.
[00:37:08] Dean Barber: You have to, right?
[00:37:10] Lance Gaitan: Yeah.
[00:37:11] Dean Barber: You don’t go buy a stock in a company without understanding how that company makes money.
[00:37:15] Lance Gaitan: Exactly.
[00:37:16] Dean Barber: And what that company’s value is relative to where it should be.
[00:37:20] Lance Gaitan: Right.
[00:37:21] Dean Barber: Lance, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you joining us here on The Guided Retirement Show.
[00:37:25] Lance Gaitan: Well, thanks for inviting me, Dean. Good talking with you.
[00:37:27] Dean Barber: Absolutely. Take care.
[CLOSING]
[00:37:29] Dean Barber: All right. There you have it. Lance Gaitan, options trading strategies. This guy has been around in the financial services industry for over 30 years and he gets it. He understands what’s going on in the options trading world. Look, if you think that options are something that you want to check out, obviously, you want to do what Lance said, get some education.
But like I told you, I wouldn’t do the option strategies on my own and I’ve been in the financial services industry for 32 years. If I was going to employ options strategies, I’d seek out the help of a professional. And even when we’re employing option strategies for our clients, guess what? We’re not making those trades ourselves. We’re seeking out some of the best options traders out there to help deploy the option strategies for our clients. Hope you enjoyed it, and safe investing to all of you.
[END]
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Investment advisory services offered through Modern Wealth Management, Inc., an SEC Registered Investment Adviser.
The views expressed represent the opinion of Modern Wealth Management an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Information provided is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. Modern Wealth Management does not accept any liability for the use of the information discussed. Consult with a qualified financial, legal, or tax professional prior to taking any action.